Fox News Freaks Out After Canadian TV Deletes President Trump From Home Alone 2

Fox News Freaks Out After Canadian TV Deletes President Trump From Home Alone 2

According to Fox News, the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) deleted Donald Trump’s five-second scene from their recent broadcast of the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It was all anyone could talk about on conservative media yesterday, with one host on the show Fox & Friends calling it “censorship.”

President Trump even tweeted and retweeted about the deletion of his scene three times last night. But there’s a simple explanation, and it has nothing to do with censorship.

According to the CBC, the scene was edited out back in 2014, long before Trump would announce his candidacy in June of 2015—that infamous escalator ride that ended with Trump calling Mexicans rapists. And Trump’s short scene wasn’t the only thing that got cut in Canada.

“As is often the case with feature films adapted for television, Home Alone 2 was edited for time,” CBC spokesperson Chuck Thompson told his own news network on Thursday.

“The scene with Donald Trump was one of several that were cut from the movie as none of them were integral to the plot. These edits were done in 2014, when we first acquired the film and before Mr. Trump was elected president.”

The scene is incredibly brief and Trump has just one line, telling Kevin McCallister, played by Macaulay Culkin, that the bathroom is “down the hall and to the left.” Oddly enough, Kevin takes a right.

As CNN notes, roughly 8 minutes were cut from the Canadian broadcast of Home Alone 2 that has aired every Christmas since 2014, including other scenes where Kevin goes swimming and a scene where a homeless person warns to “watch it, kid.” The cut scenes aren’t vital to the plot and are only deleted to make room for commercials. Canadian viewers take to social media every year to complain about the deletions, most of which have nothing to do with Trump.

But that didn’t stop craven media outlets like Fox News from reporting on this potential declaration of war from Canada nonstop yesterday. The excised scene didn’t just lead with the news in the morning during Fox & Friends, the network also complained about the deletion during The Five, with host Jesse Watters calling the scene with Trump, “one of the most interesting parts of the movie.”

“It was a liberal edit. If you want to edit for time, take out the crazy pigeon lady in Central Park,” Watters said.

That may be a reasonable suggestion in Trumpland, but of course, the far right host had to go and make it weird, claiming that Canada was “rewriting history.”

“When you look at what they did, it’s rewriting history because what Trump was in the early 90s, he was a tycoon that was admired and embraced by American culture, by Hollywood, by the entertainment industry,” Watters continued. “This was a family-friendly film. Liberals can’t accept it so they want to deny it and it makes them look petty.”

The period between Christmas and New Year’s tends to be a pretty slow time for news, so it might make sense that Fox News is spending all day complaining about something so dumb. But there are plenty of other stories that might be worth covering. As just one example, three people have died in U.S. immigration custody in the past week.

U.S. officials announced late Thursday that a 41-year-old woman died on Christmas Day while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“In the early morning of December 25, 2019, while awaiting final processing and release, the individual notified CBP officers that she was suffering from abdominal pain and had vomited,” a press release from CBP states.

“CBP contacted EMS immediately and the individual was transported to the Laredo Medical Centre for a medical evaluation. The subject’s health declined rapidly and she passed away at the hospital.”

According to CBP, the woman, originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had presented herself with her family to immigration officials in Laredo, Texas, presumably for asylum. The unnamed woman had a “previous medical condition,” according to CBP, but had been “cleared by on-site contracted medical personnel.”

U.S. Custom and Border Protection, an organisation under the Department of Homeland Security, has a long history of lying about its own policies and the treatment of asylum seekers at its facilities, so it’s tough to tell what actually happened. But whatever it was, it seems much more important news than Donald Trump’s five-second scene getting cut from a TV broadcast in Canada.

But what do I know? I’m not the President of the United States, setting the agenda for the wealthiest nation in the world.


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