This morning, the host of the President’s favorite television show embarked on an openly white nationalist rant that dehumanized the immigrant children thrown into Trump’s concentration camps and made a deplorable excuse for the trauma and the suffering that this administration has inflicted on them.
FOX and Friends host Brian Kilmeade argued that we don’t need to care about migrant kids because “they aren’t our kids” and pointed out that since Trump wasn’t doing it to the people of Idaho or Texas – obvious code for “white people” – the tearing of families apart and the demonization of immigrants is somehow something we should tolerate and turn a blind eye to.
Brian Kilmeade on Fox News: "Like it or not, these aren't our kids … it's not like [Trump] is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These people are from another country." pic.twitter.com/w9dM5SiLLf
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 22, 2018
The “our kids” line, in particular, rings a white supremacist alarm bell as it echoes what shameless white supremacist Congressman Steve King (R-IA) said when he declared that “we can’t rebuild our civilization with other people’s babies” in a widely condemned anti-refugee tweet.
Kilmeade’s remarks were apparently received just as poorly, because it didn’t take long for him to take to Twitter to hastily issue an obviously insincere and ridiculous apology that isn’t going to convince anybody but FOX viewers who aren’t quite as far right on the blood-and-soil scale.
On FOX & Friends earlier, Of course-I didn’t mean to make it seem like children coming into the U.S. illegally are less important because they live in another country. I have compassion for all children, especially for all the kids separated from their parents right now. 1 of 2
— Brian Kilmeade (@kilmeade) June 22, 2018
Nobody wants to see children in these circumstances and glad they are on their way to being reunited with their parents.https://t.co/d1mmMlq0j9
2 of 2
— Brian Kilmeade (@kilmeade) June 22, 2018
The problem, of course, is that he literally said that those kids coming from other countries were less important because they were foreign kids and not “like us.”
FOX and Friends’ campaign to normalize white nationalist rhetoric is a deeply disturbing thing to behold, especially in the context of a Trump administration that is rapidly ramping up their campaign of persecution and demonization against immigrants. We cannot allow this kind of talk to be swept under the rug- nor let these ghouls get away with their obviously insincere bad-faith apologies.
