THE NEW ABNORMAL

Should Democrats Even Bother Going on Fox News?

In this week’s episode of The New Abnormal, Molly Jong-Fast discovers the reality of Fox News and how one teenager fought back against Matt Gaetz.

If you’ve surfed the internet over the course of the last few years, there’s no doubt you may have stumbled across at least one viral clip of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on Fox News.

The former mayor and Democratic primary candidate has become a regular on the conservative media outlet since 2019; his latest viral comments earlier this month saw him praised as one of the Democratic Party’s “most effective communicators” after defending his husband’s pointed tweet about people protesting justice Brett Kavanaugh at a Washington, D.C., restaurant to Fox News Sunday with Mike Emanuel.

For Buttigieg, going on Fox News is “a no-brainer,” Lis Smith, author of Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story and senior adviser for Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, told Molly Jong-Fast on this week’s episode of The New Abnormal.

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“On that campaign, going on Fox was an absolute no-brainer,” Smith explains. “First of all, there’s this idea that no Democrats watch Fox, which is completely, completely misguided. About a third of all Democrats get their news from Fox News. It’s the same across racial demographics: white Democrats, Latino Democrats, Black Democrats. And the Fox News audience, as we know, is monumentally larger than both CNN and MSNBC. You do reach a large number of Democrats.”

Smith said that when Buttigieg appeared on Fox News’ town hall in 2019, “there were 1.1 million viewers for the town hall, which was three or four times the audience that we had for any of his CNN or MSNBC town halls.

“He didn’t go on and spew Republican talking points. If anything, he gave really important counter-programming to the Fox News audience. And that’s why I believe Democrats should go on because while we know that some of their hosts might be acting in bad faith, a lot of their viewers aren’t, and that’s the only way that they get their news. And that’s the only way they’re ever gonna hear from Democrats.”

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Then, Olivia Julianna, 19-year-old activist and strategist for the youth-led nonprofit Gen Z for Change, reflects on her work as a fundraising powerhouse and her reaction to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)’s attempts to humiliate her after arguing that overweight and unattractive women don’t need to worry about getting pregnant or needing abortions.

“I was not surprised to see Matt Gaetz doing something very on-brand with what Matt Gaetz does, which is to be disgusting and a creep,” she says.

“My initial reaction was like, of all people, what room does Matt Gaetz have to talk about other people’s physical appearance?”

When Gaetz responded to her tweet by posting a photo of the teen, alluding to the fact she fit his description, she said: “I laughed because I knew that I was about to ruin this man’s day.”

She has since raised over $700,000 for abortion care.

“A lot of people think because we’re young that we are doe-eyed or naïve or ignorant, when the reality is I’m the leading political strategist for one of the largest youth-run nonprofits in the country. And we have very successfully fought back against Republican politicians in the past in events that have made national news several times.”

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Martha MercerEditor

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