In an interview with Jim Hoft, notorious right-wing agitator and editor of Gateway Pundit, J.D. Vance suggested President Biden was “intentionally” trying to kill Americans who “didn’t vote for him” by (as this particular conspiracy theory goes) allowing fentanyl to proliferate in red states.
Per John Knefel in Media Matters, the concept started—as conspiracies often do—in the Tucker Carlson fever swamps, where the now-fired (as of 2023) Fox News host claimed it was all part of Biden’s “equity agenda.”
“Carlson concluded that although the United States had suffered high levels of overdose deaths, ‘these are exactly the kind of people the administration hates anyway, so with equity in mind, the White House plans to continue allowing as much fentanyl as possible to come into this country through Mexico.'”
Knefel went on to point out that fentanyl seizures were at the same level in 2022 as under the Trump Administration: “More broadly, the overdose epidemic in the United States is a complicated phenomenon, driven by drug manufacturers, a for-profit health care system, and economic precarity that’s resulted from deindustrialization and an overall decline in the power of organized labor. It is not caused by immigrants.”
The Biden administration has made significant progress disrupting the transnational drug trade, including busting up a Chinese money-laundering network and, more recently, the arrests of two Sinaloa Cartel leaders.
SOURCES
- Media Matters
- CNN
- Washington Post
- Photo credit: Getty images
