President Donald Trump's loyal followers in the right-wing media have drummed up a false panic about chaos and disorder in American cities to justify his authoritarian crackdown with the National Guard on anywhere that protests him, Media Matters for America president, Angelo Carusone, told MSNBC's "The Weeknight" on Monday.
This comes after a federal appeals court panel dominated by Trump appointees gave the green light for the president to activate the Oregon National Guard to march on protesters at the Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
"So much of this, even though this is being decided in the court of law, becomes about the imagery and about what people understand this to be," said anchor Alicia Menendez. "To your point about the fact that [the appellate court] just took the representations at face value, this is what a lower court judge had to say about the protests in Portland on September 26th, the eve of the president's directive. Law enforcement, quote, 'observed approximately 8-15 people at any given time out front of ICE, mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around. Energy was low. Minimal activity.' If you watch Fox News, that's not the impression you would get of what is happening in Portland. And by the way, that judge was a Trumpappointee."
"Yeah, I think the misinformation part of this is incredibly important on multiple levels," said Carusone. "One, at the court level, you know ... the appeals court didn't accept the finding of fact. They just accepted representations from government. And what's scary about that is that NYU just put out a study where they found that 35 courts have pointed out that that the government has lied, the administration has lied to them. Thirty-five courts have called them out for giving them false information. So you shouldn't be taking it at face value at anything."
"But this is because it's sitting on top of this larger cauldron of lies that has been cooked and simmering on Fox News in particular, and what they've been doing," Carusone continued. "And all of those people at the antifa hearing that Trump did, that meeting at the White House, they are all ostensibly right-wing media figures. Many of them call themselves journalists, but they're media figures, they're characters, and they have been pumping poison into the ecosystem for weeks. So because they do their own podcasts and streams, they're on the ground there. They have been not just creating these little flash points of imagery or pointing back to B-roll from 2020, saying, there's fires burning, and recycling that narrative. And of course, Fox will pick it up and run with it. But the larger story that they're putting on top of it is that it is chaos on the streets."
"And so that has been recycled in the right-wing echo chamber for weeks on weeks on weeks," he added. "And these are all figures that are on the ground there that are weaving together this false narrative. It is then being laundered and elevated through Fox News, then validated by the White House when he brings them to ... the White House to actually have this big meeting about antifa and all this insurrection stuff that they're worried about. But it's all lies. It's all a fabrication. And it then gets finally legitimized by the court that sort of takes that spin and puts a stamp of approval on it when it makes these sort of judicial decisions."