You can always count on Fox News to find a way to spew lies better than anyone — except perhaps President Trump and his administration.
In the wake of yesterday’s tragic shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by an anti-Semitic right-wing extremist, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy decided that she didn’t like the fact that conservatives were being disparaged by their association with murderous neo-Nazi bigots.
So, during her Sunday morning appearance on Fox & Friends, Campos-Duffy decided to unilaterally declare, against all obvious evidence to the contrary, that anti-Semitism is a problem originating in the left-wing.
“There is a rise in anti-Semitism,” she pointed out, according to RawStory. “And it’s happening in Europe. That’s something that hasn’t been talked a lot about because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the neo-Nazis that we see here, that fringe group here in America.”
“And it’s infecting our universities,” Campos-Duffy continued, “is a very virulent anti-Semitism from the left. So if we’re going to have the conversation about the rise in anti-Semitism, we need to talk about where it’s being mainstreamed, which is in our universities and some of the fringe of the progressive side.”
Campos-Duffy’s absurd proclamation seems to falsely conflate left-wing activism against the policies of the current right-wing Israeli government towards the inhabitants of occupied Palestinian land with anti-Semitism, ignoring the fact that many progressive Israeli citizens share the same views as the American progressives.
The Fox News host’s claims that the left is responsible for promulgating anti-Semitic views are even more ludicrous considering the fact that President Trump through his tweets and his rantings at his fascist-style bund rallies continues, even after the latest massacre, to send out easily interpreted dog-whistles to his bigoted base.
Trump’s despicable fear-mongering over a caravan of Central American refugees sends the right-wing blogosphere into a storm of paranoia, raising lunatic conspiracy theories about how “globalist” (dog-whistle code for Jewish financiers) Democrats are funding the caravan and providing a fertile medium for the growth of a right-wing extremist culture of violence that had been been laying like dormant spores until Trump’s verbal manure provided the nutrients it needed to spring to life — and spread death.
With Campos-Duffy and Fox News reaching new heights of Orwellian spin on the truth, it’s fairly simple to see where the real source of the rising levels of hatred and bigotry — repackaged under the sanitized label of “nationalism” — truly resides, and, despite their efforts to point fingers elsewhere, it sits squarely in the hands of Trump and his de facto state broadcasters. the right-wing media, from the traditional outlets like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting to the darkest corners of social media, who transmit Trump’s divisiveness to a foolishly gullible audience.
The solution to fight against the rise of right-wing hatred is two-fold: Vote for progressive Democratic candidates in the midterms, and boycott products by the companies that sponsor the torrent of divisiveness and hatred that the right-wing media promulgate through their advertising dollars. You have the power to help start change. Use it.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by David Edwards at RawStory.
