Teaching the Public Not to Give a Fox

Jesse Watters’ segment on Fox News wasn’t reporting. It was verdict-writing, delivered with smug certainty and a side of the network’s signature bullshit.

The facts were already fixed. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, had been shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal immigration operation in Minneapolis. She was already dead.

By the time her name hit the airwaves, the violence had already occurred. What followed wasn’t reporting. It was moral grading. Coverage that leads with identity markers and loaded language doesn’t merely inform. It conditions people to shrug and move the hell on.

What remained was narrative control, deciding how much her life should weigh and whether her death should register as tragedy or dissolve into background noise.

Watters didn’t lead with circumstances, policy, or accountability. He led with dismissal, then distance, then othering, a sequence Fox viewers have been trained to recognize and absorb without even noticing it anymore. That’s the trick. Make it feel normal. Make it feel boring.

He dismissed her as a “self-proclaimed poet.”
He emphasized her pronouns.
He foregrounded her sexuality.

That order matters. By the time the killing enters the frame, empathy has already been rationed.

This isn’t new. It’s a long-running pattern. For years, Fox and its hosts have practiced this kind of narrative sorting to signal which victims are worth grief and which ones should feel expendable. Over time, it stops sounding like propaganda and starts sounding like common sense. It becomes the wallpaper. You stop noticing it. That’s the point.

The distance between a Fox News sneer and an Arizona politician floating execution is not ideological, it’s procedural. One trains the audience. The other tests how far the training has gone.

In 2025, an Arizona state legislator publicly suggested that a political opponent should be executed, language framed not as a threat but as righteous outrage. Same move, different setting. Strip the target of legitimacy. Cast them as an existential danger. Float elimination like it’s just another spicy opinion. Once that framing lands, the violence doesn’t have to happen on air. The audience has already been trained to see it as thinkable.

And sometimes Fox doesn’t even bother with subtlety. In a 2025 segment discussing homelessness and mental illness, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade floated “involuntary lethal injection” as a solution, then clarified, “Just kill ’em.” That wasn’t a joke and it wasn’t a slip. It was the endpoint stated plainly.

Under the Trump administration, that conditioning has intensified. The constant drumbeat of “law and order,” “threats,” and “criminals” flattens moral response until state violence feels inevitable, even deserved. People aren’t taught to ask what the government did. They are taught to ask what the victim did wrong.

None of the details Watters emphasized had a damn thing to do with the use of deadly force. They existed to do one job: tell viewers she was not like them, so outrage and accountability would feel misplaced and excessive.

This is how propaganda finishes the job after the fact. You don’t need to justify the violence outright. You just need to shrink the victim until the audience feels permitted to think, quietly and without shame, “She had it coming.”

That permission didn’t come from nowhere. It was taught, repeated, normalized, and turned into background noise. And once people accept that logic for someone else, the system doesn’t have to argue for its brutality anymore. It can just coast on habit.

That isn’t commentary. It’s moral cleanup after state violence, performed so often it now passes for news.