This week in stupid 

• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh: “Jesus did not abide by the tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Later in the week, Walsh also said, “If somebody doesn’t think they’re racist, then they aren’t racist.”
• Fox’s Greg Gutfeld on reproductive rights: “Let the women figure it out.”

This week in scary

• Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk: “You don’t have abortion rights.”
• Warning of a “synagogue of Satan,” former Daily Wire host Candace Owens said, “All of these world leaders that we have, even President Zelensky, all seem to be homosexual.”

Excuse me?

• Fox’s Jesse Watters attacked the Arlington National Cemetery employee involved in an altercation with Donald Trump’s campaign staff.
• Tucker Carlson compared women serving in the military to piles of human feces.
• After a horrific school shooting in Georgia left four dead, a Fox News guest blamed video games.
• Trump ally Laura Loomer: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think it’s really bizarre how every single time there’s a major election, there’s always a school shooting.”
• Newsmax guest Hogan Gildey said the Georgia school shooting “has nothing to do with guns.”
• Fox host Trey Gowdy claimed that most Americans would say mainstream media is a bigger threat than Russia or Iran to American democracy.

This week in Project 2025

For Media Matters’ complete coverage of Project 2025, please visit this section of our website.

• Pro-Trump Fox News personalities have repeatedly signaled support for many of Project 2025’s extreme proposals.
• On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said election deniers and Project 2025 contributors helped draft the SAVE Act.
• Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts: “The United States in the 1700s was a place that was not divided by class.”

Jesse Watters’ racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris’ presidential run

Jesse Watters’ Fox News career has been plagued by scandals generated by his racist and sexist invective. But even by his own low standards, the prime-time host has been on a tear over the last two months since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Here are a few examples of Watters’ disgusting rhetoric:

• Watters said Hillary Clinton endorsed Harris “because she’s a woman.”
• Watters said Harris is vice president due to a “DEI deal” and has the media’s support because “they love a Black woman taking on a white man.”
• Watters claimed that men who support Harris have “mommy issues.”
• Watters claimed Harris is “not African American, technically, because she has a Jamaican dad.”

The controversies surrounding Watters has done little to arrest his climb up the Fox ladder to his current position hosting the networks' flagship time slot. He’s been helped along by his close relationship to former President Donald Trump, for whom he aggressively cheerleads.

Tucker Carlson is pushing Nazi apologias and Holocaust denial. He addressed the RNC just weeks ago.

On Monday, Tucker Carlson published a two-hour interview with Darryl Cooper, the host of a history podcast who has a “strange fondness for Adolf Hitler,” as Mediaite documented. During the interview, Cooper explained his view that legitimate German grievances are treated too unsympathetically by historians and that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II. His argument effectively excises the historical role of Nazi ideology and resulting genocidal slaughter of European Jews.

I invite you to read this fantastic piece of Media Matters’ Matt Gertz to get a complete breakdown of the interview.

Carlson no longer shapes national media narratives the way he did at Fox News, but he may be more powerful than ever within the Republican Party. Behind the scenes, Carlson reportedly lobbied Donald Trump to pick JD Vance as his running mate. He also midwifed Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump. Carlson addressed the Republican National Convention in July and has a series of public events lined up featuring guests including Vance and Trump.

In an unearthed video, JD Vance said childless elites make the U.S. “dangerous.” It was too much for a Newsmax interviewer.

In a previously unreported 2021 interview, Republican vice presidential nominee and Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) ranted that the country had become a “dangerous place to live” because of childless elites. Vance’s remarks were met with skepticism from a seemingly unlikely source: Jenn Pellegrino, a conservative Newsmax host who was interviewing him.

During the interview, Pellegrino gently pushed back on Vance’s remarks, saying she has a “different stance” and asking, “Are we not painting this group with perhaps a broad brush?”

Vance, who was previously a conservative commentator, has frequently criticized people for being childless. Media Matters documented numerous instances of such remarks in right-wing media. In one instance, Vance attacked people “who can’t have kids” because they “passed the biological period when it was possible” as “miserable” people who pursue “racial or gender equity” to give “their life meaning.”

In case you missed it 

• Right-wing media figures are responding to news that several prominent MAGA influencers were unwittingly working on behalf of Russia by spouting absurd conspiracy theories and attacking law enforcement agencies that uncovered the apparent scheme.
• Right-wing personalities have spread a decontextualized clip of Gov. Tim Walz discussing a congressional trip to Afghanistan and used it to accuse him of “stolen valor.”
• In coverage surrounding Kamala Harris’ August 29 CNN interview, national cable news networks repeatedly framed Harris’ shifting position on fracking as a problem for her campaign in key battleground states — echoing a line of right-wing attacks against her.
• Right-wing media attacked Harris for supposedly “flip-flopping” on support for the border wall, falsely alleging that she is going “ultra MAGA to win an election” by “copying and pasting” Donald Trump's policies.
• Anti-abortion groups have launched aggressive lobbying campaigns against ballot abortion access amendments across the country.
• Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is touting support from one of the most vitriolic critics of IVF in the country: Michael Knowles.
• Michigan Republicans have been featuring extremist commentator Garrett Soldano as a speaker at numerous campaign events. Soldana has stated that he opposes abortion for rape victims because “God put them in this moment.”
• Several right-wing media figures tied to Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have supported changes to Georgia’s election certification process that could be used to question or deny the state’s vote totals this November.
• Election denier group True the Vote is planning to monitor ballot drop boxes with “24/7 streaming video” that will be “available for anyone.”
• Fox News is helping to elevate fracking as a supposedly major election issue by continuing to litigate Kamala Harris’ position even after she and her campaign have stated that she no longer supports a ban on the natural gas extraction procedure.