The hosts of Fox & Friends compared vaccine and mask mandates to living under autocracies and encourage their viewers to take to the streets to protest against public health measures. Somehow these propagandists failed to mention that the mask mandate only applies to public places that do not require proof of vaccination, or that their own employer has had a similar vaccination and testing requirement in place for months on end now.
I guess working for Fox "news" is akin to working for an evil autocrat, who is trying to destroy the American way of life as well, but none of these jackasses are complaining about that.
After railing about public officials supposedly only wanting to put these measures in place so they can "control" the population, downplaying how dangerous COVID can be -- likening it to the common cold -- and playing a clip from Dan Bongino's latest rant, here's Will Cain, Rachel Campos-Duffy and Pete Hegseth encouraging their viewers to follow the lead of those who are protesting in Austria, fearmongering that similar measures to New York will be put in place across the country. They know full well that red states will never do such a thing, and they love to pretend that Americans have some sort of God-given right to make each other sick.
HEGSETH: The reason this matters too is New York City could be a precursor to what happens across the country. We don't want to be New York City-centric here. It's a reality that New York City decided to preemptively go after omicron, one that has revealed itself to be far more mild.
But you also have what's going on in Austria, the country of Austria that has universal vaccine mandates now. You've got 40,000, 50,000 people taking to the streets saying my government shouldn't compel every single person in the country to get the shot.
And you wonder if it would have to get to that place. […]
What what point do we have to reach in this country where folks take to the streets as well? Hopefully we don't get to the point there's a universal mandate for an entire state.
CAIN: But would you bet against it?
HEGSETH: I wouldn't. That's the crazy part.
CAIN: To Dan's point about the goalposts moving, I would challenge anyone watching, set that bar out as far out as you can, and just ask yourself “Is that impossible here?”
I don't think you can come up with something where your answer might be “That will never happen in America.”
CAMPOS-DUFFY: I totally agree. And by the way, these are gi-normous protests. I mean, this is a country of what, eight million people, and they have 40,000, imagine going to a protest with 44,000 people and their government, still not listening to them.
So, yeah, I agree. Maybe we all need to go protest. Maybe we all need to, you know, make our voices heard. But in the end, are our leaders going to listen?
HEGSETH: It's true. We should not take for granted the brilliance, and how we still lean on our founding documents and our Bill of Rights, which a lot of these countries do not have. Their rights are not endowed to a creator. They are given to them by a government, therefore easily taken away. We're lucky. We're lucky. It may not hold out against autocrats forever but for now it's the one thing standing between what they want to do.
CAMPOS-DUFFY: Those documents have trigger warnings on them. And, at the um....
HEGSETH: That is true.
CAMPOS-DUFFY: ...and in our nation's capital, so, you know... at the archives.
CAIN: The last firewall.
Hegseth was actually asked about Fox's vaccine mandate last month, and pretty well lost what's left of his tiny mind over it.
Sadly, there's no one in the studio there to ask them a similar question every time they run another one of these segments, where they're doing their best to kill as many of their own viewers as possible.
