Reactions to ‘Fox News Commenters Spew Racism at Whitney Houston’

Lots of denial from the right, of course
Wingnuts • Views: 46,502

Here’s a great post at Balloon Juice by “Soonergrunt,” reacting to our post yesterday about Fox News commenters and their ugly racism: Why We Fight.

This is Why We Fight. This is the nature of the opposition. I live amongst these people here in what they proudly refer to as “the buckle of the bible belt” and I’m here to tell you that John’s post of last week was right on the money. You need to read their sites—Fox News, Free Republic, lucianne.com, Michelle Malkin’s site, and others. See what they say to each other when they think they aren’t being watched. The palpable hatred and violent fantasies will make you sick, but you need to know what they want, and you need to keep seeing it in their own words. It’s one thing to say “we read them so you don’t have to” but it’s entirely another to make you all see that you do, in fact, need to. In a few days after this thread is dead, some conservatives will post here claiming that it’s all projection and fantasy, just like they did with John’s post last week. None of that will change a thing. If you’ve ever wondered why I dump shit all over the sorry-assed conservatrolls we have here, it’s because there is no fundamental difference between them and the people quoted above. Their world is the world that our little trolls would make, and people such as they deserve only contempt.

Lest you or anyone accuse me of nutpicking, I am specifically calling out the commenters on those sites. But I’ll note that there’s a reason that racists and bigots frequent sites like Michelle Malkin’s site (which is actually pretty ironic) and Freeperland and Fox.

If you love this country, you need to know and you need to fight for it. If you want a better future for your children, you need to know and you need to fight for it.

Well said. This is why I post these excerpts; not because I enjoy reading this ugly garbage, but because it needs to be exposed. One reason why it’s gotten so incredibly horrifying to read comments at right wing sites is because nobody holds these people accountable. In some cases, site owners are just tolerating this sickening racial hatred, but in many others they’re absolutely doing their best to incite it.

Meanwhile, I received at least a dozen tweets and emails from right wingers claiming that I had faked the post, because they couldn’t see any comments on that Fox News thread.

I know it won’t make even a tiny dent in the right’s armor of denial, but here are a couple of screenshots showing that yes … there are comments for that article. Since the Fox News site uses Javascript to display the comments, it’s possible that people who can’t see them are using incompatible browsers or some sort of extension that’s blocking them.

When you click the link circled above, you get to this page:

Notice that the page now contains a total of 4370 comments. The last time I checked it yesterday, there were over 5100. That means that since I exposed these ugly comments yesterday, Fox News administrators have deleted at least 800 of them — and in fact, you can see one that’s been deleted right there at the bottom of the screenshot, on the very first page.

This is far from the first time Fox News has hosted a deluge of outright racism, by the way:

Fox News Commenters Respond to Common Story With Deluge of Racism and Hate
Update: Four Hours Later, Fox News Commenters Still Spewing Racism
Fox News Commenters Cheer for Serbian War Criminal
Fox Nation on ‘Fast and Furious’: A Deluge of Death Threats and Racism
Fox News Commenters Respond to Somalia Story With Deluge of Racism
Fox News Audience Spews Racial Slurs at Morgan Freeman
Fox News Commenters Spew Racial Slurs at President Obama (Again)
Fox News Commenters Spew Overt Racism at Wyclef Jean and Haitians

Of course, there are some right wingers who would have you believe that all of those comments were planted — either by me, or by “leftists” working in concert — to make them look bad. For example, at the site of racist blogger Robert Stacy McCain: An Idiot Obsessed With Commenters.

After spewing insults at me, calling my post an “increasingly desperate effort to simulate relevance,” and insinuating that I planted all the comments, McCain writes:

As to the attitudes reflected in the comments cited by LGF: Lots of white people in pop music – e.g., Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon of The Who, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin – have died as a consequence of substance abuse. Anecdotal examples are not proof of an ethnic trait, and even if statistical evidence demonstrates a correlation between a behavioral trait and an ethnic group, we should be cautious about asserting any particular axis of causality.

The Irish have a reputation for alcoholism, and perhaps deservedly so. But it is very difficult to say, for example, that stupid Micks are prone to drunkenness (a) because they’re Micks or (b) because they’re stupid.

Furthermore, while it might be observed that Ireland has produced a lot of stupid drunks but precious few nuclear physicists, if we generalize too broadly from that example, stupid drunken Micks might take exception to our observations about the correlation between the stupidity and drunkenness of his type. And then some smelly ignorant Paddy O’Sheeney at the end of the bar will likely give us a demonstration of the tendency toward brutish violence for which that damned race of wretched drunkards are so universally notorious.

Therefore, I urge you to refrain from expressing offensive ethnic stereotypes about the Irish. However, you can insult the Frogs without fear, as the French are most famous for the cowardice of their men and the promiscuity of their women.

What an excellent way to prove that you’re not a racist — by posting several paragraphs full of nasty, bigoted slurs.

UPDATE at 2/13/12 12:22:58 pm

And now: Update: Fox News Makes Racist Comment Thread Disappear.

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