Neil deGrasse Tyson
They can't help themselves:
A frequent Fox News guest who has contributed to a white nationalist website attacked Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and host of FOX's Cosmos, for speaking out about racial profiling he has experienced.
The leading right-wing noise machine attacking a scientist.
How odd. The leading right-wing noise machine televising a racist.
How odd.
The name is Gavin McInnes, and Fox gets credit for continuing to know under which rocks such people can be found.
MCINNES: I hate this guy [...] White liberal nerds love this guy so much, he could defecate on them like Martin Bashir's fantasies and they would dance in the streets. All he does is, he's drunk with adulation. And he talks about things like "when I was young in New York I would get racially profiled when I'd go into stores." Back then he looked like he was in The Warriors. He had a huge afro and a cutoff shirt and New York was a war zone. Sorry, you fit the profile.
McInnes should be sorry. But not for the reason he thinks. Fox should be sorry just for being the sorry sham that it is.
Video over the fold.
This is the type of person Fox considers appropriate to put on television, as an authoritative voice.
McInnes used to write for VDARE.com, which the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a "White Nationalist" "hate group," and stated in 2011 "I love me some VDARE." In one post for VDARE.com, McInnes compared a Canadian university to a "madrassa" because it wouldn't host Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who advocates for founding all-white towns.
McInnes currrently writes for Taki's Magazine, a "paleoconservative" website that publishes overtly racist articles including ones by neo-confederates. At Taki's, McInnes has referred to Asian-Americans as "slopes" and "riceballs," suggested Muslims are "stupider" and "more violent" due to inbreeding, defended blackface because some minstrel shows were "just mimicking black people" and "fun," backed the racist comments of Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson, and argued that to yell the n-word at someone is "not racist" but "just very rude." He also owns his own website, StreetCarnage.com, where he defended Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's racist comments because Bundy was just "wonder[ing]" if African-Americans were better off under slavery. In 2013, 18 Milling Rising gave him a "Lifetime Achievement Award in Hipster Racism," a brand of racism marked by making "ironically" racist "jokes."
Tyson himself gets
the last word:
Overall, Tyson notes, Cosmos premiered not only on Fox but on National Geographic Channel and, globally, in 181 countries and 46 languages. "It tells you that science is trending in our culture," Tyson averred to me. "And if science is trending, that can only be good for the health, the wealth, and the security of our species, of our civilization."
And yet, many members of our species still deny that the globe is warming thanks to human activities—a point that Cosmos has not only made a centerpiece but that, the program has frankly argued, threatens civilization as we know it. Tyson is known for being fairly non-confrontational; for not wanting to directly argue with or debate those who deny science in various areas. He prefers to just tell it like it is, to educate. But when we talked he was, perhaps, a little more blunt than usual.
"At some point, I don't know how much energy they have to keep fighting it," he said of those who don't accept the science of climate change. "It's an emergent scientific truth." Tyson added that in the political sphere, denying the science is just a bad strategy. "The Republican Party, so many of its members are resistant to embracing the facts of climate change that the legislation that they should be eager to influence, they're left outside the door," said Tyson. "Because they think the debate is whether or not it's happening, rather than what policy and legislation can serve their interests going forward."