With President Trump's approval rating in historic free fall and his eldest son increasingly buried in a pile of lies about the Russian Rendezvous, it's more important than ever for State Media to push an alternative narrative. Enter Fox News, which has for months sought to paint the so-called "Resistance" movement opposing the administration as a kind of insurrection whose members are prone to vulgarity and violence. Jesse Watters, one of Bill O'Reilly's enduring gifts to the nation, tried to push the Leftist Violence narrative this weekend by hosting a member of "Antifa," for anti-fascist, named "Kevin."
There have been eruptions of violence when Antifa groups have come into contact with counter-protesting right-wing or "alt-right" factions, but they're relatively rare in the scheme of anti-government protest since January 20. Naturally, Fox's inclination is to blow them up as representative. Except in this case, at least according to Mediaite, in the rush to do just that, Fox got trolled. Apparently, "Kevin" is actually a YouTuber named BG Kumbi who uploaded the clip to his channel under the "comedy" category to rave reviews from his followers, who left comments like, "this is f**king real," "I never knew kumbi could troll on this level," and "this is actually real lmao."
That notion was seconded by heavy-breathing alt-right social media figure Mike Cernovich:
There's a little extra flatness to Watters' concern-troll questions about violence against police horses when you consider Kevin's repeated references to "the Drumpf administration" are all a gag. Then again, it's painfully obvious that Watters does not care about any of this, and like most of the Fox crew now sees it as his main job to try to bash liberal piñatas for his audience's entertainment. He himself is the embodiment of Internet troll culture run amok, smashing out of your computer screen and into three-dimensional life.
Just take his appalling "Chinatown" segment from October:
That's just part of a long theme:
That this is one of the people who Fox News decided should benefit from Bill O'Reilly's defenestration says just about it all about the network. While Fox is making a big show of moving to zero tolerance for sexual harassment after it emerged the company was a viper pit of abuse, beginning at the top, it appears bigotry and pointless, disingenuous liberal-bashing will still get you your own show.
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
