The hosts of Fox & Friends are stupid, but surely not this stupid. They must know by now that all the rhetoric about hordes of brown criminals streaming across the border is sending dangerous currents through the country. The El Paso shooter explicitly invoked the language of a "Hispanic invasion of Texas" in his manifesto, a screed that echoed what you might hear from the president or on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show on any given day. Donald Trump's campaign "has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word 'invasion'" since January, according to The New York Times. The connection is so clear that it leaves us with the strong possibility that people using this rhetoric know exactly what they're doing and they do not care.

After all, Brian Kilmeade sat on the Dunce Couch this morning and went on a blithering rant about how it's totally cool to continually suggest a shadowy army of foreigners is invading the country. This is the guy who defended the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance policy" that inevitably led to family separation by suggesting the kids (some of whom were toddlers) torn from their parents and put in cages would otherwise "turn into MS-13" in his neighborhood. So, the bar isn't particularly high. But three days after a guy drove thousands of miles to kill 22 people and maim 29 more in response to a supposed "invasion," this is pretty fucking gross.

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Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade is defending using the term "invasion" to describe migrants crossing the southern border this morning: "If you use the term 'invasion,' it's not anti-Hispanic, it's a fact." pic.twitter.com/dOsgYVgrV2 — Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 6, 2019

"If you use the term 'this is an invasion,' that's not anti-Hispanic," Kilmeade said. "It's a fact."

The gunman drove down to El Paso to fight the "invasion." ABC News is reporting today that he allegedly "cased" the Walmart beforehand "looking for Mexicans to kill." Again, this is not complicated. Kilmeade is either aware of what he's doing, and fine with it, or he's too stupid to grasp it. Considering he has the ear of the United States president on a daily basis, it's hard to know what's preferable.

But beyond that, is it a "fact"? Are these migrants storming the border with weapons, looking to conquer and subdue the people or the government of the United States of America? No. Many are trying to declare themselves for asylum—as is their right under domestic and international law—on the basis that they're fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty in countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Many are women and children. The vast majority are not engaging in violence and pose no physical threat to Border Patrol agents or anyone else. Many are crossing illegally because the Trump administration has shut down or created extreme bottlenecks at legal ports of entry—a process known as "metering"—leaving people to try to survive in extreme and dangerous conditions on the other side of the border for days or weeks at a time.

All that doesn't mean we have to let everyone in, or even a majority, though that would be far closer to constituting American Exceptionalism. But it's not an invasion. They just want safe harbor. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore," and all that. When you call something an invasion, it implies there's a violent force coming to take something from you. It implies you need to defend yourself. People on the fringes of our society will take this literally, as we've already seen—and not just in El Paso. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter also talked up an "invasion," blaming a Jewish group that helps refugees for "bring[ing] invaders that kill our people."

On balance, you've got to think these folks know what they're doing and don't care. After all, Fox & Friends also played host to Kellyanne Conway this morning as she tried to spin the Dayton shooting into a false equivalence with the one in El Paso.

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Kellyanne Conway says she's "hopping mad" b/c she sees little coverage of Dayton shooter being "supportive of Warren, Sanders."



The difference, of course, is that Trump pushed dehumanizing conspiracy theories that motivated El Paso shooter. Warren/Sanders have done no such thing pic.twitter.com/eU8R0gmbw2 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 6, 2019

There is no evidence that the Dayton shooter's motive was political. None. That he had political views does not prove those political views informed the shooting, particularly because Elizabeth Warren has not been pushing conspiracy theories about people who go to bars in Midwestern towns. On the other hand, the president has pushed the exact conspiracy theory that the El Paso shooter cited in his manifesto.

This has not stopped Conway from gleefully tweeting bits of a CNN story on the Dayton shooter all morning with "no comment." Never mind that, in the vast majority of cases, she'd dismiss the story as Fake News based solely on the source. Never mind that, considering he kept a "rape list" in high school and shot his own sister to death, it seems just as likely he is part of the established trend of mass shooters with histories of misogyny and domestic violence. And never mind that she hasn't mentioned this passage in the same story:

Conway is one of the most astonishingly dishonest and shameless operators in an era defined by them. She will work overtime to muddy the waters around these two shootings in the hopes that people will lose sight of the direct connection between El Paso and the president's rhetoric about immigrants. Kilmeade and the Fox & Friends troupe will likely do the same. There is no way they are under any illusion anymore about what is happening and the role of the president and his rhetoric in it. They have accepted this as the price of doing business in an era when white nationalism and xenophobic hate are in the ascendance on their end of the political spectrum. Whatever it takes to stay on-air, or in 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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