Todd Starnes, a Fox News personality infamous for his far-right rantings against immigrants and LGBTQ people over national airwaves, will no longer be working at Fox News, “its website, or its premium subscription service, Fox Nation,” as first reported by TheWrap.
Earlier this week prior to his departure from Fox News, Starnes agreed with right-wing pastor Robert Jeffress on air that Democrats do not worship a Christian God; Jeffress claimed that Democrats may worship the demon god Moloch instead. If those comments stirred his exit from Fox News, they are among the tamer that he has made on the network. In August, The Daily Beast reported that Starnes compared migrants to Nazis and claimed that America was being invaded by a “rampaging horde of illegal aliens” less than two weeks after an accused white supremacist committed mass murder in El Paso, Texas, and targeted Hispanics for his rampage.
Let’s walk through some of the greatest hits from Starnes’ broadcast, which were blasted across the nation by Fox News Radio and preserved in the Right Wing Watch archives.
Earlier this year, Starnes hosted right-wing pastor Franklin Graham on his program to praise a New Jersey mayor who was resisting a state law requiring schools to teach LGBTQ history. On Starnes’ show, Graham declared:
This is an affront to God and I don’t believe that the schools have a right to teach our children something that is an affront to God. So the mayor is absolutely right and I back him 100 percent. God made us and created us, he made us male and female so that we can carry on the population, so that we have children and that we would increase, and homosexuality goes against God’s plan for the human race.
Last October, Starnes called for President Donald Trump to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, deploy the military, and treat an incoming caravan of migrants seeking relief in the United States like an “invading force” committing “an act of war.” Starnes said, “So, shut down the borders, call out the military, and quite frankly we ought to treat this 4,000-strong migrant caravan as an invading force. That’s what we ought to do. It’s time to play hardball.”
In June 2018, Starnes defended the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, arguing that “President Trump is not gassing children” and that the critics of the policy were “treasonous” and “traitorous” to the United States. (The punishment for treason against the United States is death.)
"President Trump is not gassing children": Todd Starnes defends the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the border by declaring that critics of the policy are treasonous traitors. pic.twitter.com/H7jnpZxmp6
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 19, 2018
While discussing DACA, a program that shields some undocumented people who arrived in the U.S. as children from deportation, in April 2018, Starnes said that his problem with undocumented immigrants is that once they arrive in America, they “get all biblical on us and they start churning out the babies.” Starnes said:
And here’s the problem, here is the problem, ladies and gentlemen. You see, once the illegals arrive here on American soil, what do they start doing? They get all biblical on us and they start churning out the babies. And so every one of those babies is a new Dreamer. I mean, sweet mercy, America, how many more of these Dreamers are we going to have to take care of?
When people across the nation rallied for the March for Our Lives rallies and demanded gun reform in March 2018, Starnes blamed “culture jihadists.” He said:
That really is what we do on this radio program, is that we want to stand alongside people who are coming under attack. And there are a lot of people that don’t have the national platforms that really face these struggles when the left comes after them and these culture jihadists. And that’s what it is, I think that’s what we saw over the weekend with these protests on the Second Amendment.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, is another person whom Starnes accused of jihad, this time “political.” In October 2017, Starnes said:
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe the president needs to take immediate action here. I believe he needs to go ahead, rip off the Band-Aid, rip of the duct tape and fire Bob Mueller because I see the end game here … We know how this is going to end and it’s not going to end well. It’s time to get rid of Bob Mueller and it’s time to get rid of his partisan cronies. It’s time to stop the jihad.
Ann Coulter, a right-wing pundit with clear and present ties to white nationalists, appeared on Starnes’ Fox News Radio program in 2017 and told Starnes that if Trump compromised on his anti-immigrant agenda, it could justify “death squads” in America. “If he continues down this path, well I guess there are three options. There’s the organizing the death squads for the people who ruined America, because there will be no more hope,” Coulter said.
In 2015, Starnes claimed that rainbow-colored Doritos were doing the bidding of “godless sickos,” because proceeds from the chips were donated to an organization that supports LGBTQ youth. Starnes said:
It appears that Frito-Lay would rather do business with the likes of Dan Savage than America’s good, church-going people.
Look, it’s not my business where you dip your Dorito, but as for me and my house, I can promise you this, not a single Frito, not a single Cheeto until Frito-Lay stops giving money to a bunch of godless sickos who bash Christians.
Beyond Fox News Radio’s airwaves, Starnes has spoken at numerous conferences hosted by anti-LGBTQ hate groups, including his featured spot at Values Voter Summit, where he is expected to speak next weekend.
