Fox News: New National Monument Must Be Biden Bribery Smoking Gun, Because UKRAINIUM

This much stupid should be painful.

Base photo by Nate Loper, Creative Commons License 2.0

Nobody has ever accused Fox News of being smart, intellectually rigorous, logical, or even true. But creative? Fox News can definitely do creative, or at least it can play a game of News Mad Libs (to make libs mad) by trying to connect literally anything in the known universe to Hunter Biden. This week, we got a spectacular example of the genre as two Fox anchors tried their best to suggest that Joe Biden had only the most nefarious, corrupt motives in mind when he declared a new national monument that will protect 1,562 square miles north and south of Grand Canyon National Park.

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Here's Joe Biden Making The Grand Canyon Even Grander

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Never mind that Native American tribes and environmentalists have been working for literally decades to protect the sensitive high desert surrounding the Grand Canyon. In Foxworld, history is just as much a fiction as logic or evidence.

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According to first Jesse Watters and then Laura Ingraham, Biden actually created the new Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument so he could block all uranium mining in the area,and thereby guarantee that Russia and Kazakhstan can completely control world uranium markets! There goes Traitor Joe, betraying America to pay back the huge bribes everyone knows Ukrainian and Kazakh interests gave Hunter, who passed millions along to Joe himself!

We’ll get to the videos of Watters and Ingraham trying to apply Occam’s Duct Tape to all this, but first, let’s just make clear why it’s all nonsense. Happily, that’s really easy. For starters, the area being preserved by the new monument accounts for just 1.3 percent of the US’s known uranium resources. If Joe Biden were trying to choke off access to uranium mining in the USA (while cackling madly at his own evil genius), declaring this national monument would be a huge failure.

For another, while the US does import most of its uranium, Russia and Kazakhstan aren’t the only sources — we get as much of those imports from Canada and Australia (15 and 14 percent of the annual total, respectively) as from Russia (14 percent). An international agreement limits Russian uranium imports to 15 percent of the total through 2040. But the main reason we import uranium is that it’s just plain cheaper than digging the nasty stuff up here. With only about one percent of world uranium supplies, we’re just not competitive on world markets, and US companies that want to mine uranium demand federal subsidies to even make a go of it.

With that in mind, let’s have a good laugh at this recording from Tuesday of Jesse Waters trying to blame Joe Biden for coups in Africa and Crom knows what else, all so he can get rich by manipulating world uranium markets for Hunter. Remember, however many times he says the monument closes off “millions of acres” to mining, the more important number is 1.3 percent — the real portion of US reserves taken off the table. Also, haw haw senile Joe Biden said “nine” wonders of the world, because he’s feeble and senile but also ruthlessly manipulating everything.

Watters grimly notes that “as always is the case with Joe Biden, you have to follow the money,” and asks how it makes any sense at all that Joe Biden, supposed foe of climate change, would prevent mining of lovely carbon-free uranium, hmm? (Because mining has poisoned Native American lands, including waterways that reach the Grand Canyon. Really. It’s right in the proclamation.)

We won’t bother transcribing the whole mess; Media Matters has most of it. But look at all these very important questions Watters is Just Asking, about Biden’s sneaky underhanded corruption for which there’s no actual proof:

So, instead of mining uranium here at home — remember made in America Joe, union jobs Joe, no emissions Joe — why wouldn't he starve this dirty Russian company of cash? It’s like Keystone all over again. His entire energy policy favors Russia and China, why is that? 

Well, does it have anything to do with the three and a half million dollars the Russians paid the Bidens? Or the Porsche Panamera that the Kazakhstanis gifted Hunter? Does it have anything to do with the three and a half carat diamond that the Chinese slipped the first son? There’s something very mysterious going on in the international uranium market that involves the Bidens and the Russians.

There’s not really anything to debunk there, beyond the simple fact that Biden couldn’t hand world uranium markets to Russia if he wanted to. The US simply doesn’t have enough uranium to do that in the first place, and certainly not by taking 1.3 percent of the potential US resource out of the market.

Wednesday, it was Laura Ingraham’s turn to say “one MILLLLION acres” and to sputter uselessly about how America will be devastated by Joe Biden’s endless uranium corruption. Lookie how Joe and Hunter are holding money covered with Burisma China Ukraine Kazakh honey, too! Graphic design is Fox’s passion.

As long as Joe Biden is in power, a cloud of corruption hangs over this White House. Take his announcement yesterday, brazenly crippling America’s uranium mining capacity by making one million acres permanently off-limits for any type of mining. […]

And what country — when you think about how this is all being cordoned off, can't do any mining here — is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Joe’s courageous decision? None other than Kazakhstan, home of one of Biden’s preferred oligarchs and one of his son’s sugar daddies. It’s now guaranteed to remain the dominant supplier of uranium to the United States with its 35 percent share.

Well, it all could really make perfect sense, couldn’t it? One of the most crooked families in American politics is responsible for making America permanently dependent on one of the most crooked countries on the face of the planet. 

As far as we can tell, this nonsense isn’t getting much traction; apart from the usual dribble of tweets that repeat any Fox News talking points, we haven’t seen wingnuts getting too upset about it. As with any Fox garbage, though, there’s always the potential that it will set off some crazies with guns, so we hope the folks at the new monument’s eventual visitor’s center will stay safe.

[Media Matters / White House / Media Matters / AP / Grand Canyon Trust. Base photo by Nate Loper, Creative Commons License 2.0]

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