A Fox News story (1/27/22) that used anti-Asian hate crimes to swipe at a favorite Fox target—a progressive DA—was accompanied by a video that put Fox‘s typical anti-China spin on a space story.
In crafting a landscape rife with danger and lawlessness, Rupert Murdoch–owned outlets drew upon a spike in hate crimes—specifically anti-Asian and antisemitic hate crimes—without taking responsibility for the xenophobia they’ve consistently peddled when it benefited their political agendas.
Fox News (1/27/22) in January reported that the Asian-American victim of a 2019 attack was suing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin for mishandling his case, just one day before the San Francisco police department announced that hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were up 567% in the city in 2021 compared to the previous year. The story also mentioned a 60% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2020.
Early last month, Fox (2/2/22) reported on the arrest of a man suspected of spray painting swastikas on several Jewish schools and synagogues throughout Chicago. “The incidents came days after Holocaust Remembrance Day and as antisemitism is on the rise across the country,” the piece says. Another Fox headline (2/7/22) declared, “NYC Antisemitic Crimes Up Nearly 300% in January”; the story noted that “there were 15 hate crimes committed against Jewish people in January—a 275% increase compared to the four hate crimes recorded in January 2021.”
Meanwhile, Murdoch’s New York Post (1/21/22) published “NYC Hate-Crime Complaints Skyrocket, With Anti-Asian Attacks Up 343%.” Citing NYPD data, the article also noted that the largest portion of hate-crime complaints in the city in 2021 was for anti-Jewish incidents.
The Wall Street Journal (1/26/22), another Murdoch property, reported on an incident at a virtual meeting of National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum when a “Zoom bomber” hacked the group and projected anti-Asian images and audio onto the screen. “Major cities have reported an increase in hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans,” the article said, also citing the San Francisco and New York police department numbers.
Murdoch’s own outlets, however, often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place.
Scapegoating China
The O’Reilly Factor‘s Jesse Watters (10/3/16) pretends to perform martial arts as part of a race-baiting report from New York’s Chinatown.
The rise in anti-AAPI violence is connected to both the rise of a new cold war with Beijing and the scapegoating of China for the Covid-19 pandemic (FAIR.org, 4/8/21, 7/29/21, 8/25/21), playing upon xenophobic stereotypes of Asians as disease-carriers (Salon, 2/6/20) and as robots brainwashed by their government.
Even in the years prior to the Covid outbreak, Fox News was spreading anti-Asian—particularly anti-Chinese—sentiment. In 2016, the Fox News segment Watters’ World (10/3/16) featured Fox personality Jesse Watters conducting on-the-street “interviews” with New York City Chinatown residents, ostensibly to mock them for their lack of knowledge regarding US/China relations as discussed in the 2016 presidential debates. From the “Kung Fu Fighting” background music, to Watters asking his sources if they knew karate (a Japanese martial art) and questioning whether their watches were stolen, the piece was five straight minutes of blatant racist stereotyping thinly veiled as cheap humor.
Like bullies in the lunchroom deriding another child’s food, Murdoch’s outlets employed the stereotype of Asian cuisine being unclean as a common—and juvenile—trope to scapegoat the Chinese for Covid. Watters’ anti-Chinese racism predictably ramped up at the start of the outbreak in 2020, when on Fox’s The Five (3/2/20), Watters asked for a “formal apology” from “the Chinese,” insisting Covid originated in China “because they have these markets where they are eating raw bats and snakes.” He linked the disgust such stories evoke to a red-baiting agenda:
They are a very hungry people. The Chinese Communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked. It’s unsafe, and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated.
The New York Post (1/23/20) misidentifies a gross-out video as being taken “amid [the] coronavirus outbreak.”
“Revolting Video Shows Woman Devouring Bat Amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” read a January 2020 New York Post headline (1/23/20), linking a viral image of a woman eating a bat to the Covid outbreak. The article describes the clip as “gag-inducing,” explaining that “the deadly disease reportedly originated at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market, which sold civets, snakes and other illegal exotic animals that had been infected by bats.” It didn’t matter that according to the woman in the video, it was filmed the summer prior to the outbreak, or that a second bat-soup video referenced in the Post article was apparently taken in Indonesia’s Palau, not China (France 24, 3/2/20).
