Fox & Friends pushes incendiary “invasion” conspiracy theory — even after El Paso shooting

Rather than distance themselves from the immigrant “invasion” conspiracy theory that allegedly motivated a white supremacist shooter in El Paso to kill at least 22 people on Saturday, Tuesday’s edition of Fox & Friends indicated the hosts of President Donald Trump’s favorite show will continue to defend and reinforce it.

On Tuesday, host Brian Kilmeade — echoing the manifesto written by the El Paso shooter, who in turn drew inspiration from President Donald Trump — defended the use of the term “invasion” to describe migrants and asylum seekers crossing the southern border, saying, “if you use the term ‘invasion,’ it’s not anti-Hispanic, it’s a fact.”

Kilmeade’s co-hosts expressed no disagreement with his sentiment.

The “invasion” conspiracy theories about immigrants that appeared to motivate the El Paso shooter and that Trump has spent the better part of a year pushing have gotten heavy play on Fox News. Tuesday’s edition of Fox & Friends indicates that the El Paso shooting won’t change that.

That the rhetoric of “invasion” has become so normalized on Fox News is an illustration of how deep-seated incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric has become in Trump’s Republican Party. The president’s favorite show had no compunction about defending the El Paso shooter’s manifesto, in effect broadcasting his message to more than a million viewers — including, most importantly, the president.

Just a day after Trump condemned mass shootings by reading a speech from a teleprompter in which he said “in one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” the president — drawing inspiration from Fox & Friends hosts — tried to shift blame.

In tweets quoting Fox & Friends commentary, Trump suggested that former President Barack Obama — who released a statement on Monday responding to the mass shootings that took place over the weekend by calling for gun control and for people to “soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments” — should’ve received more blame for mass shootings that happened under his watch. He also downplayed the role his incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric played in motivating the El Paso shooter as a “narrative” pushed by Democrats, adding, “I am the least racist person.”

Here are the tweets Trump posted, followed by the specific bits of Fox & Friends commentary he quoted.

Trump wasn’t alone in pushing false equivalencies. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway joined Fox & Friends on Tuesday and suggested Democrats like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are just as responsible as the president for the gun violence that erupted over the weekend, because the gunman who killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, posted tweets indicating support for them.

The obvious difference, however, is that while parts of the El Paso shooter’s racist manifesto seem as though they were directly inspired by tweets Trump posted decrying the purported “attempted invasion of illegals,” Warren and Sanders haven’t said anything that could be construed as even a tacit endorsement of violence.

Trump’s tweets make clear what was already pretty obvious: that the speech he read on Monday calling for the nation to come together and “condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy” didn’t come from a place of sincerity. He seems to believe that the idea his rhetoric played any role in the El Paso shooting is just a “narrative” cooked up by Democrats who want to take him down, and that the violence that erupted over the weekend is no more his fault than the Sandy Hook shooting was Obama’s.

News comes at you fast. Join us at the end of your day to understand it. You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.