On Fox News' "The Faulkner Focus," host Harris Faulkner ran a segment discussing fringe candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's ridiculous call to raise the voting age to 25.
The Republican Party lost the youth vote in the 2022 midterms by almost 30 points.
So now you know why they are calling to raise the voting age.
Faulkner was very enthusiastic about the "ambitious" plan.
"Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced an ambitious constitutional amendment that he'd like to see," Faulkner said. "It would raise the US voting age from 18 to 25, and under his plan, 18-year-olds could vote if they either serve for six months in the military or as a first responder."
You can always count on Fox News to amplify any far-right fringe idea put forth that makes it harder for certain Americans to vote.
"They could also pass the US citizenship test. That would be one of the qualifications, too," Faulkner said. "Ramaswamy made the case for it just last night. Watch."
Fox News was very eager to show a video clip of Ramaswamy spouting his nonsense.
Fox News guest Mark Theissen was very angry that some Democrats described called this plan "Jim Crow lite."
Jim Crow laws purged the voter rolls of hundreds of thousands of voters for decades. Theissen and Faulkner should read this piece by Ari Berman for a refresher course.
Theissen said Ramaswamy's plan had no chance to pass unless you raise the military age to 25, but agreed he was onto something.
But his critique of the problem is right, which is that, you know, there was a Wall Street Journal poll the other day that showed that the importance of patriotism has declined dramatically since 1998.
In 1998 70% of Americans said patriotism was very important to them.
Today it's 34%, and among young people, it's 23%.
That is a crisis for our country.
But the problem the answer is not to raise the voting age.
The answer is to stop the woke indoctrination in our schools and start teaching kids to be patriots and good upstanding citizens.
Jackpot!
Yes, if Republicans could raise the voting age, they'd be all in. But the main reason why Fox News ran this segment was to attack public education and educators as indoctrinating school kids to hate America.
Scapegoating educators for the GOP's problems with the youth vote is Fox News' main concern. Republicans in Congress agree.
It couldn't be the rise of Christian nationalism that has overtaken the GOP. It couldn't be the hate being spewed at the LGBTQ community. It couldn't be the rise of white supremacy and antisemitism in the GOP. It couldn't be the far-right wackos being touted by the GOP.
It's the teaching of actual US history that's the problem.
Gotcha.
Go to hell.
