ABSTRACT

Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of roughly 700 articles published on the Breitbart News ‘Cartel Chronicles’ site between 2015 and 2021, this article analyzes the ways conservative citizen journalism projects strategically mobilize key tropes from international human rights to justify calls for militarization on the US/Mexico Border. Specifically, it details how widely accepted human rights frameworks like freedom of the press and protection of the rights of children are used both as evidence of humanitarian breakdown within Mexico and as a condemnation of the Mexican government. I argue that through its selective and motivated employment of human rights, Breitbart is promoting a form of ‘bullshit human rights’, defined as the purposefully misleading mobilization of rights claims deracinated from their context and repurposed without consideration for the truth they hold for the individuals who experience them. The suffering documented by ‘Cartel Chronicles’ serves only as fuel for Breitbart’s larger political project of militarizing the US/Mexico Border without consideration of human costs. Paradoxically, bullshit human rights call for an increase in violence in order to protect against human suffering.

摘要

本文对 2015 年至 2021 年间在 Breitbart 新闻“卡特尔编年史”网站上发表的大约 700 篇文章进行了定性内容分析，分析了保守的公民新闻项目战略性地动员国际人权的关键比喻以证明对美国进行军事化的呼吁的方式/墨西哥边境。具体来说，它详细说明了广泛接受的人权框架，如新闻自由和保护儿童权利，如何被用作墨西哥国内人道主义崩溃的证据和对墨西哥政府的谴责。我认为，通过选择性和有动机地使用人权，布赖特巴特正在促进一种“胡说八道的人权”，被定义为有目的地误导性地动员权利要求脱离其背景，并在不考虑他们为经历这些权利的个人所持有的真相的情况下重新调整其用途。《卡特尔编年史》记录的苦难只是为布赖特巴特更大的政治项目提供燃料，即在不考虑人力成本的情况下将美国/墨西哥边境军事化。矛盾的是，胡说八道的人权要求增加暴力，以防止人类遭受苦难。