Fox News’ Jesse Watters is the intellectual equivalent of playing a game of Scrabble with a single upside-down tile. He’s the somehow lower-brow alternative to people who think Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity talk with too many word-sounding words. On Thursday, Watters went on his show to attack homeless Americans. Who better to attack than people who historically are given no voice by media outlets like Fox News?
Watters began his sad rant saying, “Here at Primetime, when we see a problem in America, we address it. We try to fix it. And being that our studio is here in New York, we're witnessing a major problem, something all cities are dealing with: the deranged and dangerous homeless. They used to be a nuisance but now it's starting to freak people out. West Coast cities are so bad, you don't even know where you're in Fallujah or L.A. In Portland, the homeless have become an invasive species.” You read that right: “Invasive species.”
Watters’ entire career is based on having so little shame and sense of self-worth he is willing to dive to the depths of the lowest common denominators in bigotry and inhumanity. He packages this all up in a few hours of heavy-duty eyebrow plucking and manscaping. The entire Fox News production on Watters’ homeless segment came with clip after clip of homeless people in various stages of mental health crises in order to really dehumanize and trivialize the problem. Then came the straight-up lying and final solution ideas Watters and his guest have for the “homeless problem.”
RELATED STORY: Did the mayor of this dying California city just spark a universal basic income trend?
Campaign Action
First, the short clip of Watters calling human beings without homes an “invasive species.”
YouTube Video
Watters then moves on to Denver, Colorado, where officials are trying out one of the many Universal Basic Income experiments that have been successful across the civilized world. The basic idea is that you choose a few people and give them a solid stipend of money with no requirements on how they use that money. So far, in every case, Universal Basic Income projects have shown solid returns in helping people dealing with clear economic hardships that range from being unhoused to simply being unable to save any money juggling bills.
One of the things that prompted this specific round of Universal Basic Income means testing in Denver was the fact that since the pandemic started, the number of homeless women in the city has tripled. The initial contract, which will include 520 households receiving $12,000 for a year, also includes a contract with the city for “140 women and transgender and gender-nonconforming people.” It is this slice of the project that both Watters and his guest lie about and magnify as the futility of giving people money to help them through economic hardships.
After Watters’ opening invective, he brings on the classic right-wing-o-sphere pseudo-tell-it-like-it-is Glenn Beaton. Beaton is a syndicated columnist who writes dreck, dressed up as good old the way things used to be wisdom. He’s the kind of guy who will write up an opinion piece about how everybody in Charlottesville behaved badly but that antifa was basically the same as the neo-Nazis, and Trump’s handling of the affair wasn’t great but he wasn’t a problem. Scintillating analysis. If that isn’t heady enough for you, he also uses his broad brush to write opinion pieces that argue that since everybody is racist according to the internet, nobody is actually racist.
Watters is bringing Beaton on because Beaton is an Aspen resident who is writing a book about how liberals are ruining Aspen. Beaton, entering in on the ground floor of the Fox News garbage media circuit, is here to reiterate the false dilemma that Denver politicians and liberal groups are throwing money at a problem when they should be not throwing the money anywhere and instead imprison the problem. His angle is to add a pretend expertise to the misinformation Watters is spewing about Denver’s Basic Income Project—which you can read more about here.
But listen, Beaton isn’t a monster! “I don't think people ought to starve or freeze to death in America. We're too rich a society to afford that. And if somebody is starving to death or freezing to death in the gutter, I'll help them right there. But, giving them money isn't going to help them. They're going to misuse the money.” Got that? Unlike the richest of the rich who know that getting millions and billion-dollar handouts should be used on stock buybacks to inflate your business’ financial worth, and therefore your own, these unhoused individuals are not as smart and responsible as people like Jesse Watters.
What is the solution, you ask? “You know, in the old days we didn't have this problem and we weren't nearly as rich as we are now in the old days. In the old days, we had mental institutions. We had prisons. We had family support groups. We had churches. Well, the left doesn't want any part of any of that, because it threatens their governmental control. They want all of this to be owned by government.” I mean, state mental institutions and state prisons are … the government. But whatever, facts and things hurts my brain!
Can Watters somehow make this more offensive? Oh, yes. Yes he can. “You're right. It was more civilized when we banished them to asylums and put them in strait jackets and gave them the help and the drugs that they needed in an institution. This is not civilized, to let people sling poop.”
Charles Dickens wrote about how uncivilized that approach was in 1837, 1838, 1839, 1843, 1854, 1855, 1857, 1859. It is breathtaking how purposefully obtuse the entire exercise here is. Incarceration rates have only gone up over the last many decades. The real variables in our society are increasing income inequality, decreasing affordable housing, and stagnant wage growth.
But as Beaton and Watters get to the end of their segment, they further reveal what they really mean. As Watters tries to get out of the interview to move onto the next grotesque take he has on the news of the day, he and Beaton chatter back and forth about how giving any money, “you could give them a million dollars and they wouldn’t buy a house with it,” says Beaton with a smile. Why? “You know, it’s a mistake to assume these people are like us,” Beaton finishes.
That’s it. “These people” aren’t like the people Jesse Watters and Glenn Beaton consider themselves to be. They’re “losers,” and “addicts,” and “want to live on the streets.” And somehow these folks have always been around but there are more now, but it’s only different because, according to these two men, we used to brutalize them in dungeons and that was just peachy.
Here is the actual criteria for the Denver program:
And here are two men selling you pillows and gold and fear.
