thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

feelingbluepolitics:

saywhat-politics:

Right-wing media personalities have long struggled to find a conservative hero in their culture war, someone to serve as an ideological martyr for their cause – and they’ve made some pretty ridiculous attempts to force it along the way.

Gun owners? Rosa Parks. A police officer who arrested a Black man for breaking into his own home? Rosa Parks with a badge. Rogue rancher Cliven Bundy? Rosa Parks on the open range. If only conservative media were more interested in Rosa Parks herself, maybe they’d understand why those comparisons are ludicrous. But that hasn’t stopped conservative media figures from continuing to draw parallels between civil rights activism and a new front in the right-wing culture war: opposition to stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The strategy of portraying conservatives as the victims of liberal policies – even when, as was the case for Luther, the policy being violated was implemented by a Republican – makes sense as part of Fox’s political messaging, as it furthers a narrative of conservative oppression.

…"In April, Fox News helped uplift the anti-lockdown protests with an overwhelming amount of coverage. In just over one week, Fox News ran 91 segments about those protests, amounting to roughly six hours of programming. As the pandemic stretched into May, Fox began attempting to shift focus away from the mounting death toll and [trump’s] lagging approval ratings on his handling of the disaster, limiting what pandemic-related stories it aired to pieces about conservatives who were supposedly harmed by stay-at-home orders. The raging pandemic is starting to become an afterthought on the network, and Fox is moving on to topics like the Department of Justice’s decision to drop charges against former [t]rump national security adviser Michael Flynn and the phony ‘Obamagate’ scandal. With its coverage of Luther’s case, Fox has found a way to portray conservatives as the real victims in this public health crisis.

…"Taking Luther’s story as an example, a rational analysis of what happened would show her as a person who didn’t think the law the rest of us are expected to follow should apply to her, who was given an opportunity to avoid jail after violating the law and refused, who applied for and received government assistance, and who raised nearly $500,000 from a GoFundMe page started before reopening the business. To convince an audience that the victim in this situation is the salon owner – especially an audience that likes to think of itself as supporting ‘law and order’ – you have to appeal to their emotions to override the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance involved.

“A pandemic is no time for culture war gamesmanship, but as Fox News’ latest cavalcade of conservative martyrs shows, it’s the only game the network knows how to play.”

The Republicans, who are directly responsible for the deaths of about 90,000 American citizens in the last two months at this point through their greed, corruption and incompetence bravely continue their battle against the Evil Liberal Agenda of wanting to save lives and prevent people coughing their lungs out