It has been noted that viewership of the Democratic National Convention through the first three days surpassed that of its Republican counterpart by a substantial number, and is unlikely to be overcome much after Donald Trump’s long, boring reading from his teleprompter on Thursday, as usually happens when he struggles to read and get all the words pronounced correctly. Trump recited his “accomplishments,” which were only “considerable” if you think that the words “subtraction” and “substantial” actually mean the same thing, and not just the kind of misspelling or mispronunciation that Trump is prone to do. Does Trump really take the majority of voters to be that stupid? One million new unemployed, 27 million still filing for some form of jobless assistance. COVID-19 numbers might have slowed down, but they also did so in May before the summer explosion. What will happen this fall? Trump can’t keep blaming Joe Biden for everything when he isn’t even president yet, and Trump still is.
While Fox News’ coverage of the Republican Convention is still well above its usual average, but almost half of the convention’s total viewership—meaning that most of the rest of America have essentially tuned out. And why should most Americans bother with the lies and deliberate misinformation and total absence of empathy for or even recognition of people who are suffering under the Trump regime?
Thus it doesn’t seem particularly “odd” that there would be a roundtable “news” program that calls itself “Outnumbered” on the cable news station which has the highest viewership, and where rational opinion and fact-based journalism is at a premium. I’m sure that Chris Wallace takes some pride in being the “outnumbered” person in the room at Fox News, but it must also be frustrating dealing with colleagues who say mindless things, and then deny they even said them, or insist that their words were “misunderstood.”
In “justifying” Kyle Rittenhouse’s one-man vigilante spree in Kenosha, Katie Pavlich asserted that "When it comes to how do you stop this and why people are doing what they're doing, you're making a choice as a leader not to stop riots at the beginning, This is the choice leaders are making not to stop the violence initially…on the argument of vigilante justice, when you have no police around to defend businesses and people who are being attacked and their livelihoods burned to the ground, then there is a void that is filled."
Actually, there were police around; they just weren’t doing much except telling people to disperse. Breaking down Pavlich’s statement, she is clearly saying that in the alleged absence of “leadership” and policing “initially,” then there is “a void that is filled” by vigilantes like Rittenhouse. Co-host Melissa Francis responded "That's a great point. The vigilantes are just as much the fault of those local leaders who have failed so miserably." What is being said here? That there wouldn’t be any vigilantes going around shooting random people if “leaders” acted just as irrationally?
Wallace, who had decried violent protest, was nonetheless shocked by the “implication " that somehow vigilante “justice” was “understandable” and even “justified” by an absence of heavy-handed police action. Both Francis and Pavlich played dumb, insisting that they didn’t say what they had just said on live television. Wallace, amazed at the “disconnect” between what was said and what was “meant,” insisted that what he and everyone else heard was that “vigilantes were filling the void from police." When Francis and Pavlich again scolded him for “misunderstanding” what they had said, Wallace just had to throw up his hands and remind them that they said what they said, and it wasn’t “right.”
Of course, Tucker Carlson wasn’t just doubling-down on his defense of Rittenhouse’s actions, by squirming like a pig in slop to find new justifications for it. Over a graphic stating “Two People Killed in Deadly Wisconsin Riots,” Carlson failed to make plain that the only reason why street protests (“riots”) in Kenosha became “deadly” was because the actions of one person who apparently wanted to join the police in shooting unarmed people, although he managed to surpass them in raw numbers, shooting three unarmed white men. After Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, who had first confronted Rittenhouse carrying his rifle, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz apparently tried to disarm Rittenhouse, who then shot and killed Huber and wounded Grosskreutz at close range.
Naturally, Carlson gave his viewers a false picture of what had transpired. “The 17-year-old who has been charged (with murder) tried to run from the mob, tripped and fell in the middle of the street. A man ran up and smashed him in the head with a skateboard. The 17-year-old fired his gun.” Rittenhouse in “fact” acted in “self-defense.”
That is not, of course, what actually transpired. Carlson completely ignored that fact that Rittenhouse had been seen shooting his first victim, and the audio clearly indicates that he “feared” he had killed someone. He wasn’t trying to “run from the mob,” he was trying run from the crime he had just committed—which is why later in the video he is seen with his hands-up when approaching police, who despite being told he had just shot some people, they simply let him go; that is police not showing “leadership” and “doing their job.”
Carlson implied that Rittenhouse was “attacked” by the “mob” for no reason. Any reasonable person when given all the facts knows this is not the truth. Rittenhouse had been seen shooting another man dead. Two men chased him down; he was armed with a rifle that he already used against another person. The two men were unarmed against this armed man, and one of them used his skateboard to try to incapacitate him from shooting other people, and in failing to do so, they were both shot, one fatally.
Those are the facts. Rittenhouse is nothing more or less than a man who was looking for an excuse to shed blood, and that is what he did. Only commentators at Fox News and other far-right “news” outlets saw something different. If Biden wins in November, it will not only be a statement that voters have had enough of the Trump “experiment,” but a rejection of the false view of the world being sold by Fox News.
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