White men on Fox News compare Trump's threats to deploy federal agents to desegregation
Written by Bobby Lewis
Published
As the country is still experiencing mass protests against police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd -- a few of which have turned violent -- President Donald Trump has threatened to send federal agents to Democratic-run cities in order to enforce the law. Several Fox News guests or contributors, many of whom happen to be white men, have drawn parallels between these threats and earlier federal efforts to enforce racial desegregation.
On the July 21 edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp said that the need for Trump to stop “these violent mobs” had a precedent in President Dwight Eisenhower using “federal resources to help Black kids integrate schools and to protect them.” Schlapp, who recently lost one-third of his lobbying firm’s disclosed business due to his racist comments about Black Lives Matter, called for Trump to use federal authority to protect “people of color [and] young Black kids” from murderers and arsonists.
Also on July 21, Fox contributor and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich suggested Trump has an “obligation to defend innocent Americans” from the protesters and compared the situation to when “the government sent the FBI into Mississippi” in the 1960s to investigate the Freedom Summer murders when “it was clear that the local police would not hunt down who killed them.”
On July 19, Fox News contributor and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told the Sunday edition of Fox & Friends Weekend that Trump has a “responsibility to protect [federal] property, and to keep some semblance of the civil rights of all of American citizens in place.” Huckabee cited the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, when Arkansas refused “to follow the absolute law to integrate the schools,” saying, “The 101st Airborne came in and made sure it happened.”