Move over covid, monkeypox, and polio: Eric Bolling, Newsmax anchor and former Fox News star who was fired for sending unsolicited dick pics, has warned that America is in the throes of a “twerking epidemic” that is tearing at our very moral fiber.
Sharing footage of Rhode Island state Sen. Tiara Mack (D) skillfully twerking upside-down at the beach earlier this month, and moments later, a video of a mother and her young son at Pride festivities in which some light twerking also takes place, Bolling absolutely loses his shit. “This is apparently the Democrats’ best butt?” he says of Mack’s TikTok on Wednesday evening. Next, he claims the Pride footage shows “a parent forcing her child who appears not to want any part of it, forcing him to watch radical LGBT activists—you guessed it—twerk during Pride celebrations.” The video, of course, really just shows a mother and son at a Pride event as participants in a parade casually dance past them. There’s really not much to see here.
Bolling’s outrage over the twerking in question is also pretty transparently racist—as Lizzo herself has pointed out, twerking traces its origins to Black culture, and the twerking individuals in the clips that Bolling shows are Black as well.
Based on this, it’s safe to say the news cycle is pretty slow right now, but nonetheless, Bolling has an entire segment to fill—and fill it he does with predictably self-righteous screed:
“Not only is this the moral decay of America, but there’s clearly a twerking epidemic, and the left wing mob is doing everything, everything they can, to keep the twerking going and corrupt our nation’s youth. That’s how they can radically transform America, folks, that’s what they want to do, deprive children of their innocence, destroy the family unit, and of course, destroy faith. That’s the left-wing plan. … Democrats, they’ve abandoned faith, replacing it with the church of liberalism, the abortion party … what follows all this? A nation with no moral compass.”
“A nation with no moral compass.” “Corrupting our youth.” “Depriving children of their innocence.”
I don’t know that I’d use these strong statements to describe twerking, but I’d certainly use them to describe, say, sending unsolicited penis photos to your co-workers—an act Bolling is personally well acquainted with. In fact—callback!—that’s why Bolling was ousted from Fox back in 2017. Per the Los Angeles Times: “Bolling used his cellphone to send unsolicited photos of male genitalia to current and former female colleagues at the network.”
Allegations against Bolling were made at roughly the same time that Bill O’Reilly, another former Fox star, was ousted over similar sexual harassment claims—both about a year after Gretchen Carlson and other women’s allegations against Fox CEO Roger Ailes saw him removed from the network, as well. You’d think a company in which sexual harassment was so pervasive, and certainly the creeps who were publicly fired for perpetrating said harassment, would have some shame about fanning the flames of moral panics. But sadly, you’d be mistaken!
Fox and Bolling remain determined as ever to point their grimy, unsolicited-dick-pic-sending fingers at everything from anti-depressants, single moms, abortion care, people of color, gay marriage, and now, dancing, for ostensibly ruining this once-great country founded upon slavery. Anything, apparently, not to take a look in the mirror.