In case you missed it, Fox has been agog over the release of some “exposé” video of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s sensitivity training. Needless to say, the "fair and balanced" network doesn't bother to go into the history of racism
February 17, 2013

In case you missed it, Fox has been agog over the release of some “exposé” video of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s sensitivity training. Needless to say, the "fair and balanced" network doesn't bother to go into the history of racism and discrimination at the USDA that led to a major class action civil rights case and settlement. On Fox & Friends Weekend, Tucker Carlson presented the training as left-wing brainwashing that violates the civil rights of white people.

In 2010, the Washington Post reported:

The USDA's relationship with minorities has been fraught for decades. Nearly eight years ago, black farmers took over a regional office in Brownsville, Tenn., to protest the agency's pace in processing their loan applications. Under the Bush administration, the agriculture secretary appointed a civil rights director, a practice that continues in the Obama era.

Plus, there was the whole Shirley Sherrod thing.

But you’d never know any of that from watching Carlson and his guest, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, “the group that exposed this tape.” It’s also the group that seems to believe no excuse is too flimsy to suggest that President Obama should be impeached.

CARLSON: The theme that underlies this whole video is that white men are bad. How is that a federal contractor gets to make a racist case like this and take federal money and no one says anything about it?

…If you swapped out ‘white males’ for any other group in American society and you held a seminar like this at a federal agency, you’d have the Justice Department on you in about 20 minutes, don’t you think?

Naturally, Fitton thought so. But, as head of Judicial Watch, he had a broader mission: to make this about the Obama administration. “This seminar is full of racial hostility,” he said. “It goes on throughout the government. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is one component of one agency in the federal government. …This is standard operating procedure for the diversity cult that is infecting our government, major corporations.”

But Carlson, feigning bewilderment, “just wondered” why the government is doing this (without bothering to lift a finger to find out) before going on to suggest that the whole point is to make race relations worse:

I thought the whole idea of electing President Obama was that America could move past this kind of divisive talk, that we would rise above our history and yet we’re wallowing in the worst parts of it here. Why?

…If you’re a participant in one of these seminars and you spend all day hearing about how white men are bad, wouldn’t at the end you feel a little hostility toward white men? Is there any surprise that our race relations are still bad?

Fitton said, ”They highlight the differences between people as opposed to the things that unite us.”

That’s completely wrong, of course. The obvious point of the training, as seen in the clip aired in this segment, is to get people, including the white majority, to understand other perspectives and broaden their own – which can lead to unity. It speaks volumes that this would be poison to the ears of Carlson and Fitton.

Yet, as is the genius of Fox News, Fitton and Carlson didn't just argue against the training. They used it to play the racial/governmental victims in order to advance their own hostile, divisive agenda: painting the (Obama-headed) federal government as some kind of stealth Affirmative Action juggernaut riding roughshod over white people and their money.

Fitton made that point explicitly at the end: I think these types of programs lead to increased disputes about racial discrimination and hostility that are really baseless. …It’s a major problem in our federal government. …This is a lot of what goes on in Washington, in terms of everyday government and what bureaucrats do each and every day. And we need to talk about it more.

Thanks to Fox News, it's almost certain he'll have plenty of opportunity to do so.

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