YouTube Video
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Watters began his sad rant saying, “Here at Primetime, when we see a problem in America, we address it. We try to fix it. And being that our studio is here in New York, we're witnessing a major problem, something all cities are dealing with: the deranged and dangerous homeless. They used to be a nuisance but now it's starting to freak people out. West Coast cities are so bad, you don't even know where you're in Fallujah or L.A. In Portland, the homeless have become an invasive species.” You read that right: “Invasive species.”
Watters’ entire career is based on having so little shame and sense of self-worth he is willing to dive to the depths of the lowest common denominators in bigotry and inhumanity. He packages this all up in a few hours of heavy-duty eyebrow plucking and manscaping. The entire Fox News production on Watters’ homeless segment came with clip after clip of homeless people in various stages of mental health crises in order to really dehumanize and trivialize the problem. Then came the straight-up lying and final solution ideas Watters and his guest have for the “homeless problem.”
RELATED STORY: Did the mayor of this dying California city just spark a universal basic income trend?
Campaign Action
First, the short clip of Watters calling human beings without homes an “invasive species.”
YouTube Video
Watters then moves on to Denver, Colorado, where officials are trying out one of the many Universal Basic Income experiments that have been successful across the civilized world. The basic idea is that you choose a few people and give them a solid stipend of money with no requirements on how they use that money. So far, in every case, Universal Basic Income projects have shown solid returns in helping people dealing with clear economic hardships that range from being unhoused to simply being unable to save any money juggling bills.
One of the things that prompted this specific round of Universal Basic Income means testing in Denver was the fact that since the pandemic started, the number of homeless women in the city has tripled. The initial contract, which will include 520 households receiving $12,000 for a year, also includes a contract with the city for “140 women and transgender and gender-nonconforming people.” It is this slice of the project that both Watters and his guest lie about and magnify as the futility of giving people money to help them through economic hardships.
After Watters’ opening invective, he brings on the classic right-wing-o-sphere pseudo-tell-it-like-it-is Glenn Beaton. Beaton is a syndicated columnist who writes dreck, dressed up as good old the way things used to be wisdom. He’s the kind of guy who will write up an opinion piece about how everybody in Charlottesville behaved badly but that antifa was basically the same as the neo-Nazis, and Trump’s handling of the affair wasn’t great but he wasn’t a problem. Scintillating analysis. If that isn’t heady enough for you, he also uses his broad brush to write opinion pieces that argue that since everybody is racist according to the internet, nobody is actually racist.
Watters is bringing Beaton on because Beaton is an Aspen resident who is writing a book about how liberals are ruining Aspen. Beaton, entering in on the ground floor of the Fox News garbage media circuit, is here to reiterate the false dilemma that Denver politicians and liberal groups are throwing money at a problem when they should be not throwing the money anywhere and instead imprison the problem. His angle is to add a pretend expertise to the misinformation Watters is spewing about Denver’s Basic Income Project—which you can read more about here.
But listen, Beaton isn’t a monster! “I don't think people ought to starve or freeze to death in America. We're too rich a society to afford that. And if somebody is starving to death or freezing to death in the gutter, I'll help them right there. But, giving them money isn't going to help them. They're going to misuse the money.” Got that? Unlike the richest of the rich who know that getting millions and billion-dollar handouts should be used on stock buybacks to inflate your business’ financial worth, and therefore your own, these unhoused individuals are not as smart and responsible as people like Jesse Watters.
What is the solution, you ask? “You know, in the old days we didn't have this problem and we weren't nearly as rich as we are now in the old days. In the old days, we had mental institutions. We had prisons. We had family support groups. We had churches. Well, the left doesn't want any part of any of that, because it threatens their governmental control. They want all of this to be owned by government.” I mean, state mental institutions and state prisons are … the government. But whatever, facts and things hurts my brain!
Can Watters somehow make this more offensive? Oh, yes. Yes he can. “You're right. It was more civilized when we banished them to asylums and put them in strait jackets and gave them the help and the drugs that they needed in an institution. This is not civilized, to let people sling poop.”
Charles Dickens wrote about how uncivilized that approach was in 1837, 1838, 1839, 1843, 1854, 1855, 1857, 1859. It is breathtaking how purposefully obtuse the entire exercise here is. Incarceration rates have only gone up over the last many decades. The real variables in our society are increasing income inequality, decreasing affordable housing, and stagnant wage growth.
But as Beaton and Watters get to the end of their segment, they further reveal what they really mean. As Watters tries to get out of the interview to move onto the next grotesque take he has on the news of the day, he and Beaton chatter back and forth about how giving any money, “you could give them a million dollars and they wouldn’t buy a house with it,” says Beaton with a smile. Why? “You know, it’s a mistake to assume these people are like us,” Beaton finishes.
That’s it. “These people” aren’t like the people Jesse Watters and Glenn Beaton consider themselves to be. They’re “losers,” and “addicts,” and “want to live on the streets.” And somehow these folks have always been around but there are more now, but it’s only different because, according to these two men, we used to brutalize them in dungeons and that was just peachy.
Here is the actual criteria for the Denver program:
And here are two men selling you pillows and gold and fear.
YouTube Video
RELATED STORIES:
Racist Fox News host blames Chinese people for coronavirus, says, 'They eat raw bats and snakes'
FOX’s Jesse Watters tells fans to ‘ambush’ Fauci with a ‘kill shot’—Fauci calls for Watters’ firing