Last week on Fox News, Harris Faulkner, easily the network’s most fake and disingenuous anchor, did that thing she does where she lowers her voice and gets all serious, like she is really disappointed but not surprised and loves you but does not like you. She was doing her routine where she pretends to be appalled.
Faulkner may be Fox News’s most obvious liar. Her tells, they are legion.
But this thing she said last week about Pakistan expelling 1.7 million Palestinians was also just HEEEEENGGGGGH? Affecting high dudgeon, with fake emotion in her voice as she pretended to have a soul, Faulkner said that if Rep. Rashida Tlaib is “really broken-hearted about Palestinians” — sorry, is that in question, regardless of how you feel about Tlaib’s public statements? — then “WHAT IN THE WORLD IS SHE SAYING TO THE LEADERS OF PAKISTAN?”
Wait, what?
“They have just expelled 1.7 million Palestinians,” said Faulkner, whose brain apparently did not intervene to question if that even made sense. (Here is a real news story about what Pakistan is doing. The people being expelled are undocumented Afghan refugees, and potentially Rohingya from Myanmar and Uyghurs from China, all seeking asylum. It’s rather unrelated to the Israel/Hamas war, but we reckon 100 percent of Fox News viewers have zero concept of where any of these countries are.)
“With nowhere to go!” said Faulkner about the imaginary Palestinians being expelled by Pakistan.
“The scarf doesn’t tell me how [Tlaib] feels,” Faulkner added, because she’s an Islamophobic bigot. “Her actions do. Call Pakistan. Get a home for your people. Call Jordan. Call Saudi Arabia, call Iran, all the people with the money and the power!” As if the Israeli/Palestinian crisis and this war could be solved if Rashida Tlaib just opened the Middle Eastern Yellow Pages and looked up places to ship millions of Palestinians. Maybe she could rent a couple million U-Hauls.
Immediately Twitter started making fun of Faulkner’s latest bullshit. (She actually said this crap twice last week.) Yet it took her until yesterday (Thursday), more than a week later, to make a retraction.
“I was wrong when I expressly said that Pakistan had expelled Palestinians. The government there is, in fact, kicking out 1.7 million people and what they’re called a ‘tiered repatriation.’ Pakistan says those people are there illegally — they’re illegal immigrants. Now, here’s who they are: mostly Afghans who have tried to flee the Taliban. Some Uyghurs, ethnic Muslims who are facing genocide in China. And some from Iran and other places. So, I want to set the record straight — it is a mixed group of people, mostly Afghans being expelled.”
Oh yeah? What gave it away for Ms. Faulkner? Did she look at a map? Did somebody ask her how all those 1.7 million Palestinians had traversed the Middle East, Iran and Afghanistan to arrive in Pakistan? Did they ask her maybe when this happened, and precisely how?
We guess this is just one of those Fox News lies/factual errors so brazenly dumbass that it actually merited a correction, albeit eight or 10 days later, once the attacks on Rashida Tlaib weren’t so fresh and most of the viewers probably had forgotten what Fox was spewing down their gullets last week.
It does bring to mind the end of the SNL “Fox & Friends” sketches, where the screen scrolls at breakneck pace through all the errors and corrections that really should be made at the end of every real Fox News program.
Corrections like “Ukraine was not Frasier’s brother on the show ‘Frasier,’” and “Malaysia is not the female version of Asia,” and “You cannot abbreviate the Supreme Court to spell SCROTUM.”
And “‘Vaping’ is not having sex with a vacuum cleaner.”
And “The periodic table is not about ‘lady stuff.’”
Harris Faulkner’s thing isn’t near as funny, but it’s dumb enough.
[Mediaite / video via Justin Baragona]
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Call Pakistan! Tell them it's Karen on the phone and I demand to speak to the manager of Pakistan!
So, wait, Pakistan is supposed to keep their illegal immigrants? This from the same network that walk right up to the line of advocating shooting people approaching our southern border?