The Wall Street Journal that condemned the rise in anti-AAPI hate crimes is the same paper that on multiple occasions has itself conflated Covid with China. In 2020, the Journal called China “the real sick man of Asia” (2/3/20), used what it called “the Communist coronavirus” to criticize China’s government (1/29/20), referred to the virus as the “Wuhan Coronavirus” (1/29/20) and falsely accused the Chinese government of stalling investigations into the evidence-free Wuhan lab leak theory (2/12/21, 5/23/21).
Normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric
Murdoch’s outlets have also played a significant role in normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric, despite their eager conflation of any criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. In 2012, Murdoch himself tweeted about purported irony of the “Jewish-owned press” being (in his mind) anti-Israel, evoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that an elite Jewish cabal controls media (Extra!, 9–10/96).
Fox News blames the left and Palestinian solidarity for a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes. “US Seeing Wave of ‘Textbook Antisemitism’ Amid Israel/Gaza Tensions,” warned one Fox headline (5/21/21). “The incidents fly in the face of those trying to distinguish between anti-Israel and antisemitic bromides,” the piece said.
Right-wing talkshow host Dennis Prager told Fox News (5/21/21) that the “Middle East dispute” is because “a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state.”
Conservative radio host Dennis Prager joined Fox News Primetime (5/21/21) to discuss the rise in attacks:
This is not what the left wants you to believe. They want you to believe it’s over land. No, it’s not. There is a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state beginning with, of course, Iran. That is why if you look at the rhetoric, it’s always “F the Jews,” “F the Jews” in all of these attacks. It’s never “F the Israelis.” It’s always “F the Jews.”
But attributing a rise in antisemitic hate crimes mainly to left-wing anti-Zionism is more politically useful than substantiated. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggests the majority of antisemitic attacks come from white supremacist groups.
ADL’s most recent numbers are from 2019, during which there were 2,107 recorded attacks. There were 171 incidents in which attackers mentioned Israel or Zionism, and 68 of those were propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups (ADL, 2019). Out of 270 incidents carried out by known extremist groups, two-thirds of those groups were white supremacist.
Certainly, antisemitism does appear on the left as well as the right, and there are activists who shout “Free Palestine” and “Death to Jews” in the same breath, and use the word “Zionism” not as the name of an ideology but as a codeword for Jewishness. But Murdoch outlets consistently blur the line between criticizing Israel, or supporting Palestinian rights, and antisemitism. When Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid wore a necklace with the word “Palestine” on it, Fox (1/16/22) reported the model was accused of “perpetuating antisemitic tropes”—referring to a tweet Hadid had posted condemning “Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid over the Palestinian people.”
‘A complicated web’
Fox News (12/14/21) took down a cartoon depicting George Soros as “the puppet master” behind progressive DAs and attorneys general after complaints that such imagery “contributes to the normalization of antisemitism.”
Murdoch outlets stop short of condemning antisemitism when it benefits their anti–police reform agendas. Blaming Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for the election of progressive “soft on crime” district attorneys throughout the country, they evoked images of a wealthy Jewish cabal pulling strings behind the scenes (FAIR.org, 1/14/22). “Soros Funnels Cash Through a Complicated Web,” explained a New York Post piece (12/16/21).
In late 2021, Fox removed a Soros “puppet master” cartoon from its social media after being called out for evoking antisemitic imagery (Ha’aretz, 12/16/21; FAIR.org 1/14/22).
Fox star Tucker Carlson has also accused Soros of “waging a kind of war—political, social and demographic war—on the West,” in his recent documentary, Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization (Fox News, 1/26/22).
In an interview with Watters about the documentary, Carlson said Soros is seeking to create a society that is “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive” (Fox News, 1/25/22).
This anti-Soros rhetoric sounds eerily similar to that of Robert Bower, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting suspect who allegedly killed 11 people during Shabbat services in 2018. Bower (Washington Post, 10/28/18) once tweeted:
Jews are waging a propaganda war against Western civilization and it is so effective that we are headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.
Also a target of the “puppet master” trope: Michael Bloomberg. In 2020, Fox News anchor Raymond Arroyo described the billionaire and former New York City mayor, who is Jewish, as a “Biden puppet master” (Fox News, 3/5/20). The comments sparked backlash from the ADL, which contended that the use of the trope, even unintentionally, played a role in mainstreaming antisemitism.
