Before experienced tech journalist Sarah Jeong was hired by the New York Times, she wrote a series of tweets about the power structure within the United States, the oppressive levels of white privilege, and the tendency of white people to respond to attacks on this privilege as if it’s an attack on them. Naturally, the alt-Reich has picked up these tweets and waived them around in what a hilariously excellent example of just what Jeong was saying in those tweets.
On Saturday night, these attacks reached their surely soon-to-be-exceeded nadir on Fox News Watters’ World where host Jesse Watters and guest Terrence Williams showed just how offended they were by Jeong’s tweets about race … by attacking her race. As Politico reports, their critique of her arguments was exactly what you would expect from Fox News.
Williams: I don’t know if this lady is Chinese, Japanese or crazy-nese. Something is wrong with this woman and I can’t believe they would hire her. ...
Williams: There is something wrong with them fortune cookies that Ling Ling’s eating.
Fox News supervisors had apparently warned Watters against being too racist in this report about how progressives are racist. But that didn’t stop him from laughing or exchanging quips with Williams. After the “Ling Ling” statement, Watters did announce that they might be “in trouble.” While laughing.
If that seems like Watters was just sitting there, while Williams delivered buckets of Asian stereotypes, Watters got his start on Fox doing “on the street” segments on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Making fun of Chinese Americans was a regular bit during these settlements, with Watters hitting all of these notes, and more, as he regularly acted out Chinese stereotypes for O’Reilly’s amusement.
All that the segment on Watters’ World demonstrated was that the right is still willing to engage in out-and-out racism in attacking anyone perceived as being on the left. Because they expect progressives to hold people to strict standards, while they have absolutely none.
Watters “ambush interviews” for O’Reilly so frequently included racist statements or had Watters acting out a racist stereotype, that they drew widespread complaints. But they clearly amused O’Reilly, and presumably Fox viewers, so nothing happened. Nothing other than Watters being given his own show.
So on a show that was created in large part based on Watters’s noted use of racism, and in particular his use of Asian stereotypes, a Fox News host and guest went after a woman of color for daring to point out that white people held power, and perceived attacks on that power as racism. Nothing in Watters’s background is allowed to count against him, no matter how blatant. Everything in Jeong’s background is held against her, no matter how well-intended.
Watters wife filed for divorce in March over his on-going affair with a twenty-five-year-old co-worker. Watters’s guests on his show have regularly included fringe figures from the most racist and sexist parts of the alt-Reich … which is very fringe indeed.
But since neither hypocrisy nor irony are recognized by the right, and because Sarah Jeong is sadly correct, Fox News viewers probably came away from Watters’s show nodding in agreement.
Oblivious, the right continues to press ahead, emboldened by previous tweet-shaming successes in the hopes that they can either get Jeong fired, or use her as “proof” that the left is racist against white people. Because feeding this “economic anxiety” is exactly what the right is about 24/7. And of course, the immediate response of many on the right attacking a young woman of color for talking about the entrenched power of white people, has followed the path blazed by Watters ... attack her on the basis of race.