Hate: Pulling back the curtain
Read Time:4 Minute, 24 Second
On Saturday, the world lost a truly gifted and talented performer. Whitney Houston was found dead in a Beverly Hills hotel room at the age of 48. Every media outlet on Earth immediately went into overdrive, publishing articles, biographies and posting videos of Ms. Houston’s performances.
Flowers, candles, notes and stuffed animals were placed outside the hotel, people commented under every article, voicing their grief, shock, sorrow and sharing memories. I read about proms and weddings and anniversaries and funerals, all linked to Whitney Houston’s songs. Well, almost every article.
Fox News’s website, like all other media sites, posted an article on the passing of Ms. Houston on Saturday, moments after the news broke. It was the same article that AP posted, and that CNN posted and that everyone posted. With one distinct difference: the comments. You can’t find any of those comments today, as Fox deleted every single one. Over 5,000 comments, gone. Why? Because the comments that were written in response to that first article were vile, hateful, racist, evil, cruel and bordered on illegal. Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs got hold of some of them before the purge, and posted them within their own articles. But neither site took it much further than that, almost as if the comments were the whole story.
Yesterday (Monday), against my better judgment, I visited the Fox website, and found another article about the death of Whitney Houston, written that morning. I scrolled down, and lo and behold, hundred and hundreds of comments had been posted in response to this article as well. The “scrubbers” were not keeping up, it seemed, and these comments were still posted in all their glory. Below are a few of them, but be warned, I did not edit these. I will never edit hate, because by editing it, you give it power.
Her d y i n g words were….I just want to be f u c k i n g w h i t e!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Every progressive and Obama supporter deserves to suffer the exact same fate as she did.
Progressives/Obama supporters + Rx pills + booze + filled bathtub = win for Americajust another crack head knee grow
The buckwheat supporter is dead !
NE G RO ES ARE DISGUSTING!. THEY SMELL LIKE S H I T AND ARE DMB LIKE WET BAKS. TOTALLY USELESS RACE OF INSECTS.
I am not the least bit racist, but I see this as an analogy to the theatrical series “Planet of the Apes”. So many African-Americans have chosen to use drugs and abandon their kids that the chickens are coming home to roost. Whitney does her people a disservice by the lifestyle she chose to live. (10 people liked this comment.)
Last week, CPAC invited two white nationalists and a white supremacist group to its annual meeting. Newt Gingrich calls President Obama the “food stamp president,” and says black people should stop accepting welfare and start demanding paychecks. Steve King called President Obama “urban” and many pundits on Fox and right wing radio have called Michele Obama, and the entire First Family “uppity.” Donald Trump demanded to see President Obama’s college records because a black man couldn’t possibly get into Harvard based on anything other than his skin color.
And then we have the comments above, again on Fox’s own website, under an article about the death of Whitney Houston. Do we really need a map and a flashlight to connect the dots? Are we so afraid of the truth that we refuse to pull back the curtain, choosing instead to peek just a little, then back away?
Other sites may be content with stirring the pot for their own gain (more hits, more shares), but, possibly to the horror of my editor, I don’t write about hate to gain an audience. I write about it to shine a light on the darkness that is the new Republican party. Understand, this is an iceberg, and America is the Titanic. We can’t see the whole monstrosity, because few media outlets report the whole story. Oh, they’ll post a clip of Bryan Fischer, or a speech by Tony Perkins, but they gloss over it. Want to really find out about hate? Pull back the curtain.
Evil shrivels in the light of truth and love. The only way to battle these new conservatives is to continue to show them for who they really are. I intend to do that, every chance I get. Republicans bring up the Dixiecrats in response to liberals and NORMAL conservatives hitting them in the face with evidence of their own glaring racism. Yes, we had Dixiecrats, yes we own that, and yes we are ashamed. The racism and hate flowing like shit in a pig lagoon out of the current GOP does not equal 30 some odd senators who had a tempter tantrum and grabbed their white hoods with both hands. That argument is moot.
If you pull the curtain all the way back, as I plan to do, you will be astonished, amazed, sickened and horrified. Do it anyway. America deserves better than those comments, she deserves better than CPAC, and we all deserve better than the GOP.
