Fox & Friends Brings Its Signature Stupidity to the Topic of White Privilege

Today, the latest episode of David Letterman’s Netflix Show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman dropped, and it features an in-depth interview with Jay-Z about a number of topics, from his relationship with Beyoncé to Donald Trump to his mother coming out as a lesbian. Because we live in a normal world, Fox & Friends used this to discuss how Jay-Z is propaganda and white privilege doesn’t exist because Barack Obama was president.

That’s right, it’s Friday and Fox & Friends is feeling frisky! At one point in the Letterman interview, Jay-Z refers to President Donald Trump bringing out an “ugly side of America that we wanted to believe was gone” and discusses the need to “to talk about the n-word” and “why white men are so privileged in this country.” F&F hosts Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt took that and really ran with it, painting Jay-Z as the left’s poster boy and a symbol of the failure of identity politics.

Doocy started off by wondering if Jay-Z was really the right person to talk about privilege because he’s very rich. He then brought on someone named Christopher Harris, who started something called Unhyphenated America to talk about why Jay-Z was a political distraction concocted by Democrats. Some things Harris said:

• “The left is actually promoting him because he’s a shiny object to distract people.”
• “‘FOCUS’ is an acronym for Follow One Course Until Successful.”
• “Their ultimate goal is to continue to push identity politics and they know that by using a familiar face, someone like Mr. Carter, to distract people kind of like a hypnotist uses a spinning wheel or something like that to get your attention off other things, that’s all they’re simply doing with him.”

Earhardt then jumped in, asking:

“Because Jay-Z’s complaining about white privilege, but we had a black president for eight years. Did he do a good job?”

There it is. Literally the “my best friend is black” of political discourse: racism is over because there was a single black man at the head of the extremely white U.S. government for 3.6% of the history of American presidents. Interestingly enough, Harris himself deftly avoided answering the question, but only by making a very strange point about how people protested when Booker T. Washington became the first black man to visit the White House but no one is outraged that Obama and Jay-Z are probably friends. Amazing.

The real moral of this story: maybe Netflix should stick to dropping all the episodes at once.