On MSNBC's All In, Angelo Carusone notes there is a line between white supremacist forums and Trump and “that line goes right through Fox News”
Carusone: If a Fox host read the El Paso shooter's manifesto on air, “the audience would not be shocked or surprised or disturbed”
Published
Citation From the August 6 edition of MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes:
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): I'm not going to quote this manifesto, because screw that.
ANGELO CARUSONE: Yeah.
HAYES: But it is just what we just played. There is essentially no distance in the basic thesis here. And that, as you guys have shown has been a staple of Fox programming for years now.
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, there is a straight line from these chans and some of these other message boards right through to Donald Trump and his campaign's messaging and communications. And that line goes right through Fox News. And as a thought experiment, just to underscore your point, if you took that screed, that manifesto and you put it in a Fox host teleprompter like Tucker Carlson or Ingraham or Hannity and they were to read this on air, the audience would not be shocked or surprised or disturbed. And that should, that tells you all that you need to know. I mean, if it was so inconsistent with what they were hearing every single night, there would be a different reaction. But the audience would be perfectly fine because that's what they're used to.
. . .
At the end of the day, what they're really getting to is that this -- this force is out there sort of engineering this replacement, and, you know, we've had -- if you just use the most narrow search, we found more than 125 instances and discussions around just using the word invasion alone. If you expand that out to include great replacement theory and other, you know, sort of similar examples of that, it's in the hundreds on Fox News. So put a point on that, the urgency then gets created. You have all these people organizing on the chans, and then fox is validating that theory that you have to do something right now because you're at great risk, at threat, and nobody else is doing anything about it. It makes you feel like you're the hero.