“Michigan autoworker Joseph Knowles, a guest at President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, explained why he ‘made a damn good choice’ switching from being a lifelong Democrat to a Republican. During Trump’s address on Tuesday, when he honored a 13-year-old brain cancer survivor and the mother of a 12-year-old girl who was murdered, allegedly by illegal migrants, most Democrats remained seated. Some protested the address by holding signs that read ‘FALSE,’ ‘NO king!’ and ‘MUSK STEALS,'” says the lede to a Fox News story printed early Saturday morning, itself just a recap of an on-air segment from Wednesday after Trump’s stupid speech.
“I’m very disappointed in the Democrats on how they handled things,” Knowles told two Caucasian Fox News anchors in the middle of the afternoon. “And you know what? I feel like I made a damn good choice of not voting for them anymore, and I’m very proud of how Donald Trump handled it.”
Moving on from complaining about Dems’ conduct at the speech, he then ripped into the party overall. “They said their agenda was for the working people, but that’s not the case,” said literally every fucking Fox News guest billed as a “former Democrat” over the last decade Knowles. “They’re out-of-touch, and I can no longer support an organization or a political party like that.”
It might’ve been around this point, or maybe when Knowles said “I got very good hope for the Republican Party. I mean, more and more people are seeing the true colors of the Democrats. And it took me, I’m sorry, 20 years to see that, and I woke up. I’m very confident the American people will wake up too,” that a reader might begin to perceive something about this interview. Not just that Knowles’s lines were scripted, because you’d have to be pretty fucking stupid not to have picked that up right away, but that they were scripted with a specific intent. A very specific intent.
Almost like they needed someone, anyone, to speak up the same week Reuters prints a story quoting a three-time MAGA voter saying “Nobody that I’ve talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives,” and that she had taken down her Trump flag after being DOGEd from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, which has (or had) a large branch providing a lifeline to some otherwise deeply depressed West Virginia town.
Now, is it 110 percent certain that Fox News called Knowles in for the interview and printed the story in a vain attempt to establish a counter-narrative to the fucking non-stop firehose of “Leopards Ate My Face” stories from the mainstream media? No. As mentioned it’s the same old “former Dem voter” script Fox News and other right wing outlets have been pushing for nearly a decade now.
A yarn already pretty diffuse and would absolutely still exist in another timeline, one where Trump pissed away an enormous chunk of his early second-term political capital on something less needlessly destructive to regular people, where Knowles would probably be spewing more or less the same shit about being “gone forever” from the party and having “seen enough, and this — what I saw — this isn’t brand new. This has been going on for a long time [Jesus freaking Christ he’s just doing all the work here, lol]. What the TV has shown and what the world has seen, is this is how they always have handled situations like this. They put their agenda first, and that’s all they care about.”
Ughhhhh, holy shit, lol.
Anyway, without getting deeper into the weeds of the Freudian script Knowles was reading from, it’s still impossible to divorce his comments from the face-eating leopards context – one which Fox seems keen on avoiding in the article but seemingly accidentally put right up front by mentioning that Dems on Tuesday were holding up signs saying “MUSK STEALS.” Which would make it accurate to describe Knowles’s interview and the article as mostly about him being offended that “out of touch” Democrats were protesting the president giving a drug-addicted apartheid baby and the world’s wealthiest individual free reign to fuck regular Americans out of their jobs. And that this particular regular American was regime media’s champion du jour of a different narrative.
There’s a problem though. For example, you remember that young rural Michigan woman who was canned from the National Park Service for no good reason at all was just utterly devastated that she lost her career and then spiraled even further into the abyss when realized that Trump lied to her about making IVF free? Yeah, there’s no countervailing element in the Fox News article on Knowles.
It’s true. “Since President Trump came back my grocery costs have gone down, his executive order mandating 50 percent higher pay for blue collar Michigan autoworkers means I can afford a second, younger wife, and my neighbor and I had so much fun last weekend legally vigilante killing a 19 year-old suspected shoplifter at Walgreen’s! We shot that son of a bitch in the back right when he bolted for the fire exit and then again in the face as he cried and begged!” Knowles did not tell Fox News.
Now as easy as it is to armchair quarterback some of these things, it still raises the question of why Fox isn’t instead trying to track down, say, the MAGA brother of a DOGEd federal worker who unambiguously checks all the boxes of the general stereotype of a federal civil servant who was a total leech, played Diablo IV on taxpayer time, stole office supplies regularly, and so on. Don’t they have any better ideas for controlling the damage than this guy’s bitching about Democrats?
Rote but worth repeating: Right wing media and voters are always going to be happier and more comfortable attacking a Democrat in the White House than they are defending a Republican one, and this has never been more true than it has been with Trump. There’s no way Fox News hadn’t themselves internalized a something similar to this a long time ago and you’d think having had four years of practice from 2017 through 2021 (and then for a good chunk of the fat fuck’s legal travails during that stretch too) they might’ve honed some more effective technique than this weak bullshit.
Maybe in the second half of the Biden Administration they didn’t have the bandwidth to think ahead about how to run defense for Trump Reich II. That there was no longer term plan simply because the day-to-day of returning him to power required a non-stop focus on finding regular folk suffering under his allegedly feckless, imperial rule, ones who lost their jobs needlessly due to his policies and finding themselves left behind, turning to Trump as the answer to their problems so you should too.
Regular folks like Joe Knowles.
Yeah, this was a CNN segment, aired on October 21, 2024, but Fox News made it their own, clipping the video and writing the next morning that “Michigan autoworker Joseph Knowles is planning on casting his first vote for former President Trump this November. ‘At this point now, I’m desperate,’ Knowles told CNN’s John King on Monday. ‘So I’m willing to try anything right now to make sure I can take care of my wife and kids. That’s all I care about.’ King explained to viewers how Knowles was one of hundreds of autoworkers who were laid off and placed some blame on the Biden-Harris administration for its electric vehicle mandate. ‘I thought the Democratic Party was for the working class. The average Joe like me. That‘s what I thought,’ Knowles said.”
(True to form, Fox News of course edited out the part where King said that Knowles “blames corporate greed” first before blaming Biden’s electric vehicle mandate for his layoff.)
“He admitted he had since been facing backlash from family and friends over his decision since they believe Trump is racist. ‘I took it from my mom, my auntie, my cousins, my sisters, they came at me,’ Knowles said,” Fox News wrote further down in an effort to portray him as a brave rebel.
Doesn’t exactly pack the same punch as “My life is disintegrating because I can’t work in my chosen field. Lump on top of that no support from family – it hits you very hard,” from a DOGEd worker who said her own mom, a retired federal employee, is all for it. “She has somehow been convinced that public servants are a parasite and unproductive even though she was a public servant,” says Jenn.
But back to Knowles, who in last week’s interview mentioned off-hand that he’d actually gotten his job back, but then complained that “men from his union who were still out of work wanted to focus on Trump and bring up ‘the 34 felonies'” and that “They want to bring up all the things that really, to be honest with you, have no effect on my life. It has no effect on their lives.”
Seems like a missed opportunity for Fox, that they could’ve led Knowles into somehow crediting Trump for being employed once again after however many months out of work but didn’t.
The whole MAGA propaganda-industrial complex have their work cut out for them as the unforced errors and collateral damage pile up and fuel outrage against them and yet they don’t seem to be up to the challenge so far. Between Fox News’s utter fucking impotence at elevating an “Average Joe” to counter the Trump voters losing their livelihoods and this twatwaffle Richard Hudson calling the town hall protests a “threat to democracy,” they might be described as “out of touch.”