Extremist rhetoric from rightwing media and officials is 'intensifying', experts say | ... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...ing-media-fox-news-republicans
right-wing media officials rhetoric extremist crisis culture GOP
shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 21
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Away from Fox News, Pearson Sharp, a host on the hard-right One America News Network (OANN), has been attempting to carve out his own niche of extremism. In late June, Sharp raised the unhinged and untrue theory that “tens of thousands” of people meddled in the election to prevent Trump winning, and went even further than Carlson in his comments.
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“In the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution,” Sharp said.
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Robert Herring, the CEO of OANN, said: “He was only telling what [sic] could happen if you try to over throw America ... He gave the laws that would apply.”
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Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, whose newly released book Hoax explores how Fox News covered Trump, told an interviewer in June that the US had entered an environment “where the Fox base” prefers “propagandistic opinion shows [rather] than any semblance of news”.
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“People want to be lied to, and it’s above my head to know what to do about that,” Stelter told the Washington Post. “What do we do about that, when millions of people want to be lied to every day?”
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The hysteria is not limited to television. Last week Vice leaked video of a speech by Scott Perry, a Republican congressman and devotee of the false stolen election theory, in which Perry told the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference that they should “go fight them”, referring to Democrats.
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Vice reported that Perry claimed many Democrats did not share the same American values as conservatives.
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“We can acknowledge that maybe not every one of them is that way, but that doesn’t matter,” Perry said, before drawing a dark parallel.
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“We’ve seen this throughout history, right? Not every not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and 40s was in the Nazi party. They weren’t. But what happened across Germany? That’s what’s important. What were the policies? What was the leadership? That’s what we have to focus on.”
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The comments by Perry, an influential member of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus, add further context to what experts fear is the current state of the American right – dangerous, intensifying, and with no end in sight.