Fox anchor Bret Baier managed to toss some red meat to the masses on Thursday night while failing to observe what decades of Fox News has done to the Republican Party.
"These two debates show how far left the Democratic Party has gone on some issues," he told Shannon Bream. "Think about the evolution from Obamacare where they couldn't even talk about illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants having access to healthcare. Now everybody's raising their hand."
He added some advice for the Trump campaign, too. "I think the Trump administration, the Trump campaign, is going to take this issue and run with it. That, and socialism, probably late-term abortion and the economy will be the pillars for 2020 for the Trump campaign."
Bream muttered something about "both sides moving to the center," and heads should have exploded. Or lightning rained down on both of them.
Where in this discussion is the part where these two anchors acknowledge that the Republican Party is now a party of fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and more?
The New York Times quantifies just how hard right the Republican Party is:
According to its 2016 manifesto, the Republican Party lies far from the Conservative Party in Britain and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany — mainstream right-leaning parties — and closer to far-right parties like Alternative for Germany, whose platform contains plainly xenophobic, anti-Muslim statements.
The Republican platform does not include the same bigoted policies, and its score is pushed to the right because of its emphasis on traditional morality and a “national way of life.” Still, the party shares a “nativist, working-class populism” with the European far right, said Thomas Greven, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin who has studied right-wing populism. These parties position themselves as defenders of the “traditional” people from globalization and immigration, he said.
The difference is that in Europe, far-right populist parties are often an alternative to the mainstream. In the United States, the Republican Party is the mainstream.
For every Fox News worry bead about socialism, we will be calling out the fascism. For every Fox News worry bead about undocumented immigrants, we will be right there reminding everyone about Trump's concentration camps for children seeking asylum. We will march under the banner of health care as a human right.
For every Fox News worry bead about abortion, we're going to be there reminding everyone that government has absolutely no right to be dictating decisions between a woman and her doctor.
At some point, Fox News' worries just don't matter anymore, especially when those they defend are hard-right white nationalists and worse.
Take note, Bret Baier.
