Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:37 pm
Never a station to tone down rhetoric, a Fox News host this morning accused the mainstream media of a “political hit job on Dr. Ben Carson” and said it is “nothing short of a journalistic lynching, strung up with rumors and innuendos and flat-out lies.”
It’s ironic, but the Fox host is actually playing the race card. The thing they’ve inaccurately accused President Obama of doing for years.
Watch Todd Starnes make a fool of his own point here:
Starnes has it figured out- the reason the media is doing this to Carson and supposedly didn’t do it to Obama (forget about the seven year hunt for President Obama’s “long form birth certificate”) is because Carson is a conservative and his behavior changed because he’s a Christian.
“It is further evidence of the Mainstream Media’s appalling behavior towards black conservatives. They insinuated he made up stories about his past – violent behavior that was changed once he became a Christian.
Starnes went on about President Obama admitting to smoking pot and why hadn’t the media tracked down where he bought it from to be sure he really bought it? Why are they smearing Dr. Carson, Starnes lamented, with shades of “Leave Britney alone!” angst.
Starnes charged that they are smearing Carson because his life story is about redemption, clearly not getting that this is exactly why his stories of redemption are being vetted. These stories are the only “why” he is running for president, without them, there is nothing, Carson has no experience in government, he has no knowledge of government and he is as vague as can be on policy. All he has is his story.
Starnes preached, “Ultimately, Dr. Carson’s life story is not about condemnation — it’s about redemption. It’s about the Gospel of John – Chapter 3, Verse 16.”
“But I’m afraid that’s a story the Mainstream Media doesn’t care to cover,” Starnes closed melodramatically, totally missing that media actually loves this story because they love a simple, very dramatic story. But they are vetting Carson because it is their job to vet front-runners and he is a front-runner.
Stepping out of the irony-challenged world of Fox’s epistemic closure, which is killing the Republican Party more quickly than first anticipated, it’s not persecution and it’s not a “lynching”. Starnes’ hyperbolic accusation makes no sense at all. Conservatives like to pretend they are revolutionaries, but in reality they stand for empowering the top 1% and for the status quo or days gone by. Those are usually the people doing the lynching; not being lynched.
The lynching of black people in the South stepped up after the Civil War — after slaves were given “freedom”. Why? It is a way for the powerful to keep the less powerful down, to intimidate them. It is not done in reverse, for obvious reasons. In this country, it has been used to keep change from happening, to keep a minority down. Dr. Ben Carson represents a lot of things to conservatives, but he doesn’t represent a threat to the establishment – he is in the party catering to the establishment. He doesn’t represent the down-trodden or the minorities or the hungry. There is no reason for the establishment to go after him.
Dr. Ben Carson is a conservative Republican with vague policies catering to the rich and powerful. He is a devout member of the prevailing, dominant religion in this country. Yes, he’s black, but because he’s a conservative, catering to the top 1%, he is not a threat to the establishment.
No one is actually out to get Dr. Ben Carson, well, aside from Donald Trump. No one is lynching him, not even metaphorically, although his not very well hidden ego boost at being “threatened” and thus needing Secret Service is noted. Someone has apparently threatened him.
But “lynching” is a wild accusation from a host of a very powerful mainstream media outlet, who just finished accusing the media of lying about Dr. Ben Carson. Fox News, the place where they regularly imply that President Obama is a Muslim and gave plenty of airtime to Republicans “just asking the question” about President Obama’s birth certificate, long after it had been made available to them.
In this crazy conservative world, it’s totally okay to accuse the media of “lynching”, but not okay for them to accuse Carson of “fabrication”, when in fact, he has been very busy fabricating things.
Leave Ben alone! You meanies never ask Democrats any questions. Maybe someone will ask to read all of Ben Carson’s emails and drag him in front of years’ long investigative committee based on disproven and debunked conspiracy theories. You know, so he can stop feeling so persecuted.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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