The Foolish False Equivalence Between Fox News, The GOP, and Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes

Covering hate speech and extremism in the world of mass media is a tricky and complicated endeavor, a fact laid bare this week as some in the media have truly missed the mark while covering the notorious neo-Nazi who dined with former President Donald Trump ahead of Thanksgiving.

On one hand, what could be more important for the media than to shine a light on the kind of hate speech and activities that fuel racism or conflict between ethnic and other minority groups – recruiting and radicalizing individuals? However, questions of when hate speech is newsworthy and whether or not to amplify or platform it are always difficult decisions as media can often fall into a trap of normalizing or even minimizing some of the worst actors in society – which is exactly what the Daily Show and others did with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes this week.

The Daily Show, which yes I understand is meant to be satire, decided to tackle the Fuentes fallout by comparing him to Fox News hosts and other mainstream GOP leaders.

The comedy show put together a mash-up titled, “Trump Dinner Guest Nick Fuentes Vs. Fox News.” On YouTube, they blurbed the clip as, “Everyone agrees that Nick Fuentes should not be having dinner with former president Donald Trump. He’s much better suited to be a host on Fox News.” The clip from Tuesday now has well over 1 million views on Twitter.

The clip runs through some of the recent punditry on Fox News, like top-rated opinion host Tucker Carlson questioning, “How is diversity our strength?” and agreeing with a guest, “You are right, they are Godless.” The mash-up juxtaposes Carlson’s statements with Fuentes saying the exact same thing, without any context.

The clip then shows Fuentes saying, “Black people are violent,” and then shows Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union on Fox News, saying, “They have chaos and violence in their communities.” The clip goes on to show clips of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR),Fox News host Jesse Watters, former Rep. Steve King (R-IA), and former President Donald Trump saying quotes echoed in different contexts by Fuentes.

Now, while all the comments from Carlson to Trump deserve scrutiny — and, many of them, condemnation — the clip makes a false equivalency in comparing these right-wing figures to Fuentes, whose rhetoric openly embraces white supremacy, authoritarianism, antisemitism, Holocaust denial, rabid homophobia, and just about every other imaginable version of hate speech.

The issue here is not the clips the Daily Show chose to highlight from mainstream GOP leaders, but the myriad of hateful remarks from Fuentes that the Daily Show did not shine a light on. In order to make this clip work, the Daily Show producers had to cherry-pick some of the less horrific (although still awful) things Fuentes has said.

So, while the purpose of the clip equating Fuentes to Fox News hosts was clearly meant to smear Fox News hosts as akin to Fuentes, the equivalence also goes the other way and helps to normalize Fuentes as part of an ideological movement embraced by tens of millions of Americans.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid fell into the same trap on her show, saying she sees only a “very small degree of difference” between neo-Nazi Fuentes and the current GOP – which just retook the House of Representatives.

Reid began by noting what she saw as a tepid condemnation in the GOP of Trump’s dinner with Fuentes. “They don’t want to talk about Trump. They say, but Trump’s not an anti-Semite. They carve out of that Trump is not a bad guy. He shouldn’t have had him at the table,” Reid told her guest.

“The problem is, the rest of what Fuentes just said — to me, that doesn’t sound any different than fundamentally what the party platform is,” said Reid having previously shown a clip of Fuentes saying America needs a “dictator” to impose his values on the rest of Americans.

“They don’t believe in elections. They don’t necessarily like the idea of democracy. Mike Lee said democracy is a bad idea. They don’t like the idea of women controlling their bodies. They clearly wouldn’t mind having a dictator because they don’t think that elections matter. They think they should just decide who the president of the United States is. They hate the culture. They’re angry that the culture is too friendly to LGBTQ people,” Reid concluded.

Like the Daily Show, Reid omitted some of the worst of what Fuentes said in the very clip she showed. Fuentes in the clip also claimed the United States is an “evil country” before he called for the overthrow of American democracy. That’s the kind of rhetoric from Fuentes that led to Georgia’s GOP Governor Brian Kemp (R) calling Fuentes, and Trump’s meeting with him, “un-American.”

Reid carefully chose the culture war issues she wanted to discuss in comparing Fuentes to the GOP, and while all valid, meant she had to ignore his open hatred of the United States and embrace of Nazism — something she certainly couldn’t hang around the neck of the GOP.

So, while Trump-fueled election denial in the GOP, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) speaking at Fuentes’s conference, Tucker Carlson’s embrace of authoritarian leaders like Hungary’s Victor Orban and his comments supporting Vladimir Putin are all the kinds of topics the media should report on and the public should scrutinize and debate – tying Fox News or the broader GOP to Fuentes and his ilk is simply wrong and only serves as a gift to him. Fuentes, whose publicly stated goal is to drag the conservative movement close to white nationalism, is clearly loving every second of this news cycle.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.