“If Americans went to a town in a Muslim country, set up shop, built a church, and lived like Americans, the locals would scream because western life is NOT compatible with Islam, THEIR words. Well the reverse is true too” – Top comment on the Fox News article “Working-class Americans say their town is the next Dearborn – and they’ve had enough,” posted Sunday morning.

The very Fox News-ian headline on the article is actually a downshift from the link on the propaganda outlet’s homepage – where this is the top story – which says “Americans complain their neighborhood is quietly turning into a Muslim haven,” emphasis added to the very blatant othering of Muslim-Americans by situating the non-Muslim neighbors of the former Holy Cross Lutheran Church at 4345 East 10 Mile Rd in Warren, Michigan, the name of the road placing it 10 miles north of Detroit’s city limits. The drab, nondescript church was sold by the Lutheran congregation to the Muslim one around 2019 and subsequently converted into its current mosque in a transition much more peaceable and orderly than the 1453 conversion of the Hagia Sophia by the Ottoman Empire.

But you wouldn’t know it from Fox News’s coverage, placing front and center the bitching and moaning of a pink-faced caucasian neighbor wearing a Harley Davidson t-shirt. “They’ll turn anything into a mosque,” Justin Tye, 57, told Fox News, adding that he hasn’t renewed his Harley’s plates supposedly because he’s scared a van full of Muslims might suddenly pull out of the mosque’s driveway and splatter him on the pavement. No mention of whether he might be selling it to pay his bills because that would distract from the real point here, that “Americans” are feeling squeezed by other Americans expressing their religious freedom and practicing their faith.

“After Ramadan, they would have their [Eid al-Fitr] prayer service. It was unannounced. We didn’t know anything,” Tye said, adding Fridays are “chaos” in the area. “All of a sudden, we were just woken up to 100-plus people behind the mosque, with an imam on a podium with big amplifier speakers, belting out his prayer service. So it woke up the whole neighborhood,” Tye continued.

.@PressSec: [on rollback of contraception mandate] @POTUS supports the 1st amendment, the freedom of religion pic.twitter.com/mohxxjf9kK

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 6, 2017

Huh. It’s almost like Tye’s a God-hating leftist commie who doesn’t get that religious freedom means the freedom to impose the tenets of that faith onto non-believers whether they like it or not… Or maybe the other reality that here we are nearly two years after convicted felon President Trump returning to power and still these MAGAmericans are suffering from the privations of a Muslim invasion… Or maybe that “the next Dearborn” is rich considering that it was Trump’s dishonest appeals to Muslim Michiganders that he was going to end the genocide in Gaza that successfully swung the state red again in 2024 (worked out great for those people)… or that actually all of those things, sarcasm aside, are true and not at all in tension with each other in this article.

But editorially here – for this article at least, can’t speak for some others – Fox News ran a tight ship and as such the words “Trump” and “religious freedom” do not actually appear anywhere in the text of their propaganda piece. Nor does “Abdul El-Sayed,” except for articles linked in the paragraph breaks with all-caps headlines like “MICHIGAN SENATE RACE: EL-SAYED’S TIES TO EXTREMIST FUEL ANTISEMITISM CONCERNS AMONG JEWISH VOTERS” and “WATCH: EL-SAYED PRAISED ‘BEAUTIFUL’ SENSE OF COMMUNITY ABROAD WHILE TRASHING US AS ‘WHITE SUPREMACY'” as that’s the actual point here. Fox isn’t saying outright that electing Mike Rogers to the US Senate is going to to stop Muslims from buying up abandoned churches or that the Lutherans will retake control of their former church in Warren, they’re just making it feel like that’s what will happen.

Measured by that intent, it was actually a very well-executed effort. In practice however, if we’re judging solely by the audience’s visible reaction, well, the results were mixed at best, with the fucking idiot getting “2.4k” upvotes for posting that childish, simplistic “counterfactual” anchored nowhere near the crucial Senate pickup opportunity for the GOP amid a bleak November outlook.

Actually just going to leave “If Americans went to a town in a Muslim country, set up shop, built a church, and lived like Americans, the locals would scream because western life is NOT compatible with Islam, THEIR words. Well the reverse is true too” alone. It even sucks on its own terms as a MAGA Land comment, utterly devoid of texture, inspiration, or comedy intentional or not, all of it unworthy of dismantling for its absolutist ignorance and sixth-grade reading-level logic.

Stil that it IS the top comment is itself a pretty meaningful temperature check on Fox News’s audience and yes they are somehow even fucking dumber than they were the last time you looked.