
Jesse Watters, host of Fox News' The Five, saw fit to use Sunday night's mass shooting as an opportunity to promote the conservatives' culture war on black athletes protesting racial injustice.

As is customary, the Republican response to one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern American history is to talk about anything except guns.

None of them want a conversation on how one man took 18 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition into the Mandalay Bay Casino in Las Vegas and killed over 50 people and injured more than 500 at a country music festival across the street from the window of his hotel room.

With one voice, GOP officials claimed it was inappropriately political to talk policy solutions, despite the fact that the survivors want to talk about exactly that, and despite the fact that it is apparently not inappropriate for right-wingers to tell the families of victims that the deaths are just “the price of freedom.”


Fox News even took the all too predictable step of attacking Hillary Clinton for mentioning gun safety.

On Fox, The Five co-host Jesse Watters, however, took it one repugnant step further.

In his view, the Las Vegas shooting is the perfect time to talk about ... kneeling NFL players:

Right now, friends helped friends to safety, people helped strangers to safety, and law enforcement was running towards the bullets. So all those kneelers in the NFL out there, they need to recognize when they are kneeling during the anthem — they are kneeling, and we are supposed to be honoring law enforcement, law enforcement that is trying to save lives, not take lives. So, I hope next Sunday when the anthem is played, people do kneel and out of respect to law enforcement.

Last week, Republicans claimed that kneeling during the national anthem was about disrespecting the troops. Now, according to Watters, it is disrespecting Las Vegas first responders.

Apparently, to conservatives, it is everything except what it actually is — a protest of police brutality and racial profiling.

In short, Fox News is trying to obfuscate and fend off an honest discussion of gun violence by bringing up NFL players protesting police violence, and then obfuscating that, too.

The right seems wholly intolerant of any discussion of hard issues when it comes to lives being lost — and incapable of engaging those issues honestly.