Fox "News" has never been anything but a right-wing propaganda outlet, a place for conservatism's laziest hacks to be their hackiest. But they've been getting frothier and frothier in their claims since Donald Trump landed on the scene and finally proved to Republicans that, yes, you really can lie about everything, and the paranoid and hateful base will love you for it.
At this point, Fox is well within "Pizzagate" territory when it comes to pushing hate speech; see for example Fox calling President Biden a "WANNABE DICTATOR" for having the audacity to exist while federal law enforcement officers caught Trump doing crimes. The Fox "News" meltdown over the White House flying a Pride flag during Pride Month, though, is even more over the top.
A reporter, an editor, and God only knows how many other Fox hacks had to work to assemble this particular bit of drivel. There may have been animal sacrifice involved; we can't say for sure. It takes a truly amazing amount of vitriol to come up with even the watered-down version of this hack job.
The chain of events here is this: The White House put up a Pride Flag, specifically the "Progress" Pride Flag that includes an extra chevron at the top representing transgender persons and non-white persons, and some sentient bag of hammers at Fox created from this a story under the banner "White House flew controversial new transgender flag that promotes grooming and pedophilia, say critics," which is the sort of absolute garbage you get when the intellectuals of your movement have been reduced to Christopher Rufo, Charlie Kirk, and a leaking nitrous tank where Tucker Carlson's old office used to be.
You can tell that it's a hit from the garbage-tier Fox ranks just from the "promotes grooming" phrase. You don't even need an actual story under it, you've already got the hate speech and the conspiracy promotion covered. Fox did, however, put a whole story under it, and, boy howdy, were they ripped for it all across the internets and, most notably, by White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates.
Fox News deleted their tweet promoting the story, but not before Bates proved their whole premise false by noting that the Progress flag wasn't "new" to begin with and certainly not unusual. Fox then had to embark on the hurried rewrite that ended up taking the original story's place, one that further tortures their premise of "some critics" believing the flag to be a secret reference to "grooming" or "pedophilia" by naming one particular far-right crank. They didn't take away the propaganda parts, though.
"Some critics charge that the new design actually glorifies pedophilia at a time when children are being sexualized in public schools and elsewhere against the wishes of their parents," says the Fox "reporter," and there's really no distinguishable difference between that sentence and any of the Pizzagate conspiracy frothing that claimed elites were "glorifying pedophilia" by running secret sex dungeons in the imaginary basements of local pizza restaurants.
When you say that a Pride Flag "promotes grooming and pedophilia, say critics," you are intentionally using a construct meant to push out information without any "news"-based concern for whether the critics are right, are wrong, or are 137 frogs stuffed into a trenchcoat.
Here, let's give it a try. "Sean Hannity lures college students to his Transylvanian castle, then kills them and stuffs their corpses full of seashells, say critics."
"Fox News was founded by Adolf Hitler in 1987, say critics."
Of course, there are a bunch of brickheaded, frothing, conspiracy-addled hatemongers in the Fox News audience who will very much believe anything to be evidence of "grooming," once you've pointed them at it, and Fox News reporter Kerry Byrne has more than a small chance of being the spark that turns one or more of those people violent.
For an idea of just how absolutely depraved Fox "News" is on this one, though, you don't need to go any farther than their own offices. Last year the Fox Corporation used that precise flag to promote Pride. The same one that their "reporters" are now claiming is evidence of a conspiracy.
This is where we're all supposed to have some pithy point to make about Fox, or about the media in general, or about Republicanism's descent into a fascist movement that promotes hate speech and hoax-addled paranoia for the same reason the Nazis did: because fascism needs an other to assign the world's ills to so that the party itself can be held up as means to exterminate that other, but instead, let's go with a response that's no more or no less than Fox executives deserve.
Eat shit, Fox "News." Sit yourselves down and eat a whole steaming bowl of it. Jackasses.
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