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Fox News’ Jesse Watters made a decision to disregard the well-being of his audience on Saturday night in order to whine about unsubstantiated grievances of media “censorship” and election interference against those on the right.
Watters commiserated with his guest, the president’s son Eric Trump, over the non-issues by praising the harmful conspiracy group QAnon. Both the host and Eric framed Twitter’s recent ban of the fringe movement as a way to explain the falsity that there is a liberal media that is in cahoots with big tech with the aim of silencing Trump and his allies.
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Watters began by asking Eric if the banning of “Q” was an attempt to interfere in the coming presidential election while heaping praise on the group.
“Q can do some crazy stuff with the pizza stuff and the Wayfair stuff, but they’ve also uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to [Jeffrey] Epstein and when it comes to the Deep State. I never saw Q as dangerous as ANTIFA. But ANTIFA gets to run wild on the Internet. What do you think? What’s going on there?” Watters asked.
Amazingly, Watters breezed by the Pizzagate theory as if it had no real-world ramifications. It’s a dangerous false theory that claims prominent Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a D.C. pizza shop and led to a believer entering the business armed with an AR-15 back in 2017.
As NBC News’ Ben Collins, who covers media/tech and conspiracy extremists, wrote on Twitter: “Q has not ‘uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein and when it comes to the Deep State.’ The Epstein reporting was by actual reporters at newspapers, bastardized by Q to fit a narrative about Satanic child cannibalism. Deeply irresponsible garbage by Fox News.”
Watters is boasting about a group that was deemed a terror threat by the FBI in 2019 and, according to the Daily Beast, has been connected to at least two murders and two child abductions.
The New York Times describes QAnon as a movement that stems “from an anonymous person or group of people who use the name ‘Q’ and claim to have access to government secrets that reveal a plot against President Trump and his supporters.”
QAnon also falsely claims that the coronavirus is a scam. They encourage people not to wear masks, to drink bleach to ward of the virus and to refuse a vaccine if one becomes available.
What Watters is doing by propagating these lies is not only personally irresponsible but also shows a lack of accountability over at Fox News. The network has allowed their primetime hosts to run wild spreading untruths while hiding behind the excuse that those shows are opinion-driven commentary programming and not hard news. That reasoning just doesn’t fly during a pandemic, and Fox should put a stop to it immediately. Americans are dying.
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