‘Morning Joe’ Panel: Fox News Is Using White Supremacist Language

MSNBC’s Morning Joe discussed a New York Times article tying the El Paso shooter to conservative media on Monday. The panel directly linked white supremacist ideas to Fox News and other mainstream conservative news outlets.

The author of the NYT story, Jeremy Peters, answered questions from Morning Joe regulars about his piece.

“Jeremy, it’s striking the language referenced on the front page of the New York Times today and the link to the El Paso shooter,” Mike Barnicle said. “There is also a very short timeline in many instances between the number of times that these words have been used on Fox. We just saw a few instances of them. And sometimes a very short timeline between that language, that type of language and tweets from the President of the United States directly reflecting the language.”

“Yeah. Exactly, Mike. It’s not a one-way street here,” Peters said. “Sometimes the President’s words inform Fox News hosts, sometimes Fox News hosts’ words inform the President and he goes out and repeats them. The result is this really toxic political discourse we have where it’s now become normal to refer to immigrants, migrants, as invaders, as some type of hostile enemy force that needs to be taken out and stopped at the border or in the words of one pundit, maybe even shot. And how routine this has become.”

“How common this has become was really striking to us when we reviewed five years of transcripts from several news networks and radio programs, talk radio on the right, where it’s not only a regular occurrence to refer to them as an invading force but also that the motivation behind their coming here is not out to escape the horrible conditions in their homeland, but it’s to replace white Americans. And that’s where this intersects with the El Paso killer’s manifesto. When you look at this talk of replacement which is also startlingly common in right wing media and has great overlap with this manifesto.”

Regular contributor Eddie Glaude Jr. was interested in the use of ‘replacement’ – a white supremacist conspiracy theory – on Fox News and others.

“Talk to me a little bit more about the ecosystem of hate,” Glaude said. “You’re using the language of people on the right but we know that is a kind of spectrum. But what we’re seeing is it’s collapsing with this language, right? So the alt-right or white nationalists who use replacement language and then you have Fox News using replacement language. So, this is in some ways peeling the curtain back of the ecosystem of hate.”

“That’s exactly right, Eddie, because it has migrated from the fringe to the mainstream in conservative rhetoric,” Peters said.

“And the idea of this replacement, I think, is the best example of this, because that’s something that originated with a white supremacist book about this supposed white genocide that could occur if migrants keep flowing into places like Europe and what the El Paso killer did, what the killer who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh did, you know, they referred to this invasion and explicitly in the El Paso killer’s case referred to this idea of replacement several times. That the Hispanic race was going to replace people like him, a white guy, and, you know, there’s — it’s difficult to draw a cause and effect, but I think you look at the language, the parallels, it’s pretty striking.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.