It’s eclipse day in America, and if you thought Fox News was going to act normal about it, you were wrong.
The right-wing news network wasted no time on Monday attempting to link the moon’s brief blotting out of the sun to migrant crossings at the Mexico border.
“Fox News alert! A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground. The southern border is directly in the path of totality today when the moon covers the sun,” host Dana Perino said during Monday’s broadcast of America’s Newsroom.
Co-host Bill Hemmer chimed in, adding, “We’re told officials are bracing for higher traffic than usual. That means a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in.”
The pair went on to interview Fox Correspondent Bill Melugin, who was reporting live from Eagle Pass, the border town where Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has staged a standoff with President Joe Biden and U.S. Border Patrol. Eagle Pass is within the path of the total solar eclipse.
Melugin warned that while everyone in the country is looking up, if you look down at the border you will see things like what transpired in footage from Sunland Park, N.M. “You’ll see illegal immigrants dressed in dark clothing, sometimes camouflage, trying to sneak into the United States, as suspected cartel scouts and coyotes watch from a mountain above,” he said.
Later in the broadcast, Melugin told host John Roberts that while Shelby Park, on Texas’ side of the Eagle Pass border area, was completely shut down to the public, there was an eclipse watch party taking place on the Mexican bank of the Rio Grande.
Fox News is not alone in its bizarre coverage of the eclipse. Right-wing media outlets have become rife with conspiracy theories about the astronomical event in recent weeks, and just last week Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote on X that she believes the eclipse — and last week’s earthquake in the Northeast — were a sign from God that America should repent for its sins.
There won’t be another total solar eclipse visible from North America for two decades, so we suggest you make like the Mexicans that Fox News is staring at from our side of the border and have a ball staring at the sun — safely, with your eclipse glasses of course.
