Eventually, Fox News had to devolve into self-parody. The network has peddled white resentment for years. It has conjured up demons from the dark imagination of Roger Ailes: Other People who are invading from the outside or mooching off of Good, Hardworking Americans within. They were demons for White America to fear, and to hate, and eventually, to lash out against. This was always going to end in two ways: the empowerment of the most extreme believers in this mass delusion, and in Fox—or at least the dumbest people they put on air—drowning in their own pool of toxic nonsense.

Enter Jesse Watters, Bill O'Reilly's enduring gift to American political discourse. On Sunday, the day after hundreds of white supremacists stormed an American city and attacked people in the street, and after one white supremacist allegedly murdered one person and injured many more in what even Attorney General Jeff Sessions is calling an act of domestic terrorism, Watters had a clear message for his viewers: America isn't racist. Thank you. Now here's some racism.

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Notice how Ron Burgundy here has no goddamned clue what the next segment of the show is when the teleprompter stops functioning for a moment. He'll just read whatever comes in front of him. How else can you explain what you just saw? What sentient primate, whom Fox News has deemed worthy of disseminating information to the public, would not see anything wrong here—if not with the blatant racism, which we can apparently no longer even hope for, then with the fact that they are directly contradicting themselves in a matter of moments?

"America is not a racist nation, it's time we stop acting like it is."

Then, after a sweaty pause where he grasped for the teleprompter:

"Are Maxine Waters and Susan Rice siding with a North Korean dictator? We'll debate it next. And later: guys with guns threatening President Trump over food stamps."

The two people he accused of siding with a foreign tyrant threatening the United States with nuclear destruction are women of color. (Never mind that our own Dear Leader, Watters' beloved President Trump, loves every other dictator he hears about.) The "guys with guns" looking for "food stamps" were people of color. These stories were presented not just as equivalent to the white supremacist terrorism in Charlottesville, but as more important—as real. This is the real news, the real threat to our nation. Not the guy who killed someone on Saturday because she opposed his white power rally. Not those who marched brandishing torches, yelling Nazi slogans, and who physically attacked people in a public park Friday night. The enemies are a congresswoman, a former White House national security adviser, and a group of men in an Internet video who, it's worth reiterating, did not harm anyone as far as we know.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss Watters as an outlier, which is how he himself dismissed the Charlottesville crowd. Watters does, after all, have an appalling record that culminated with his astonishingly racist "Chinatown" segment last October, which aired on his mentor Bill O'Reilly's show before O'Reilly was run out of town amid a deluge of sexual harassment allegations made against him.

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But this is not just Watters. It is the malignant metastasizing of a conservative ideology that maintains that being called a racist is worse than doing and saying racist things—or, you know, being discriminated against. It is the product of the mass delusion that white people are oppressed in a country where 80 percent of the national legislature is white, and where white households hold 13 times more wealth than their black counterparts. It is the inevitable result of a fantastical worldview that holds white people are discriminated against when applying for college, a view that has now reached the highest levels of this administration and its Justice Department.

We've learned not to expect much from Watters, a bona fide public moron, but he is just a low priest of this new creed. The bishops and cardinals are all over the place—including the White House.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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