A mere afterthought to the Fox News network monstrosity, FoxNews.com has been humming away for a good many years now just below the radar of the nation's media critics, pundits, and most decent people. It shouldn't; it is the most popular, and certainly the most corporatized, white nationalist site on the internet.
It gains this distinction primarily through writers like Todd Starnes, who has long treated the platform as an tower from which he can shout white nationalist themes and obsessions with apparent impunity from the home offices. Don't believe me? His body of work is there for all to see. (He was going on steadily about “black on white crime” in the weeks before white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered black churchgoers using “black on white crime” as one of his core justifications.) The comments from the site's visitors consistently and regularly plunge into white nationalist advocacy; Fox deletes only a scant few.
Here is Todd Starnes' latest effort, “If Pelosi brings 'Dreamers' to the State of the Union, Trump should bring ICE agents”:
The illegal aliens will be sitting in seats that in previous years were meant for brave military heroes, law-abiding taxpayers and America's best and brightest.
The sad truth is that Democrats would rather align themselves with foreign invaders who violated our national sovereignty, thumbed their nose at the rule of law, and pillaged and plundered taxpayer-funded resources. [...]
Imagine the message he could send to the world if he directed ICE agents to arrest every illegal alien in the House chamber - live on national television. [...]
There are millions of immigrant Dreamers who want to come to the United States legally, but the Democrats have decided a rampaging mob of profane illegals would make better citizens. [...]
California has already been overrun by the foreign invaders. New York City waved the white flag without so much as a fight. We must not allow the Democrats to surrender Capitol Hill.
Starnes speaks plainly and openly in the language of white supremacist groups. It is frothing, conspiracy-premised xenophobia, using words like rampaging and overrun. Your racist relatives are not going to sites like Stormfront to indulge their need for such views; FoxNews.com is the casual racist's proper Republican choice. And while Fox News, the network, goes to some lengths to polish up the notion that we are being overrun by rampaging mobs of profane illegals, at least putting it in less crude packaging, the network's brazenly white nationalist website does not bother.
Look at the comments to that post, if you like. Note what is being posted in response; note the indifference of Fox News to those statements. The website has been a base for raging, spittle-flecked white supremacy for years, and Todd Starnes is one of the core drivers.
Conservative pundits have been fairly beside themselves wondering how Donald Trump could happen to the Republican party; how decades of tiptoeing around the party's racist base could so quickly collapse in favor of open white nationalism. What, in the party and among its pundits, could possibly have encouraged such crude cruelty.
The answer, as always, is Fox News. The network has done more to nurture and promote radicalism in the Republican base than any other American group or institution. This sort of rhetoric, from Starnes, would get a pundit booted from more staid conservative institutions; even the National Review has gotten shyer about promoting authors who are so blunt in demonizing immigrant children as foreign invaders.
But on the Fox News corporate website, white nationalist and white supremacist themes are touted constantly, and the corporation has for years looked the other way. This is where the Trump generation of open racists frothing for mass deportations and a national ethnic cleansing comes from; it has been steadily constructed underneath the sanctuary of the Fox News corporate banner.