Fox News is an absolute cancer on our society, and now there’s proof of it. A man with a beard, who walks laps around his school every day, was threatened at gunpoint because two avid Fox News viewers thought he was a member of ISIS, all because he had a beard and looked Middle Eastern.
Benedette DeFrancisco, who works as a teaching assistant in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, said he goes for a walk every morning before reporting in to work to unwind from his commute and to check the perimeter of the school’s grounds. The first time he passed William Jackson’s house, he had his earphones in and didn’t hear Jackson shouting at him.
But then Jackson got more aggressive. According to the Windy City Times, this is what happened:
I literally just walk around the school, so on my second lap, he was definitely shouting [again], and it felt like it was aimed at me,” DeFrancisco said. “It was getting louder and more aggressive. A lot of swearing. I honestly thought he was drunk. I took out my headphones and looked at him, and heard what he was saying: ‘I know what you’re doing, motherfucker. You’re scaring my wife—get out of here.'”
At that point, DeFrancisco saw Jackson’s gun, a .45 caliber Ruger semi-automatic pistol. “He was waving it around, waving it at me,” he recalled. “I just tried to sat as calm as I could. I pretended to put my earphones back in, but dialed 911 instead, and walked around the corner to hide.
Both Jackson and his wife watch Fox News religiously, along with other cable news programs that are busy playing up the threat of Islamic terrorism. This is what the fear-mongering of Fox News and the right-wing pundits, and the GOP, can do. People are in real danger because of them, and they aren’t even Muslim, let alone terrorists.
The Raw Story says that Jackson and his wife had been watching DeFrancisco for awhile, and they were getting increasingly paranoid that he was ISIS, and represented an ISIS presence in Chicago. When Berwyn police confronted Jackson, he admitted that he watches the fear-mongering news shows. He’s due in court on Dec. 9 on charges of aggravated assault.
In the meantime, DeFrancisco won’t be the only person terrorized by those who watch the right-wing fear shows. At some point, someone’s actually going to get killed because of this, and the defense will be, “I thought they were ISIS! What do you want from me?” Perhaps some common sense?
That’ll never happen, though. The right lives on fear. They thrive on it. It’s destroying us.
Featured image by Fox News Channel. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
