FRIENDS: The Times reports on some heavy mascara!

FRIDAY, JULY 19, 2024

The Fox friends get passed over: Last night, Donald J. Trump finally confirmed the widespread report:

"I had God on my side," he confessed in the early moments of his convention speech.

By the norms of American political speech, that revelation can almost be regarded as secular. Not so with the gaggle who gathered on Fox & Friends Weekend this past Sunday morning.

We refer to the group of pseudo-journalistic friends who made such assertions as these:

6 o'clock hour:

JONES: There is no Donald Trump today without Jesus Christ this morning. I mean, we could be having a very different conversation this morning—

CAMPOS-DUFFY: That's right.

JONES: —going over the obituary of the 45th president this morning. And if it wasn't for the grace of God, things could have been different. So I give honor and glory to our lord and savior, Jesus Christ, for protecting the former president. 

6 o'clock hour:

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Yeah, it's a miracle!

HEGSETH: Providential.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: It's a miracle. And I told you guys earlier, I'm thinking more people pray over him, literally put their hands over him—there are many pictures of him in the Oval Office, and at many events, where, before then, people will pray over him. 

There is a protective shield over him. There's no question in my mind.

8 o'clock hour:

HEGSETH: We're right, first and foremost, to thank Jesus Christ, the lord almighty, that Donald Trump is safe—

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Yeah.

HEGSETH: —and those prayers went out, and to reflect on the historic nature of this.

9 o'clock hour:

CAMPOS-DUFFY: [It's] a sign of what so many believe is true about Donald Trump, that he is under a special protection because of the millions of people who have been praying for him and praying to Jesus, praying to angels, praying to the Holy Spirit to put a shield around him. 

We had Dr. Siegel on earlier, and he said this is just almost a 99% impossibility that that bullet did not enter into his head. But for a millimeter of him turning his head, right now we would be sitting on the couch talking about an assassinated former president. It's really miraculous.

9 o'clock hour:

JONES: As I said earlier in the program at the 6 a.m. hour, if it wasn't for the lord Jesus Christ, our lord and savior, we would probably be talking about obituary for the former president of the United States.

Guys, I send it back to you in New York City.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Thank you, Lawrence.

When Donald J. Trump confirmed the report, he at least kept it semi-secular. Not so for the Fox & Friends hosts, who specifically said, through the course of four hours, that the former president had been saved by a miraculous protective shield.

According to the Fox News friends, this miraculous shield had been administered by "our lord and savior Jesus Christ"—by "Jesus Christ, the lord almighty."

The various friends said a great deal more during the course of the program. In yesterday morning's report, we transcribed more of their statements about the ways God has intervened in our politics and journalism of late.

That said, Campos-Duffy, Hegseth and Jones went where the rubber meets the road. In our view, their commentary was baldly sectarian—sectarian all the way down.

For the sake of the record, let it be said—there is no law against establishing a religious cable network. Also, there is no law against establishing a sectarian religious network.

Such cable networks already exist. There is no law against such networks, nor is there any obvious reason to think there should be.

That said, the Fox News Channel continues to pose as a standard "news channel." It seemed to us that the conduct these friends displayed constituted such a break from conventional journalistic practice that their conduct needed to be recorded for the sake of posterity.

Elsewhere, the disagreement with our assessment is general. Here's what we mean by that:

This morning, the New York Times commits an insult to human intelligence by featuring a front-page report in its print editions about Usha Vance's wardrobe, but also about the heavy mascara favored by Donald Trump's women. 

The report was prepared by Vanessa Friedman, the Times' "fashion director and chief fashion critic." Front-page headline included, Friedman's report starts like this:

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Usha Vance and the Iconography of the Trump Women

J.D. Vance, the newly nominated vice-presidential candidate, may represent the new generation of the MAGA movement. But, as became clear Wednesday night when Usha Vance stepped gingerly into the spotlight to introduce her husband at the Republican convention, his wife represents change of a different kind.

That is not because she is a Yale-educated lawyer with three children, or the daughter of two Indian immigrants. It’s because she does not hew to the very specific mold of femininity that has become the norm in the world of Trump.

After all, there is a certain kind of look that the women in Mr. Trump’s closest orbit—his wife, daughters and daughters-in-law—all share, and that has become a defining gender trope in his own political reality show.

It involves a lot of hair, often left to cascade in glossy, carefully controlled Breck girl waves. It involves heavy mascara (or false eyelashes), lip gloss and vertiginous heels. It often involves a brightly colored sheath dress. It calls to mind a cross between a Miss America—or Miss Universe—pageant contestant and a Fox newscaster. It is the equivalent of the Palm Beach billionaire take on the trad wife (even if these wives also have work). It looks as if it requires a lot of effort to maintain.

On and on this analysis went, in pursuit of that "defining gender trope." For better or worse, Friedman moved next to the question of the "heavily made-up face" of Donald Trump's Jr.'s fiancée.

