I can no longer in good conscience appear on Fox News as one of its regular liberal talking heads, especially after the recent acts of right-wing violence.

This is not a decision I’ve come to lightly. For a long time, I believed it was important for Fox’s audience to hear somebody willing to push back against the insanity regularly pushed on the network. But now I believe the only thing to do is walk away and call out the network for what it is: a cancerous propaganda organ doing lasting damage to our country.

My change in thinking began after witnessing how the network handled my on-air interaction with former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski. He infamously mocked the plight of a ten-year-old girl with Down Syndrome forcibly separated from her mother at the border. Our exchange went viral immediately and played on a loop on CNN, MSNBC, late night talk shows and social media feeds across the country. But on Fox News there was a virtual blackout of the incident except for a very sympathetic segment the next day where Lewandowski was given the opportunity to clarify himself.

Most people saw Lewandowski’s remarks as succinctly capturing the inhumanity of the Trump Administration’s family separation policy. Fox News saw them as inconvenient.

This is ultimately the problem. Fox’s producers and on-air talent don’t view themselves simply as part of a conservative-leaning news outlet that responsibly approaches policy discussions about tax cuts and health care from a right-of-center perspective. They see themselves as political operatives whose job it is to help the Republican Party acquire and keep power.

The pursuit of this goal can sometimes be eyeroll-inducing — like when they praise Trump for meeting with dictators after slamming Obama for expressing a desire to do the exact same. But it can also be downright dangerous when they actively try to gin up Trump’s base with coded and, many times, explicit racial language.

We saw this before and after the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. In their zeal to attack Democrats ahead of the midterms, many on Fox News fed viewers a daily diet of commentary with anti-Semitic undertones about ultra rich Jewish financiers manipulating the political system to undermine the will of the American people. According to some of the network’s hosts and guests, Jewish philanthropist George Soros is to blame for everything from a migrant caravan in Central America to anti-Trump protesters to secretly controlling the State Department.

Was Fox New responsible for Robert Bowers committing the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in US history? I don’t know. We’ve seen these types of anti-Semitic attacks many times before. During much of the 20th century the Rothschild family was similarly accused of wacky things like controlling the weather and causing financial crises. However, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories by a major cable news network to millions of people is unprecedented.

And the chickens may now be coming home to roost.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised to learn that Cesar Sayoc posted Fox News clips on social media before sending 13 bombs to prominent critics of Donald Trump. Again, I don’t know if the network is directly responsible for his actions. But I do know that most of my nearly 18 months on Fox News was spent trying to debunk crazy conspiracy theories and outright lies being pushed about nearly every one of the individuals that survived an assassination attempt last week.

I also know that Sayoc was paranoid about immigration and that in my experience, Fox News showed itself to be verifiable snake pit of racist anti-immigrant nonsense pushed for the sole purpose of scaring voters into keeping Republicans in power. While Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham’s thinly veiled rants against demographic changes have been dismissed as opinion programming, the same can’t be said for the so-called hard news daytime shows obsessing over stories that misleadingly cherrypick criminal activity by Latinos to justify the hardline immigration policies of the GOP.

Even casual Fox News viewers could be forgiven for falsely believing that there’s an epidemic of criminal immigrant Latino gang members streaming across the southern border to rape and murder their children. Would it really be that far of a leap for a deranged individual like Sayoc to view these racist lies and believe he’d be a hero for ridding the world of the Democratic leaders Fox blames for the “open borders” allowing in these invaders?

The question liberal commentators going on Fox News need to ask themselves is how to combat this kind of harmful garbage. And the conclusion I’ve come to after 18 months on the network is that it’s just not possible.

It doesn’t matter if you win a debate about whether George Soros is funding a caravan of criminal Latinos. The debate itself is designed to spread the anti-Semitic and racist anti-immigrant propaganda.

It doesn’t matter if you successfully debunk the false premise of a segment on rising immigrant crime by noting that immigrants have lower levels of crime than native born Americans. By participating in the debate, Fox already got what it wanted by showing its viewers another Democrat seeming to side with “criminal aliens”.

And it doesn’t matter if you get a senior Republican official like Cory Lewandowski to expose the Trump administration’s heartless policies by literally mocking a disabled child. The network will just bury it.

The only thing accomplished is the legitimization of a propaganda outlet that masquerades as news in order to do the racist dirty work of the Trump Administration and its obeisant Republican Party. That dirty work has political consequences for our democracy — and it also may have the kind of violent consequences we saw last week.

I want no part of it.

Zac Petkanas is a Democratic strategist and President of Petkanas Strategies LLC. He previously served as a senior aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee and communications director to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.



Update: Fox News issued a statement to Mediaite: “We encourage all voices to come on Fox News to help us inform and exchange ideas with our vast and engaged audience.”

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.