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Fox News and its supporters are truly despicable. I’ve been marvelling for years how they can be so numerous.
I think we’d be surprised at the number of crazies out there.
Erin, great article. I’ve visited the Fox websites (Foxnews dot com and Fox Nation) They’re both cesspools of hate and racism, and if you try to post any facts that go against their narrow views, your comments are deleted and you’re banned from commenting. If you visit Newshounds.us, you will see that they expose the Fox racists quite frequently.
You say you’re going to pull the curtain all the way back. I’m with you on this, but how do you plan on doing that and how can your readers help? Any suggestions?
Every time Fox News enters a conversation, I put in my 2 cents worth with facts and examples of how the Fox outlets lie and spread hate. When I walk into an establishment where Fox News is showing on the tv, I ask the manager to change the channel. What else can we do to make more people aware of the hate Fox spews?
We’re documenting the same thing at the History Commons. Feel free to peruse our stuff.
Domestic Propaganda
Tea Party Movement
Race-Based Rhetoric
Domestic Terrorism
(Ignore the “military analysts” part of some of the URLs, we’ve revamped the project but not the URL.)
I don’t normally allow links in comments, but this appears to be worthy.
This is the same old same old, treating people that are not pasty white the same way they always do. That some people might be surprised or shocked is a new thing.
It more has to do with not being willing to just stand by and let such idiocy happen quietly. It is about turning on the light and making all the roaches go scurrying instead of letting them them go about their business. It is about letting people know that, no, this sort of stupid isn’t acceptable and if they act like that they are going to get called out on it.
I’m not one to stand by and watch hate happen, no matter what form it takes or who it is directed to whether I know them or not. I have seen up close and personal, racist hate directed towards me (oh and I can pass for white whatever that means in the scheme of things) and anti gay hate towards those I cherish most in this world.
Jess, it’s not the same old thing. Since the election of President Obama, there has a been a marked increase in the number of white supremacist groups in America. And with the language being used by pundits and candidates, more and more hate will surface. There have always been racists, but now they are out in the open, more dangerous and they seem to have an entire political party supporting them.
As we’re documenting at the History Commons (see my post below), this has been the standard response to Democratic presidents since the Roosevelt administration. Elect a Democrat and watch the white supremacists boil over like fire ants after you kick over their nest. Electing a black Democrat made their reaction that much worse.
It is exactly the same old thing, but now it’s more in the open where others are getting disgusted by it and won’t tolerate it for any reason. This is the same stuff they spoke of behind closed doors where no one could hear them. They just feel more comfortable since they have others with the herd mentality egging them on.
I myself have been instructed to go back to Mexico, the middle east get my Muslim ass out of the country. I am an atheist, born and bred in California so I have no idea where these haters come up with some of the crap they do. Haters always gonna hate no matter what you do. I typically just laugh at them, leave them with a pithy comment and walk away, since that pisses them off more than trying to talk to them after the first confrontation.
Hehe, that is a good idea Jess. Taunting such idiots is both more cathartic as well as the best way to destroy their ‘argument’ and make them shut up.
The odd thing is that no one, save the SPLC, rightwingwatch.org and a few small sites deal with this in any other way except to use it to score Internet “points.”
I never visit Fox, but after reading the comments under the first article, I knew that much hate could not be silent for long.
That is what worries me. With so much hate pouring out, how long before it explodes out into the public sphere. Well again…damn, I suppose it already is there under the guise of teabaggers and quite possibly some of the Republican presidential candidates.
This at least explains how they have been elected, yet I am more depressed then before…
Turn that depression into something concrete. I do research and write about it. Others protest in the streets. Others raise hell on Facebook and Reddit and other venues. Others try to take over their local Democratic Party organizations and field candidates who stand strongly against racism. There’s something for you to do besides be depressed about it all.
I ran across this same information earlier today (though through an intermediate source and not the Fox News site itself). I don’t understand this level of idiocy.
I was torn between wanting to just close the page or see how bad they could get. As a general rule, the second one is not advised (which of course means I did it).
And you are right, they are just going to try and sweep this under the rug, quite possibly because they know they cannot publicly endorse this kind of thing and also because they don’t want to lose any of their fans (read: rabid racists).