In an op-ed plastered across Monday’s New York Post front page, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) calls for an end to the “muzzling of America.” Despite getting a spot on the front page of the fourth-largest newspaper in the U.S., coverage across the entire Fox News lineup, a new book deal, an audience of more than half a million followers on Twitter, and a lengthy list of credits on IMDB, Hawley would like you to believe that he is a man without a voice.
Hawley’s essay makes a now-familiar argument against so-called “cancel culture,” which naturally, came for him all because he tried to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans and maybe, sorta, kinda helped incite a deadly mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. Who among us hasn’t had a brush with insurrection at one point or another?
That same morning, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced her bid to become the next governor of Arkansas. In her announcement, she played on the same theme as Hawley, saying, “I took on the media, the radical left, and their cancel culture, and I won. As governor, I will be your voice and never let them silence you.”
“Cancel culture,” like “identity politics” and “political correctness,” is an ill-defined concept that has been weaponized to shut down criticism of conservatives.
Are Hawley, Sanders, and the many other politicians and people in conservative media who regularly denounce “cancel culture” actually the steadfast supporters of radical free speech they make themselves out to be? No, of course not. They’re mostly just raging hypocrites. After all, this week News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch bemoaned “awful woke orthodoxy” just days after purging Fox News of employees who correctly called the presidential election.
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The successful branding of “cancel culture” as the invention of the left is both sad and remarkable -- as well as factually incorrect.
Fox spent 2020 recklessly minimizing the danger posed by the pandemic. Led by its prime-time team, the network denounced social distancing measures, face masks, and the public health officials who supported them, championed purported miracle cures that didn’t work, and propped up kooks and charlatans, all in service of then-President Donald Trump’s political standing. Their coverage influenced Fox’s audience -- but the impact was much greater than that. The Fox-obsessed Trump altered federal pandemic policy to align with the network’s programming, even hiring regular guest radiologist Scott Atlas to help lead the White House coronavirus task force. The results were catastrophic.
Fox defended its coverage of the pandemic in a statement to Insider’s Tom Porter for a story published Tuesday morning. “FOX News Media has continuously provided viewers with the latest news on the global pandemic over the past year,” a Fox PR representative said. “Both FOX News Channel and FOX Business Network hosted over a dozen pandemic-related town halls over the last 11 months, while extensively promoting the use of mask-wearing and vaccinations to our audience via public service announcements across all of our key platforms.”
But the network’s coverage Monday night alone puts the lie to Fox’s claim to being a credible source for information about the pandemic.
In spite of Fox’s claimed support for mask wearing, Ingraham used her show to once again falsely suggest there is no evidence of their effectiveness. She described Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, as an “ancient medical bureaucrat with a fancy title spewing lies or unprovable accusations,” as an on-screen graphic described him and Dr. Anthony Fauci as “Liars in Labcoats.”
Collins’ sin? He argued in an interview that masks are a “life-saving medical device” that could have saved tens of thousands of Americans if properly utilized. Ingraham went on to issue questions for Collins which called into question the efficacy of face masks, concluding, “The answers to these questions go directly to exposing some of the big COVID lies that our press — they’re either too stupid or too biased to uncover for themselves."
Later in the program, Ingraham hosted Atlas, who also took a shot at mask usage.
Contra Fox’s purported support for vaccination, Carlson once again used his show on Monday to promote a cowardly and pathetic brand of anti-anti-anti-vaccine commentary. “Since COVID, Bill Gates has gained extraordinary powers over what you can and cannot do to your own body,” Carlson warned, in a nod to conspiracy theories about the Microsoft founder. “Bill Gates would like you to take the coronavirus vaccine, and it’s not a request.”
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