Meghan McCain Okay With Far-Right Extremism Because Fox News’ Christmas Tree Caught Fire

Late Tuesday night, a 50-foot Christmas tree outside of Fox News’ studios in New York caught fire, leading Fox News hosts and supporters to immediately batten down their hatches for what they were framing as a new round of attacks in the War on Christmas.

Suzanne Scott, the company’s chief executive, called the fire a “deliberate and brazen act of cowardice” in a memo to staff. Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt defiantly claimed, “Someone did this to spoil our Christmas, but that’s not gonna happen.”

But what seems to be the worst take of all came from Meghan McCain, who tweeted, “I don’t want to hear anything about how radical some of you believe republicans to be when there are lunatics running around New York City setting Fox News Christmas tree on fire.”

This sort of fear-mongering around a fake narrative of urban lawlessness is old hat for Meghan McCain, but the insistence that no one can criticize anything happening in conservative or far-right spheres because of this incident is an incredible false equivalence, even for her.

Over the weekend, a group of white nationalists marched through Washington DC. Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn is out here calling women “earthen vessels” in unhinged anti-abortion rants. Florida’s governor is trying to assemble his own little personal vigilante army. The conservative-packed Supreme Court seems to be seriously considering overturning 40 years of precedent protecting reproductive freedom. And it hasn’t even been a year since thousands of Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol Building, with what appears to be the assistance of multiple sitting members of Congress, not to mention the sitting president.

But we’re not allowed to talk about any of that because someone (presumably, but not for certain) set a big Christmas tree on fire? OK, Meghan.

It does appear that the cause of the fire was arson, and a suspect has already been taken into custody and charged. But rather than antifa or whoever else is presumed to be responsible for this hate crime narrative that McCain and Fox News have created, the suspect is a 50-year-old unhoused man, and the police have said that, as of now, they don’t think the incident had any “political” motivations.

The fire could have been deliberate, or it could have had something to do with the 100,000 lights that were said to adorn the “All-American Christmas Tree,” as Fox News dubbed it because subtlety has never been their strong suit. Either way, it’s not going to stop them from crafting their own narrative about the event.

As a side note, I said that Meghan McCain had the worst reaction to this fire, but it’s an extremely close call between her and Ainsley Earhardt, who said on-air that the Christmas Tree was a symbol of everything related to the holiday season, including Hannukah.

I’ll let you decide for yourselves which was actually worse. They’re both so awful that they might just be impossible to rank.

(image: screencap)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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