Fox News is already laying the groundwork to delegitimize the results of the 2024 election, resurrecting the cycle of lies that led to the January 6 insurrection.
In the lead up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his Fox allies warned that Democrats would employ widespread voter fraud to change the results. Trump falsely claimed he was the victim of a stolen election after he lost, and then Fox promoted this lie — even though its hosts and executives didn’t actually believe it. The network ended up paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this lie.
The same cycle is beginning again. Just 24 hours after Trump won the Iowa caucuses, Fox host Laura Ingraham predicted that Democrats will “game the system or yeah, maybe even cheat” in the 2024 election, signaling that Ingraham will carry water for any efforts by Trump to subvert the results of the next election. Rhetoric such as this is proliferating at an accelerating rate across right-wing media outlets.
The incentives that drove Fox to promote election lies have only strengthened since 2020. Competition within right-wing media is increasingly pushing Fox closer to Trump, and Fox employees saw in 2020 that they are more likely to pay an internal price for debunking Trump’s fraud claims than for supporting them.
As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes, “Fox remains a loaded gun pointed at American democracy. And Ingraham’s fearmongering shows that she and her colleagues are willing to pull the trigger again.”
Former President Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses with 51% of the vote on a night with extremely low voter turnout. As the first 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest, the caucuses failed to show any clear challenger to his nomination. Some right-wing media figures are already declaring the primary over and calling on other candidates to drop out.
- On his show on X (formerly Twitter), Tucker Carlson claimed, “It’s hard to see how he’s not the Republican nominee.”
- Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk mocked Ron DeSantis’ and Nikki Haley’s lackluster results and called the primary contest a “charade.”
- Former White House political director Matt Schlapp declared, “The primary is over.”
- Fox’s Laura Ingraham told DeSantis and Haley to “suspend their campaigns and unite behind Trump.”
On Monday, Americans celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day — a federal holiday meant to commemorate the civil rights hero and a day to reflect on the sacrifices our forebears made to advance the causes of justice and equality in this nation. Several right-wing media figures spent the day instead smearing King as a “bad guy” who “stands for America’s anti-white mania.”
- Charlie Kirk said that King “is not worthy of a national holiday. He is not worthy of godlike status. In fact, I think it’s really harmful.”
- Daily Wire host Matt Walsh attacked King as “a communist, a plagiarist, an adulterer, an abuser, allegedly a rapist, and more.”
- Neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec attacked the civil rights movement for turning King into a “saint” and complained that “the real legacy of the 1960s” was “enshrin[ing] racial discrimination and race consciousness into the federal bureaucracy.”
