Fox News Has a New Favorite Target: Oprah
With just days to go before a midterm election that could see control of the House—and, hell, maybe the Senate too (I’m a stupid optimist, sue me)—flip from Republican to Democratic control, the galaxy brains over at Fox News have decided that now is the right time to introduce the American public to their newest public enemy number one: Oprah Winfrey.
Why Fox thinks it’s a good idea to attack one of the most insanely popular people in the country—a woman so influential she convinced Americans to eat pizza with a crust made of fucking cauliflower—is beyond me. Nevertheless, after Winfrey publicly threw her support behind Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams, Fox went on the extremely ill-advised attack.
There was resident primetime bigot Laura Ingraham, who accused Winfrey of “broad-brush race-baiting” after she told a rally of Abrams supporters she was there “because of the men and because of the women who were lynched, who were humiliated, who were discriminated against, who were suppressed, who were repressed and oppressed.”
“I refuse to let their sacrifices be in vain,” Winfrey added.
“To try to tie the candidacy of the Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp to the scourge of racism and even lynchings,” Ingraham whined on her Thursday evening broadcast. “Come on, Oprah! It’s dehumanizing, it’s completely baseless, it’s totally cruel, and again I say, you’re much better than that and you’re much bigger than that.”
As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp has, in fact, actively worked to suppress and disenfranchise thousands of black voters. So, yeah, I’d say tying his candidacy to the “scourge of racism” seems pretty appropriate.
Aside from Ingraham, there was Fox & Friends guest Jana Ellis, who insisted that “Oprah really represents the far-left’s socialist agenda” because of “all of the free things that Oprah gave out” on her television show.
Oprah, of course, is a billionaire corporate mogul who makes oodles of cash selling health food, magazines, and diet plans. Last time I checked, none of those things were a fundamental principle of socialism.
And on Fox Friends First, guest Richard Roth tried to make the case that voters in Marietta, GA, might not connect with Oprah’s message because she’s “in a very different financial status” from ordinary Georgians. (Roth conveniently did not mention that our reality TV star president happens to have been born with an extremely tacky silver spoon jammed down his throat in New York City, and plenty of people seem to listen to him just fine.)
Roth ultimately conceded that people do, in fact, listen to what Oprah has to say, which might have something to do with the fact that she was was born in abject poverty on a rural farm in Mississippi—the sort of thing that could, I don’t know, make her a compelling messenger to lower-income voters in a Deep South state.
The Five host Jesse Watters (Laura Ingraham, pay attention—this guy is an actual “race baiter”) said that Oprah’s endorsement would likely put Abrams over the top on Election Day, after insisting that “If she was a Republican and she was running against Trump in the primary, I’d have a tough decision to make,” which, hmmmm, really Jesse? Really?
Anyway, a bunch of twerpy Fox News dipshits picking a fight with a woman so popular and powerful that she convinced people to read 800 pages about Imperial Russia seems like an incredibly stupid move to me. I guess we’ll see on Election Day.