The report appears on the front page of today's print editions. This helps explain why millions of voters in Red America are extremely eager to get to the polls to vote against the candidates from our own Blue America nation.

That said, please consider:

On the one hand, the heavy mascara of Trump's wife and daughter and daughters in law merits a front-page report, accompanied by a photograph, in today's New York Times. By way of contrast, not a word has been written—presumably, not a word will ever be written—about what happened on the Fox News Channel this past Sunday morning.

Also, not a word is being written about the other gong-show behaviors which are so prevalent on that heavily watched and very important "cable news" channel. Within the world of Blue America's upper-class news orgs, such things simply aren't done.

Our guess would be this:

All in all, the New York Times doesn't want to tangle with Fox. Whatever the merit of that speculation may be, very few people in Blue America are aware of the ways their knowledge of the world is being restricted by the profit-oriented players who run the New York Times.

Also, by the profit-oriented players who run MSNBC! But let's postpone talk of that hapless entity. Let's wait for some other day.

In the next few says, we'll have more to offer about the performance of the Fox News Channel this week. For now, let's return to Fox & Friends Weekend—to the players who turned it into a sectarian religious channel during Sunday's prayer service.

Yesterday, we listed the names of the four (or five) players who took part in Sunday's revival meeting. That said, who's the person who kick-started this service?

We think he should try to do better. The leading authority on his life and times thumbnails him as shown:

Lawrence B. Jones

Lawrence Billy Jones III (born December 10, 1992) is an American libertarian political commentator, author and a current co-host of the weekday edition of Fox & Friends on the Fox News Channel....Jones, 31, is the youngest African American to co-host on a cable news network.

Jones was raised by his mother, Tameria and father, Lawrence Jones II. Jones has stated that he served as "youth mayor" of Garland, Texas, in 2009. He graduated from Garland High School in 2011 and studied political science and criminal justice at the University of North Texas.

Jones was hired as student advocate in the Garland Independent School District, becoming their youngest employee. When he was 19, he ran for a seat on the school board for this district, but lost the election. He served two years as a board member for Dallas County Child Welfare. In 2012, Jones was on the Garland Parks and Recreation Board. In 2013, he was named Activist of the Year by FreedomWorks. That year, he went undercover for Project Veritas, a conservative organization founded by James O'Keefe known for publishing deceptively edited videos...

[...]

On September 14, 2023, Fox News announced that Jones had been named a permanent co-host of Fox & Friends which saw Jones relinquish his weekend program.

There's more to the report, but all in all so it goes. Meanwhile, everybody makes mistakes, but the leading authority attributes this error to Jones:

In July 2019, Jones blamed the Barack Obama Administration for a lenient plea deal that sex offender and accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein received in 2008, incorrectly asserting that Obama was president at the time.

Whatever! Also, such errors may serve to recommend those who commit them to the suits at the Fox News Channel.

Jones became a regular weekday friend last fall. We've been disappointed by the direction his work has taken. Our view of his work would be this:

As time has passed, he has increasingly seemed to fashion himself as someone who knows everything there is to know about every conceivable topic on Earth, and as someone who's eager to share the three million things he knows. 

(Calchas was "the clearest by far of all the seers who scan the flight of birds?" So it was in Homer's day! Today, the Calchas role occasionally seems to have been passed on to Jones.)

At any rate, so it went this Sunday morning, when Jones scrambled to his feet to explain Trump's escape.

This newest friend is very young. We don't doubt his sincerity, but it seems to us that his "journalism" could frequently be a bit better.

We have different views of the various friends who staged Sunday morning's revival. 

Among the weekend program's three regular friends, Rachel Campos-Duffy strikes us as a million percent sincere. On occasion, the overtly and overly angry Pete Hegseth quite possibly does not.

As we've noted in the past, Will Cain strikes us as the weekend friend who tends to hold back when the other two friends have perhaps gone wild.  In our searches of Sunday's show, we didn't find any statements by Cain which merited inclusion in our report.

Jones serves as co-host on the weekday Fox & Friends program. In the profile we've posted above, we see the outline of a young person who has been a self-assured striver since youth.

Needless to say, there's nothing "wrong" with being a self-assured striver—until such time as there is.

On Sunday, Jones moved quickly to kick-start the framework—to take the discussion sectarian. As always, he seemed to be thoroughly sure of himself.

The New York Times won't report this sort of conduct on the Fox News Channel. Out here in Blue America, very few citizens understand how poorly they're being served by new orgs like the timorous Times—and even by the "favorite reporters and friends" who pander to their predispositions on our own nation's "cable news" channel.

Given our nation's rapidly spreading gong-show / meltdown—in the wake of last night's speech by the Palooka who's running ahead—we leave you today with a question:

Sacred Troy must die, Hector once prophetically said. 

As the "democratization of media" creates a deeply unintelligent modern-day Babel, is it possible that our American version of sacred Troy pretty much already has?