Unless you have been under a rock, you know that some bad Canadian wildfires have sent smoke clouds to hover over American cities, mostly on the East Coast, and that New York in particular has broken all kinds of records for worst air quality ever. It’s nasty. It’s dangerous. The entire world looks orange. It looks like something out of Blade Runner. Major League Baseball postponed Yankees and Phillies games.
You know, unless none of that is true because you watch Fox News and Fox News says everything is fine.
If you watched Sean Hannity last night — and face it, some of y’all’s Nanas did — you heard that the skies over New York weren’t so bad, no big deal, nothing to worry about. Sean Hannity works out a lot and he’s fine, so why aren’t you fine, you snowflakes? Did you hear about how Sean Hannity works out a lot? He works out a lot. That’s why he has those muscles.
“I keep reading and hearing reports and people being interviewed, ‘I had a hard time breathing,’ and I’m like I’m walking in the same place you’re walking in and I don’t feel a thing! And I’m trying to understand, I work out regularly, so I think I’m relatively in tune with my body, I think if it was difficult, if I was having difficulty breathing, I would notice? But these are young people saying this! Are they all snowflakes?”
Sean Hannity loves to talk about working out. He is an MMA fighter guy! He’s very in tune with his muscle man body. And because of his working out skills and his muscles, he has the expertise to know if he’s having a hard time breathing. Why is everybody else such a snowflake?
In response, his halfwit guest Charly Arnolt just wanted to know if there was a correlation between the crackpipes she was reporting on the day before and the smoke in the air today. They agreed people just like to have things to complain about.
Hannity and Arnolt also spent time making fun of New Yorkers wearing masks to protect themselves from the smoke-filled air, because of course they did.
This is the flavor of Fox News right now. Protecting your lungs from orange hell fumes is woke, we guess. And admitting that forest fires are getting worse because of climate change is woke, although as Media Matters reports, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is fine with admitting that.
Not Fox News.
They made fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for bringing up the climate crisis. They made fun of people wearing masks. Judge Boxwine declared that “mask insanity” is back. Jesse Watters did his Little Man Syndrome dance about “our stupid neighbors up north,” made fun of Joe Biden, and got mad because the government is telling people to wear masks again.
Laura Ingraham brought on a cigarette and coal lobbyist named Steve Milloy, a climate change denierwho’s notorious for arguing on behalf of Philip Morris hat secondhand smoke isn’t so bad, to tell viewers there’s “no health risk” from this smoke.
This is the message Secondhand Smokey the Climate-Denying Bear wanted viewers to hear:
“Steve, no one’s denying it is unpleasant. My eyes are pretty itchy and watery, yesterday and a little bit today, and it might go on for a couple more days,” Ingraham said after introducing her guest. “But is this wholly out of the ordinary?”
“No. This happens anytime there’s a wildfire in the West. I mean, it’s unusual in the East. Look, the air is ugly, it’s unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they get anxiety over it. But the reality is there’s no health risk,” Milloy replied. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time — no public health emergency.” (Both countries reportedlysee more than 1 million premature deaths a year from air pollution.)
“This doesn’t kill anybody, this doesn’t make anybody cough, this is not a health event,” he further explained.
“Particulate matter is very fine soot. It’s just carbon particles — they’re innocuous,” Milloy later added. “There’s nothing in them. They have no effect.”
If you want a two-minute demonstration of just how much Fox News hates its viewers and doesn’t care if they live or die, that’s a good clip to save.
So all that shit was weird. These people are so goddamned fucking weird.
And for REALLY REALLY weird, we close with Greg Kelly over on Newsmax, who seemed positively charmed by all the pretty orange smoke in his eyes. It’s a “beautiful, interesting aura,” he said. He of course allowed that “Our woke friends to the north in Canada, their forest fires got out of hand and, well, this is what we’re dealing with.” But it wasn’t so bad!
“I’ll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It’s not an unpleasant odor, to be honest. It’s kind of weird when it seeps into the building, but outdoors, I can deal with it. Folks with respiratory issues though, that’s a real thing, a real complication.
“The White House is trying to exploit this, saying it’s all because of global warming and the normal talking points that go with that. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s a forest fire. This actually has happened a couple of times before in history. And for the time being, we can live with it. But it is pretty, it actually is pretty. It’s a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”
American right-wing media is a pretty good indication that humanity is wrapping up as a species, don’t you think?
We were probably never meant to make it this far.
[Media Matters / Media Matters]
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Just got to BlueSky!
I have profiles those other places but I think I forgot how to log on.
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