Fox News has spent months featuring incendiary and nonsensical coverage of “critical race theory” that stoked anger against school board members and educators. Now that the Justice Department is responding to reports of an increase in violent threats against those targets, the network’s propagandists are denouncing the DOJ effort and leveraging it to further rile up its viewers by falsely claiming that President Joe Biden’s administration is going after people for simply criticizing education policies.
This is a case study in how the right functions as a perpetual outrage machine. Right-wing operatives and media personalities manufactured a crisis; convinced the Republican base it was in a fight for the future of civilization; provoked them to the point that some started targeting the purported aggressors with violent intimidation; and now are treating attempts to limit the resulting damage as simply more reason for that base to feel aggrieved.
A coordinated and dishonest right-wing campaign has been attempting to turn local debates about school curricula into a polarized national issue Republicans can wield in state and national elections. Its partisans identify, exaggerate, or fabricate discrete local instances of alleged left-wing excesses in discussions of race in schools, deceptively brand them all as “critical race theory,” and encourage local parents to view those debates as part of a national fight.
Fox has played a key role in carrying out this strategy, devoting obsessive coverage to local school disputes. “Critical race theory” was mentioned on the network more than 1,900 times over three and a half months earlier this year. The network has been particularly focused on Loudoun County, Virginia, a bedroom community for camera-ready Republican political operatives. Fox ran nearly 80 segments on “critical race theory” in that school district from March through June.
On Fox, the stakes in the “critical race theory” fight could not be higher. That obscure legal framework has been described on the network as a ”racist theology,” a “neo-marxist religion,” and a “civilization-ending poison” that “threatens to overturn the advances of human civilization over the last 500 years” and could lead to the genocide of white Americans.
The right-wing campaign against “critical race theory” has had serious consequences, according to the National School Boards Association (NSBA), a federation that represents local elected school board officials.
“Many public school officials are also facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula,” the association’s leaders wrote in a September 29 letter to Biden. The letter also highlighted “attacks against school board members and educators for approving” mask requirements in schools; such policies have been regularly denounced on Fox. The NSBA described these “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” as “a form of domestic terrorism,” warned that they had resulted in some officials resigning or deciding not to seek reelection, and requested a response from the Justice Department.
On Monday, the DOJ announced a modest series of measures, including interagency strategy sessions, the creation of a task force for federal prosecutions, and training sessions for school board members and other potential victims on identifying and reporting illegal threats. The announcement specifically noted that these steps are “designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel” (emphasis added).
Fox quickly responded in its typically dishonest and overheated fashion, portraying the DOJ’s effort as targeting not specifically “criminal” acts, but any criticism of school board members.