14 DAY TRIAL // Fox News makes headlines so often and is subject to so many controversies that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. However, when conversations around Clint Eastwood’s most recent film, “American Sniper,” started to get more heated – and political –, you could count on the Fox News team to speak their mind in a very passionate manner.
“American Sniper” is a film based on Chris Kyle’s best-selling biography, Kyle being America’s most deadly sniper in history. The film is a film, so it’s a dramatized take on the book, which in turn is a dramatized take on Kyle’s experiences.
However, controversy around the movie has been raging since before release, partly because many famous voices compared it to American (and even Nazi) propaganda in the way it raises Kyle to superhero status and describes the people whose lives he takes (and not only) as purely evil.
Fox News went beyond this consideration in their assessment of why Americans should see the film, as the video below shows. Americans should see the film because it’s the patriotic thing to do, because Kyle saved lives, they argue. So far, that makes sense: soldiers are heroes, sacrificing their lives for their country.
But then this happened: America, the world’s policeman, saved the planet and helped billions of people move up into middle class.
Courtesy of Charles Payne: “We've been the world's policeman, and guess what's happened over the time we've become the world's policeman? A billion people in other countries have moved into the middle class. We had India on TV earlier. If it wasn't for Americans dying around the world, the rest of the world would be in abject poverty. We have saved the planet, and if we go away as [the world's] policeman, it's going to be hell to pay for everyone.”
Anna Kooiman believes that all that is “so true.” Even without getting into the details of America’s international military campaigns or politics, this comment is inane: America may have done a lot of things (good and bad), but it did not eradicate world poverty, and it did not save the planet. Stating it as fact is hilarious.
