Fox News host Shepard Smith stood up on Monday for the rights of refugees to seek asylum in the US in a short commentary…. “Today we mourn, but we cannot allow ourselves to become like those who want to destroy us. We cannot resort to the tactics of the barbarians,” he said. “We must fight for what we believe in and who we are. Guard our freedoms faithfully for the generations to follow, and we must not let the rhetoric of potential and political extremists among us lead us to self-destruction.”…. While the “shining city on a hill” is vulnerable, Smith said, refusing to accept those fleeing terrorists would denigrate what he described as the country’s “unique experiment in freedom, tolerance, openness, and equality.”…. “When there’s panic, we show resolve. When there’s call for extremism, we resist,” he argued. “We are America. We must lead.”
My deep and abiding antipathy for Fox News Channel and the Right-wing propaganda it peddles as “news” is hardly a secret. There is little that FNC does that isn’t steeped in propaganda and disinformation. When one of their talking heads goes off the reservation and actually says something genuine, heartfelt, and not a scripted talking point…well, it’s such a rare and wonderful event I feel honor-bound to shine a light on it.
Shepard Smith is no one’s journalist; none of FNC’s talking heads could hope to pass any sort of journalistic objectivity test. Still, when he spoke up for the rights of refugees to seek asylum in the US, you could almost hear the Rabid Right grabbing their torches and pitchforks in a fit of righteous fury. Smith is spot on, though, when he says that America is a “unique experiment in freedom, tolerance, openness, and equality” (though the Far Right’s definition of “freedom” applies only to Conservative White Christian. That experiment may not always play out well in reality, but America is a nation of refugees founded by refugees. To slam the door shut to Syrian refugees fleeing terror and oppression goes against everything this country stands for and was founded on.
The raging return of Conservative Islamophobia represents values America was most definitely NOT founded on- fear, xenophobia, and religious intolerance. The haters and knuckle-draggers would lead us down a path of enmity and barbarity that represents a betrayal of American values and history. Our strength lies in our diversity- not in the uniformity of Conservative White Christian groupthink. If American is to become the province of those who hate foreigners and would exclude those who neither look nor worship as the Christian majority do, in the end we will have lost our way.
I applaud Shepard Smith for having the courage to speak the truth, a rare needle in Roger Ailes’ propaganda haystack. Still, I hesitate to be overly effusive in my praise; at the end of the day, Smith still works for Fox News Channel, perhaps the single biggest reason why so many low-information voters feel that ignorance and reaction are as American as baseball and apple pie.
