Fox Hates Jasmine Crockett Because She's A Smart Black Woman

“Her incompetence is beastly.”
“She certainly is a mental deficient.”
“She’s a dumb-dumb, and you can’t take her seriously.”
“She is a recalcitrant piece of garbage.”
“She’s massively incompetent.”

That was Fox News’ Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery trying to demean Rep. Jasmine Crockett five times in a single rant. But all that petty derision reveals nothing about Congresswoman Crocket and far more about Kennedy’s own intellectual bankruptcy, moral squalor, and her talent for cheap, performative cruelty masquerading as political commentary. The only real skill she’s honed is making the shallow sound edgy to people too dim-witted to notice.

If Kennedy had a real argument, she wouldn’t have needed to stack five personal insults on top of each other like a sad little Jenga tower of insecurity. 

A truly intelligent and competent commentator wouldn’t rely on crude, empty attacks in place of reasoned critique. She needed five insults because she had nothing else. No substance. No evidence. No point. No working brain cells. Just spit and bile.  Just look how hard she had to work just to prove she had nothing. And ultimately, she demonstrated that she’s the one who’s actually mentally deficient.

Kennedy’s rant came after Crockett dared to call out Donald Trump’s “racist and wrong” remarks about the president of Liberia speaking “such good English.” When Crockett labeled Trump’s words for what they were, the GOP rapid-response machine snapped into gear. Kennedy simply picked up that baton for Fox News. She didn’t contest a single fact. She went straight for the oldest, most cowardly trick in the racist playbook: smear the Black woman’s intelligence. Reduce her to a “dumb-dumb.” Make sure the audience sees her as unworthy of basic respect.

It’s pathetic and so damn predictable.

Kennedy knows she can’t beat Rep. Crockett on substance. She can’t out-argue her. Crockett is a civil rights attorney, a sitting member of Congress, a woman who can dismantle Republican talking points with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back. She is sharp, fearless, and unbothered by conservative fragility. And that terrifies mediocre bigots like Kennedy.

This is the same Lisa Kennedy who made her name being smarmy on MTV in the 90s, who rebranded herself as a libertarian edgelord sneering at working people’s needs, and who has built a career in conservative media serving up sarcastic, punchline-level takes for an audience desperate for reassurance they’ll never have to take Black women seriously. Kennedy isn’t offering critique; she’s offering white folks a comfortable fantasy where no Black woman is ever smarter than they are.

She’s the human embodiment of smug mediocrity. This is a woman who leveraged the aesthetics of rebelliousness into a decades-long gig kissing the ring of right-wing power while pretending she’s too hip to care about the damage. She’s the type who rails against government overreach but has no problem with state violence at the border or policing Black communities, the kind of libertarian who mocks student debt relief but wants her rich pals’ taxes cut.

Kennedy has no policy chops. She’s not serious. She’s a lazy performer who built her brand on eye-rolling, faux-radical snark that crumbles the second you ask her for actual ideas. She’s the sort of TV pundit who thinks being mean is the same thing as being smart. She’s paid to pander to viewers who want to hear that even the most obviously intelligent Black woman in the room is a “dumb-dumb,” because that lie is easier for them to swallow than gagging on the fact that she’s one of the dullest minds in the room.

“She is a recalcitrant piece of garbage.”

That line is a window into who Kennedy is. She’s a smug, washed-up cable clown who traded whatever critical thinking skills she once pretended to have for the cheapest form of white grievance theater. She’s not a serious commentator.  She’s a professional bigot-whisperer whose job is to sneer, belittle, and dehumanize Black women who won’t stay in the roles her audience finds comfortable. 

Calling Crockett “garbage” is Kennedy admitting that she can’t match Crockett’s command of the facts, her courtroom-honed intelligence, or her refusal to play nice for people who despise her. It’s Kennedy revealing that she knows exactly what her audience wants to hear and delivers it with a wink and a sneer.

She’s not just smug mediocrity. She’s a willing foot soldier for white grievance politics, who lacks confidence in her own intellect and the right-wing worldview she’s there to defend.  At the end of the day, she knows Crockett was right.  But instead she says, “Look at this dumb-dumb.”

Kennedy’s disrespect of a sitting Black representative was personal, and it was also universal. 

Every time a Black woman shows up in American public life with undeniable intelligence, whether she’s a Representative like Jasmine Crockett, a Supreme Court justice like Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Vice President like Kamala Harris, or a scholar, attorney, doctor, journalist, or educator, there is a reliably ugly backlash waiting for her. It doesn’t matter if she graduated from the nation’s top schools, served with distinction, or simply out-argues her opponents in debate.  As soon as her intelligence shines, the slur emerges: “mentally deficient,” “low IQ,” “affirmative action case,” “DEI hire,” “dumb,” “illiterate,” “incoherent.”

This isn’t random name-calling.  It taps into centuries of propaganda about Black inferiority. It’s the same old lie that Black people are less intelligent, especially Black women. It’s a deliberate racist strategy that is about policing who gets to be seen as competent, authoritative, or deserving of respect in American public life. Because for people invested in whiteness, a Black woman who is brilliant, articulate, prepared, and unafraid is a threat to the entire hierarchy they depend on. She disrupts the lie that whiteness is the natural home of competence and authority.

The psychology behind it is pathetic.  If you can’t disprove her, you have to degrade her. You have to reduce her to something less than you so you can feel safe, unchallenged, and unthreatened. Calling her “dumb” isn’t an analysis of her arguments; it’s an exorcism. It’s an attempt to expel her from the realm of people who have to be listened to or taken seriously. It’s about making sure the audience doesn’t even consider the possibility she’s right.

This is why these attacks are so formulaic and so emotional. They’re not built to rebut a Black woman’s logic; they’re built to reassure the insecure. They work by triggering a familiar, comforting stereotype for white audiences: that no matter how many degrees she has, no matter how well she argues or writes, no matter how prepared she is, she’s still just a dumb, beastly Black girl who should know her place.

Calling Jasmine Crockett “mentally deficient” is the white supremacist mind doing damage control. Kennedy called Jasmine Crockett a “dumb-dumb” not because Crockett is anything of the sort, but because she’s dangerously smart in ways that threaten conservative power. She knows the law. She knows how to use it. She knows how to make Republicans look like the unserious, unethical frauds they are.

Kennedy knows that if people actually listen to Jasmine Crockett, if they hear her questions, watch her disassemble Republican witnesses, or see her call out right-wing hypocrisy in real time, then they might start to wonder why Kennedy and her Fox News pals never have any answers.

She can’t say: Jasmine Crockett is wrong about Republicans shielding criminals. Because Crockett isn’t. She can’t say: Jasmine Crockett doesn’t understand the law. Because Crockett demonstrably does.

All Kennedy can say is: Don’t listen to her, she’s a dumb-dumb. That’s it. That’s the entire intellectual offering.

It’s the rhetorical move of a coward. Of a hack. Of a professional gaslighter who’s made a living comforting racists with the lie that any Black woman who challenges them is actually an idiot in disguise.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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