With almost two decades of experience creating echo chambers under its “These Colors Don’t Run” belt buckle, you’d think that Fox News would be better at pandering to nerds. But the conservative news network failed miserably at just that on a recent episode of Your World With Neil Cavuto, which featured a characteristically fair and balanced debate between Star Wars fan Mike Dunzelman and Star Wars hater Carley Shimkus, who we would bet $20 owns at least one copy of an Ann Coulter book signed by the author. Except it was more like the smug host and the mean-girl blonde making fun of the poor Star Wars nerd, which, to be fair, is the natural state of Star Wars nerds.
Based on the premise of explaining to people who have been in a bunker since 1975 what the hell Star Wars is and why it was interrupting their football, the segment began with Shimkus complaining that superfans were buying up all the opening-weekend tickets to The Force Awakens and ruining it for everyone else, although it’s unclear why she would be seeing the movie opening weekend if she doesn’t even like Star Wars. (She then adds that there are “like 15 million of them and they’re all out of order,” unlike the clear flash-forward structure of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy.)
Ad hominem attacks and stale jokes about how Star Wars fans don’t have girlfriends followed, although Dunzelman tried his best to defend the franchise. Cavuto, despite his assertions that the whole thing is “a little sad,” outed himself as a closeted nerd when he asked “Darth Vader is dead, right?” (How would you know that unless you saw Return Of The Jedi, huh, Cavuto, you virginal dork?) But possibly the best comment of the whole thing comes early in the segment, where Cavuto says he won’t be seeing The Force Awakens because his parent company, Fox, is no longer involved with the franchise. Much like Emperor Palpatine, Rupert Murdoch loves a sycophant, apparently.
[via Consequence Of Sound]