"No city is safe": Fox News loses its mind over a Christmas tree fire
"No city is safe": Fox News loses its mind over a Christmas tree fire
"It’s about Jesus, it’s about Hanukkah, it is about everything that we stand for as a country."
Thanks for checking out this free preview version of Public Notice (the second item in the newsletter is subscriber-only). If you’d like full access to the site and to support my work, please consider a paid subscription.
Free subscriptions are appreciated too. This is the last of four newsletters I’ve published this week (read the previous ones here), but I’ll be back with more next Monday!
Fox News spent Wednesday and Thursday morning trying to turn the suspected arson of the network’s Christmas tree into something akin to a combination of 9/11 and Benghazi.
America woke up on Wednesday to the horrifying news that the huge tree outside Fox News’s building had gone up in flames.
While I’m being a bit sarcastic, the sight of flames in midtown Manhattan is obviously a serious and scary thing. But nobody was hurt, a suspect was apprehended, and police have made clear they do not believe the suspected arson was politically motivated.
Fox, however, turned the self-importance up to absurd levels, with network personalities characterizing the incident as evidence that “no city is safe, no person is safe” (Brian Kilmeade), claiming “it’s about Jesus, it’s about Hanukkah, it is about everything that we stand for as a country” (Ainsley Earhardt, who’s apparently unaware that a “Hanukkah tree” is not really a thing), and vowing, “We will rebuild it.” (Lawrence Jones)
Both Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity led their Wednesday evening shows with the story.
“Why is burning Christmas trees not a hate crime, according to the DOJ?” Carlson asked one of his guests.
CNN put together a supercut of all the over-the-top Fox News commentary about the fire, and contrasted the effort to make a huge deal out of it with the network’s downplaying of the January 6 insurrection. Watch:
Fox News was still at it on Thursday morning. Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade suggested the arson is “a hate crime against us, against Fox News” and went as far as to connect the tree fire with the Waukesha parade murders.
”Tree” was ultimately mentioned at least 33 times just on Thursday’s Fox & Friends.
While some network personalities seemed to be at least somewhat in on the joke, others — perhaps most notably Kilmeade — were deadass serious about trying to turn the tree fire into a symbol of everything wrong with Biden’s America.
“Now you know how the Reichstag fire would have been covered if Germany had TV in 1933,” American Independent writer Oliver Willis quipped.
Unintentional comedy aside, it’s enough to get one wondering how Fox would’ve reacted had the arson suspect turned out to be a Biden supporter. Hannity would probably be anchoring special coverage that would last until the midterms.
The David Perdue-Brian Kemp primary will be a bruising referendum on the big lie
If Glenn Youngkin’s successful gubernatorial campaign in Virginia demonstrated that stoking the culture wars can still be a path to victory for Republicans, David Perdue’s gubernatorial campaign in Georgia will be a referendum on the potency of the big lie.
On Monday — almost exactly 11 months after he lost his US Senate seat to Jon Ossoff — Perdue announced he’s running for governor, setting up a primary contest against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. And in the video announcing his candidacy, Perdue made it abundantly clear he’s mad at Kemp for failing to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the state, and hellbent on making sure Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams doesn’t take office.