DOUBLE STANDARD

Trevor Noah Calls Out Fox News’ Las Vegas Hypocrisy: You Had No Problem ‘Politicizing’ Orlando

The same Fox News hosts who denounced the politicization of the Las Vegas massacre were doing just that the day after Orlando.

Because this past Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas “didn’t fit any of Fox News’ established political narratives,” Trevor Noah said Tuesday night they “couldn’t politicize” it. “And if they couldn’t politicize it, then I guess neither should anyone else,” he added.

As The Daily Show demonstrated with a series of clips from Brit Hume, Kimberly Guilfoyle and others, Fox News spent Monday calling for a period of “mourning” before anyone tries to “politicize” the tragedy.

“I like how Fox News says, please don’t politicize this today,” Noah said. “As if there’s anytime they’d be willing to talk about gun control.” Even if we all waited a day, as Fox host Howard Kurtz suggested in a much-maligned tweet, Noah joked that they would say, “Sorry, we can’t do Thursday. Yeah, we’re going to be talking about Hillary’s emails.”

“But I get the concern,” the host added. “I mean, what kind of terrible people would push a political agenda the day after a mass shooting? A shooting like with Orlando?”

With that, he cut to clips of the same Fox personalities invoking President Trump’s Muslim ban the day after an ISIS-inspired attacker opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “You wonder whether people like that should be coming here,” Hume said on June 13th of last year. That same day, Guilfoyle was calling on the Muslim community to combat “radical Islamic terrorism.”

Of course, there was one Fox News host who miraculously found a way to politicize the latest shooting—but it had nothing to do with guns. After praising the law enforcement officers who were “running towards the bullets” in Vegas, Jesse Watters said, “So all those kneelers in the NFL out there, they need to recognize when they’re kneeling during the anthem, they’re kneeling, and we’re supposed to be honoring law enforcement—law enforcement that’s trying to save lives, not take lives.”

"Wow, did this guy just find a way to use the mass shooting to pivot back to the NFL argument?” Noah asked. "Yeah, like, after watching this, you would be thinking, hundreds of people shot in Las Vegas, Colin Kaepernick you son of a bitch!”

If Watters' point was, “you've got to show respect to the police,” then Noah said, “Personally, I would rather respect the police by reducing the number of guns that risk killing police, but not kneeling is good, too.”

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Matt WilsteinSenior Editor

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