FOX and the Evil Empire

I do not watch FOX News, not even for entertainment. So I am glad that someone — in this case rawstory.com’s David Edwards — is paying attention. Edwards calls our attention to a story broadcast on FOX News featuring Northern Exposure’s Janine Turner expounding on the new Star Wars movie above a moving marque reading “News Alert: Star Wars Outrage.”

Ms Turner apparently was the go-to expert called up to respond to MSNBC host Melissa Harris Perry’s suggestion that there might be a racial angle on the new Star Wars movie. Was Darth Vader voiced by a black man and dressed in black attire prior to his turn away from the Dark Side? And was he revealed to be a white man after his conversion?


To which, Ms Turner responds that “political correctness is going to be responsible for killing more Americans” because — get this — “the Bible talks darkness and light.  This is about evil and good. Darkness and light.” Uh, ok.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with anything else, this goes back to biblical times,” she continued. “It’s been discussed in the Bible, Jesus talks about it. It’s about darkness and light, evil and good.”

Turner pointed out that it was “always” that way in the movies: “Evil people come up on the black horses, the good people come up on the white horses. I mean, you know, this is darkness and evil.”

According to the actress, the discussion of racial issues in Star Wars is the kind of rhetoric that is “ruining our country and putting us in this clear and present danger.”

Turner said that she had found a clause in the Constitution (Article I, Section 10, Clause 3) that would allow “the states to take this back into their own hands.”

Because the states were facing “imminent danger” they could come together and form their own union to deal with immigration and other issues, she advised.

“We’re in clear and present danger, we’re beyond imminent,” Turner opined. “So the states can legally and constitutionally come together to defend the American people.”

Really? Yes. Really. And, so, Ms Turner transforms what might have been a truly informed discussion of implicit racism in the film industry and popular culture into a truly fantastic hallucination about reclaiming the rights of southern white men in the United States.

Oh, by the way, for those of you who may have forgotten your Constitutional Law, US Const. I.10.3 reads:

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Surely, all of you can see how this clause, originally intended to reinforce the Interstate Commerce clause and so further restrict and constrain the separate rights of states, could (under the influence of powerful hallucinogenics) be interpreted to mean: whenever an MSNBC film critic plays the #blacklivesmatter card, citizens face such an immanent threat as to warrant rejection of federalism and republican institutions.

In a different Galaxy (not ours), where entertainment media was prohibited from falsely representing itself as news and where the public enjoyed sufficient health, education, and security as not to be deluded by Gorgias’ “fine art,” Ms Turner’s dire warnings would be the occasion of no more than hearty bar-room guffaws. In our galaxy, here and now, where people are justifiably terrified for their lack of health, education, and security, Ms Turner’s provocations are themselves evidence that the disease is far advanced.

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