The Denver City Council is considering a proposal that would remove sugary drinks from kids meals at restaurants. Parents could still buy sodas for their children for an additional cost, but the idea is that simplifying kids menus to include only healthy options (milk and water) will remove some of the pressure parents feel when kids see the sugary options at ordering time.
The geniuses at Fox News mistakenly conflated this with “banning” sodas from schools, and they can’t believe such a thing would be allowed to happen. Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (best known as the unlikable “Kennedy” on MTV back in the day) came on to give her two cents and lean in to her stale, sarcastic schtick.
“I say we tie the children up, we put them back in their rooms, we Zoom in a room and control everything they put in their bodies, everything they see and interface with,” she declared.
Zing! You mean like which books are available to them at the library?
She followed this up with a baseless assertion that banning sugary drinks in schools has the reverse effect, making children want soda even more than they otherwise would. Denver City Councilmember Chris Hinds called the proposal a “nudge” toward healthful living, but Kennedy declared this “the problem,” adding that “cities like this think that government has to parent for them. The parents are not to be trusted.” She then rounded this deep thought out with a classic slide down that slippery slope, claiming that “a nudge, at some point, turns into a headlock.”
Kennedy is a part of the hand-wringing cabal that blames critical race theory in grade schools (which is not a real thing happening in grade schools) for student deaths. These are the same people who have openly supported school book bans—including Pulitzer Prize-winning books they admit they have not read. But Fox News is happy to promote stochastic terrorism against LGBTQ+ adults and students—which really does harm young people.
In recent years, Kennedy has railed about the concept of public schools in general. Her assertion that not having sugary drinks on school lunch menus will lead to worse health outcomes is wrong. A plethora of studies show that cutting sugary drinks out of a child’s diet is a surefire step toward curbing childhood obesity. There is also evidence that even small breaks from sugary drinks in a child’s diet can have positive physical and emotional effects very quickly, and lead to better health outcomes for those children over time.
There’s a reason why Fox News only has a single liberal-ish voice on the network: political consultant Jessica Tarlov. Whenever she asks conservative pundits at the media outlet to actually explain their positions, things get embarrassing real fast, as shown in the video below.
We're recapping all of Tuesday's primary night action on this week's episode of "The Downballot"! Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard go coast-to-coast, setting the table in Texas' Senate race and picking apart the bloodbath in the state House. Then it's on to North Carolina, where GOP extremists dominated at all levels of the ballot—and where one notorious election fraudster is now on his way to Congress. We wrap with California, whose troublesome top-two primary system made its quirks felt in a whole bunch of races, from Senate on down.
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