Rachel Campos-Duffy (bio here) was a reality-TV actor before she became an entertainer on a Fox talk show.
I point this out because it’s important to keep in mind she’s not, and never has been, a journalist. Her job is to entertain Fox audiences to keep ratings up, as the Dominion lawsuit against Fox revealed. Doing that involves feeding red meat to a mob trained to hate LGBQT people.
During a Fox & Friends segment, Campos-Duffy defended Daniel Penny, a white Marine veteran who’s charged with manslaughter for choking Jordan Neely, a schizophrenic black man, to death upon Neely becoming disruptive on a New York City subway.
The case has become a political flashpoint between homeless advocates and “safe streets” campaigners, but whether Penny committed a crime is for a jury to determine based on the legal definition of self-defense.
Campos-Duffy’s remarks made an interesting journey in a very brief space of time. First she alluded to “crazy people punching women in the face” on public transportation, then complained about male passengers who fail to intervene, then alluded to a “crisis of masculinity,” then said, “They’re gender confused. Am I a woman? Am I a man? What am I? Am I binary?”
In four quick steps, by squishy leaps of logic, transgender people are to blame for women getting punched on New York subways by crazy street people.
That logic is very similar to this: Cheese is yellow. The moon glows yellow. Therefore, the moon is made of glowing cheese.
By the way, she’s also arguing that the solution to subway assaults is more vigilantes, not more police, and certainly not more funding for mental health interventions.
As this demonstrates, conservatives don’t have constructive solutions for society’s real problems (e.g., subway crime, or mental illness), so they conjure up imaginary ones (e.g., transgender people enable crime), which their spokespeople peddle to the gullible with shallow monologues, scapegoating along the way.
I don’t watch Fox shows, because the dishonesty of their hosts is appalling, and in between their bigoted rants they have nothing useful to say; but I run across descriptions of their antics in stories like the one here.
It’s sad that millions of people do listen to media whores like Campos-Duffy, because they’re being trained to hate people who’ve done nothing to them, and hating those people won’t make them one iota safter on subways or anywhere else.
Is it fair to call show like Fox & Friends a cancer on our society? Yes, because they eating away the fabric of democracy and our sense of community. And, as we learned from the Dominion lawsuit revelations, it’s done purely for profit, and against all decency norms. That’s the very definition of “whoring.”