‘Jews will not replace us’
Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/21/21) said Democrats want “to change the racial mix of the country”: “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries” (Media Matters, 9/23/21).
In October, Jewish groups condemned Carlson’s defense of “Replacement Theory” (Daily Beast, 4/9/21)—the idea that immigrants and people of color are entering the US to reduce the political power of white Americans (Media Matters for America, 4/8/21; FAIR.org, 10/20/21). The theory is linked to antisemitism because it’s often claimed an elite Jewish cabal is leading the replacement. A popular conspiracy theory in 2018 claimed Soros himself was organizing the caravan of Central American migrants to the US border (Washington Post, 10/28/18).
Among Carlson’s fan-base are a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where “Jews will not replace us” was a prominent chant. Facing a lawsuit for taking part in the deadly demonstration while serving time in prison for an unrelated crime, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell reportedly watched Carlson with other white supremacists to prepare for the trial, according to a former inmate (BuzzFeed News, 10/28/21). Cantwell also mentioned Carlson in court documents, saying his trial was intended to silence white supremacists and those who agree with them, “even on peripheral issues.” He went on:
This is evidenced by the president of the United States, and the second most popular show in cable news (Tucker Carlson) being branded as “white nationalists” on account of sharing a small number of our views on the pressing issues of our time.
Neither Carlson nor Fox has commented on the neo-Nazi endorsement of the show.
Carlson has also downplayed the January 6 insurrection, whose participants included Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, asserting that it was not an act of terrorism (Fox News, 1/7/22). On hand for what Carlson (7/7/21) described as a “fake” insurrection “where elderly people showed up with signs on the Capitol” were Tim Gionet, a livestreamer known as Baked Alaska who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories online; the Nationalist Social Club neo-Nazi group; a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt; and another wearing a shirt reading “6MWE,” which stands for “6 million wasn’t enough.”
In 2021, Fox News commentator Lara Logan faced condemnation from Jewish advocacy groups for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly pseudoscientific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners (Fox News, 11/30/21). “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline,” tweeted the Auschwitz Museum in response. Neither Fox nor Logan apologized; in fact, Logan retweeted a defense of her comments.
The answer? More police
As FAIR (FAIR.org, 6/24/21; CounterSpin, 10/7/21) has reported in the past, using an uptick in certain crime categories to stoke fear of street crime allows corporate outlets to push a pro-police agenda, while blaming social justice, anti-police violence movements for crime.
In early February, Fox News (2/3/22) reported on President Joe Biden’s visit to New York City and rejection of calls to defund the police, citing the city’s rise in crimes, including hate crimes:
Hate crimes also surged 72% in New York City last month, driven mostly by a 275% increase in crimes against Jewish people.
It’s a trend that started last year, as hate crimes rose 96% in 2021 .
Framing the primary problem as crime and not hate allows hiring more police to be presented as the solution. And hate-mongering outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal don’t have to address their own antisemitism and anti-Asian racism.
The billionaire$ will continue to keep the classes and races in the United States divided through contrived ideological fault lines, exacerbated by a political duopoly financed with unlimited campaign contributions.
This intentional programming, distracts the working class and entertains the poorly-educated, while inflaming the angry underemployed who previously enjoyed some sense of economic security and societal respect.
https://wastedink.substack.com/p/psychopathology-of-a-failed-state?s=r
It’s hard to deprogram people when the nonsense comes so fast. “Data voids” should be a household term.
I agree it’s very useful to understand American capitalism as religious (debt is sin, shun the doubters, toil all the days of your lives like a fallen Adam) and race is undeniably a mark of American greed. Being black essentially means you’re assumed to be guilty from the start, and if you get rich you’re an exception to your race’s fate.
However, pushing back a little on the collapsing of power and race entirely, every racial caste has their own elite nowadays, with white being the largest, and just as important, every race has its poor families. See the graph here.
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/10/11/massive-wealth-inequality-exists-in-every-age-education-and-racial-group/
This may seem like a very simple point that everyone knows, but
without acknowledging this, it makes it easier to shrug off deaths say from covid in the South, laugh at power shortages in Texas etc. Spectator politics isn’t much of a solution even if it has the correct vocabulary. For example, Black people live in those states too and will be affected by people punishing the white trash through lack of engagement. But it’s a kind of power trip.
