X Rips Fox News’ Report About Ketanji Brown Jackson Receiving Free Beyoncé Tickets

Source: The Washington Post / Getty

W e really didn’t need any more evidence that right-wing media outlets and their faithful, fact-averse viewers intentionally distort issues because otherwise, they might have to acknowledge their hypocrisy and aforementioned fact averseness. Sometimes these outlets and their followers get so shameless and transparently disingenuous that we might wonder what kind of uneducated fool would be so gullible as to buy into these displays of anti-intellectualism —but then we remember that a pathological liar and 34-times convicted felon who doesn’t understand how elections work (or how anything works, really) is dangerously close to being elected president for the second time, and it all becomes clear.

Anyway, Fox News, the central hub for conservative misinformation, recently played around in everyone’s faces by highlighting a “news” story about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson receiving Beyoncé concert tickets valued at $3,700, among other gifts. Now, Fox News’ story doesn’t directly accuse Democrats or “the left” of being hypocrites by letting Jackson slide while being up in arms over luxury gifts received by Justice Clarence Thomas , but there is no other conceivable reason for why the network thought this was a story worth reporting. At any rate, conservatives who don’t know things took the “news” exactly how it was likely intended.

So, factless Fox acolytes are calling for Jackson to be removed from the bench and insisting that she must recuse herself from all Donald Trump-related cases despite Trump having nothing to do with the issue, which is actually a non-issue since Fox’s report made no mention of any impropriety or ethics violation because there was none.

But since there’s never really a bad time to explain to MAGA constituents why they’re stupid, let’s go ahead and go over all the reasons Ketanji Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas are not the same . (I mean, outside of the fact that one of them is a self-loathing, civil rights protection-eroding , shucking and jiving modern-day house slave who voted to strike down the same affirmative action that put him through law school , and the other one is Ketanji Brown Jackson.)

First, there’s the most obvious difference: Thomas has, for decades, accepted free luxury vacations and other gifts valued at around $2.4 million (that’s the low estimate), whereas Jackson’s gift is under $4,000. Of course, Fox News also mentioned a “$900,000 advance for her upcoming memoir Lovely One out in September, and two gifts of artwork in her chambers worth $12,500,” but a book advance isn’t a gift and even if you add in the price of the artwork, it amounts to barely a fraction of the gifts Thomas received. (It’s also worth noting that these people are focused on the Beyoncé tickets when they are the lesser valued gift. It’s almost as if they’re just making an arbitrary connection between two Black women they notoriously hate as if to kill two birds with one white-and-fragile stone.)

Secondly, Thomas received his gifts from Harlan Crow , the Republican billionaire political donor Thomas has a history of receiving gifts from . Jackson got concert tickets from someone who is not involved in politics and presumably has no sway in the political arena.

Lastly —and this is the point that makes all the above points moot, honestly—the core issue behind the controversy regarding Thomas, according to ethics law experts, was that Thomas’ failure to include these trips on his financial disclosures appears to “violate a law requiring justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts.” Jackson, on the other hand, did disclose the gifts, the book advance and everything else she was legally obligated to disclose, which is the only reason Fox News reporters knew about the gifts in the first place. In fact, Fox News noted that the “disclosures were part of an annual filing deadline for the justices, which all (justices) met except for Samuel Alito who asked for an extension.” (Yet, Alito somehow flew completely under the radar of this story. Go figure.)

Anyway, while Fox News followers were displaying their abject ignorance of how anything works, people on X who actually know things were mocking the network for its glaring hypocrisy and yellow journalism. Check out some of the replies below.