Fox News is a Corporate-Sponsored Domestic Terrorist Network

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | August 5, 2019 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | August 5, 2019 |

Imagine living in a country where Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Osama Bin Laden, and Jihadi John were allowed to go on primetime television every night and preach “Death to America” and spread dangerous conspiracy theories about white people to millions of people while wearing suits and collecting multimillion-dollar paychecks from Progressive Insurance or MyPillow.com or Norwegian Cruise Line or Wells Fargo.

It sounds insane, but how much different is it than Fox News? Every night, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham advise millions of viewers to arm themselves — that it is their American duty to strap up — against a coming “invasion” of “criminals” and “rapists.” Night after night, Tucker Carlson warns that immigration is “dangerous to the country” and that “white genocide” is a looming danger. He stokes fears by suggesting that white people need to have “an honest adult conversation” about “what the next 100 years looks like demographically,” and that immigrants make the United States “poorer and dirtier,” and that “white people are the real victims of racism,” that “dangerous caravans of Mexicans” were pouring through the border carrying “scabies” and other diseases, that “Mexico is a hostile power that is seeking to undermine our country and sovereignty,” that the “invasion at the Southern border” is “how this country collapses.” Meanwhile, Laura Ingraham likewise warns that migrants were “bringing diseases” to America, while also suggesting that migrants “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”

The shooting in El Paso this weekend — as well as the shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue and the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival and the Christchurch shooting, a supermarket shooting in Kentucky, etc., etc., etc. — are all a natural result of what is essentially corporate-sponsored terrorism. If you heard every night of the week from talking heads paid by Ancestry.com that our country was being invaded by brown people sent to replace you, and that you needed to arm yourselves with as many guns as possible, what do you think is going to happen? And when the President of the United States echoes these concerns about “dirty” “criminal” “rapists” “invading” the country to “replace us,” Fox News echoes and amplifies it. And Angie’s List and Match.com and TripAdvisor and Geico and GlaxoSmithKline and CarFax are paying these personalities to promote white supremacy.

Starkist and Bayer and GM are funding domestic terrorism propaganda. 8Chan may be where all these mass shooters eventually end up, but Fox News is their multibillion-dollar boot camp. And even those who don’t buy assault rifles and walk into a WalMart exhibit the same fears of diseased brown people replacing them, and while they may not pull triggers, they aim their hostilities all the same.

If you are a corporation providing money to Fox News, you are not just guilty by association: You are actually sponsoring domestic terrorist propaganda. You may be able to hide behind shareholders and a board of directors, but you are no better than those who fund any other brand of terrorism.

We need to call it out: Fox News is a hate-for-profit machine that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists. https://t.co/f1QkIE7sbB

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) August 4, 2019

Fox News gives domestic terrorists the weapon and then provides them with the targets. The only way to combat that is to take away the profit motive. We need to do more than to boycott Fox News and their advertisers — we need to demand that our cable providers drop Fox News from their channel lineups. If ISIS or Al Qaeda promoted their beliefs on a cable news network, we would shut it down. We should do the same to Fox News.