The idea of debt being sin actually is more influential than anti racism in the Democratic party, I think. Thus, the debt protesters are all priveleged yuppies, despite being often middle income and not at all lily white. Biden has quite progressive economists who don’t think like this but one or two of them have given hints they do . And it’s hurting the party.
The illegitimacy of the Democratic Party has been publicly proven a myriad number of times, but here a few key, hypocritical, anti-democratic highlights:
Following the 1992 Presidential Debates, the Democratic Party conspired with the Republican Party to assure that no third party candidate would ever share the stage with their nominees in the future. Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein was arrested and handcuffed to a chair by law enforcement for eight hours at Hofstra University in 2012, in order to guarantee that her presence would not be noticed during the debate being held there on that day.
Following the 1996 election, the Democratic Party conspired with the Republican Party on the state level, in order to enact more expensive and restrictive ballot procedures for third party candidates.
The Democratic Party gerrymandered its own districts, in order to force Ohio voters to eliminate either Rep. Marcy Kaptur (outspoken critic of TARP funding) or Rep. Dennis Kucinich (author of Articles of Impeachment against both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney).
The Democratic National Committee actively worked to suppress support of Bernie Sanders by members of the Democratic Party during the 2016 campaign, in order to assure Hillary Clinton was the party nominee.
The Democratic Party has far LARGER problems than “debt protesters.”
The problem is capitalism not just the debt protesters. That’s just a symptom of their failure to address capitalism.
But I think we agree so I won’t push the point
I respect your desire to attribute the problem to esoteric concepts like “capitalism” or “greed,” but the fact IS that both major political parties in the U.S. have been effectively “captured” by the wealthy interests responsible for climate change, and which continue to profit from the general ignorance of the populace.
Every major issue that contributes to human suffering and mass casualties can be traced back to the same industrial interests responsible for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, greenhouse gas emissions… and ultimately, the very suppression of American democracy.
This is not hard to follow for anyone willing to recognize the connections. Unfortunately, it is much easier to reject the eventual collapse of our biosphere due to unregulated industrial excesses, than recognize and criticize the inept two-party system that currently enables billionaire$ to fulfill their sociopathic mission.
David Lowery actually explains it better then I ever could:
(cont’d) (2/2)
I worry Republicans are getting a huge boost by this formula of Debt = Sin.
If Democrats can’t see problems unless the victim is pure of heart, they will continue to frame every argument about helping children, the only apolitical symbols of innocence. What does this do to the discourse? I fear it normalizes moral panics we see about trans kids existing, fetuses, ouiji boards, rap music etc.
We might instead emphasize the harm capitalism does to our sense of morality, our community bonds and traditions, rather than trying to find the perfect victim and build a whole social policy out of that.
spot on. The irony of it all is, as Trumpfuhrer was in full throated anti-gyne (china pronounced as gina (from va-gina), Apple computer, biggest China patron of all got 100% tariff exemptions as late as 2019! Tim Cook courting mar-a-lago! How slick is Murica? Average citizen dies…..corporation gets more money. What can u say about a country like that?
Only the sad… and fact-based truth, that corporations OWN our government.
I have a friend whose whole family watched Fox news. He had really no idea of what the facts are about abortion, evolution, or sexuality. Like most of what he believed was possible to disprove.
However 1. That didn’t mean I was good at it. I asked him why fossils exist and that shook him off evolution denial. But I had no idea how complex the bullshit was on abortion.
And 2. It’s probably supposed to be exhausting. They just want to wear us down. One of the tactics of misinformation is to come up with new nonsense every day so when people type it in to a search engine you can’t find any debunk yet.
And that friend’s name was Albert Einstein and everybody applauded. Sure, Paul, Sure.
Sorry, this is just as biased as whatever you claim to be fighting. The 500%+ spike in Anti-Asian hate crimes is not being done by Fox News viewers and you’re lying through your teeth to suggest that it is. Likewise, dismissing George Soros’ financial influence in politics as Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory is also lying through your teeth. Want some sources on that? Go trawl through Soros’s own twitter feed.
So-o-ooooo… how long have you been a Fox News viewer, Mike?