Blurring any supposed lines between Fox’s purported “straight news” and opinion sides, Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Will Cain appeared on Thursday’s edition of The Faulkner Focus, during which anchor Harris Faulkner did not question his accusation that President Joe Biden was imposing “literal segregation on terms of vaccination status.” Faulkner also repeated a series of misleading talking points about voting rights.
Faulkner opened the discussion by asking Cain what he thought of the Biden administration’s “dismissive tone” in its push for federal voting rights legislation. Cain then claimed that Biden was engaging in psychological projection, the process in which a person accuses others of character flaws or misdeeds they have actually committed themselves.
“The president sits there and calls his political opponents Bull Connor or George Wallace,” Cain said, referring to notorious segregationist leaders in Alabama during the 1960s, “while pushing for literal segregation on terms of vaccination status.” Multiple Fox News personalities, including Cain, have compared vaccination requirements to the Jim Crow era, apartheid, and even Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Fox News has more stringent policies on vaccination, testing, and masks than anything the Biden administration has sought to mandate.
Faulkner also repeated a variety of false claims about voting laws in states currently governed by Democrats. The false claim that Colorado’s laws on early voting are “tougher than they are in Georgia,” is absurd because Colorado is a universal mail-in voting state — but the claim was readily circulated last year by Fox’s purported “news” side.
In addition, the network’s anchors also invoked the election laws in Biden’s home state of Delaware in efforts to defend Republican proposals in Texas last year. Delaware, however, effectively made mail-in voting universally available as a pandemic-related measure in 2020, and is also in the process of implementing early in-person voting for 2022.