Outside the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, protestors formed a picket line blocking the entrance to the building, chanting “Fox knew and lied to you.” Parked on the street in front of them, a “Rolling Box Media” van with a large LED screen displayed anti-Fox graphics and incriminating quotes from high-ranking news anchors and employees.
This scene isn’t new. Nearly every Tuesday since August 2021, the activist group Rise and Resist has marched outside Fox’s headquarters, protesting the network’s coverage of the 2020 election. Rise and Resist are a self-described activist group “dedicated to defeating billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox propaganda TV,” born out of the 2016 election in opposition to Trump’s victory. According to their mission statement, Rise and Resist “rejects State-sanctioned violence, bigotry, and systemic discrimination in all its forms.”
The group’s weekly protests are known as Truth Tuesdays. Most recently, the concerns raised during these protests have been amplified by the findings of the Dominion lawsuit – deposition transcripts and leaked internal messages from Fox news hosts and executives.
Dominion, a company that sells electronic voting machines – which were used in 28 states in the 2020 election – filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News on March 26, 2021. The lawsuit alleges that Fox News and its founder, Rupert Murdoch, spread conspiracy theories that claim Dominion’s technology and its employees were involved in rigging the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
The activist group seeks to hold Fox News accountable for their alleged role in spreading election fraud conspiracy theories, which helped incite the insurrection of the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2020.
“Now we’re here because of the Dominion lawsuit,” Rise and Resist activist Jonathan Walker said at the demonstration on March 7. “[Fox is] being sued for billions of dollars because they knew the election wasn’t stolen in 2020 …. they doubted the election, and they tried to, again, separate us and divide us, and undermine democracy. So now, we’re basking in it because we knew it, we saw it, and we paid attention,” he added.
The activist group is split between “admin groups,” who hold community meetings, and “action groups,” who organize marches, protests, rallies, civil disobedience, and street theater, according to their website.
“[Rise and Resist] have been in front of Fox News every Tuesday, without a break for a year and a half, calling them out for being liars and for undermining democracy,” Walker said, “We are supporters of democracy; we do not support [individual] candidates.”
Julie Delaurier, a fellow Rise and Resist activist at the March 7 protest, added, “We’re the first street group to protest against [Fox] regularly, and we’ve established ourselves on their turf…when we first came, they barricaded the plaza, but we slipped past the barricades and established ourselves because it is publicly operated private space and we’re legally allowed to be here.”
While Walker and Delaurier, along with other members of Rise and Resist, stand against the Fox network, they also accredit the company for being masters of propaganda. “They feed people superiority,” Delaurier said, “It’s addictive. It’s intoxicating, and it is toxic… that’s why one of our tags is detox from Fox.”
“It’s an us versus them mentality, and they stoke that; they get people worked up for money and for ratings,” Walker said.
As new details in the Dominion lawsuit continue to plague Murdoch and Fox, so does the Truth Tuesday movement. The group has built consistency and has no plans of stopping, with the next protest scheduled for Tuesday, March 21, at noon in front of Fox News headquarters.
Their website includes a calendar of upcoming events.
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