Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

by Dan Pfeiffer

These are just a few examples of what happened when Fox News turned on the Bigot Spigot in the Obama years: Something called the New Black Panthers scandal emerged. The short version of this absurdity is that on Election Day 2008, two members of a fringe organization known as the New Black Panther Party stood outside one polling place in Philadelphia. These two people, one of them carrying a billy club, allegedly shouted racial epithets. Reports of this incident dominated right-wing radio, the Drudge Report, and Fox News. The very conservative Bush administration Department of Justice responded to this furor by opening an inquiry during its last weeks in office and then promptly tossed the hot potato into Obama’s lap. The Right went out of its way to make this singular incident part of a larger conspiracy and tie Barack Obama and Eric Holder, the first Black attorney general in the history of the country, to these individuals. There were congressional inquiries. A former Bush administration lawyer wrote a book about the whole case, and Andrew Breitbart, the conservative provocateur who founded the eponymous website, relentlessly promoted photographs that showed Obama at an event with one of the two New Black Panthers. What event was it? A small meeting? A dinner party? A pickup basketball game? Nope. A 2007 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, that featured tens of thousands of people. And because what’s old is new, the Republicans played the New Black Panthers card again...