Same Hymn

“The reason I’m famous is because I’m Irish. … Their traditions of Irish Catholic feistiness were ingrained in me. … The reason I’ve succeeded is because I’m Irish.”

Irish America Hall of Fame, in a room of his own. He calls himself a thoroughbred, both sides Irish, and puts the voice in 1950s and ’60s Levittown: bread rolls across the table, the parish, the NYPD grandfather. The ghost he named is Long Island Catholic. Not Belfast.

“So I’m one hundred percent Irish, which is very unusual, you know, for an American this day and age. My bloodline is all Celtic, which is frightening.”

He does not treat Irishness as a grandparent story. He treats it as the whole organism: blarney, class, the reason the voice sounds the way it does.

“My people came from County Cavan in Ireland. And the British Crown marched in there with their henchman, Oliver Cromwell, and they seized all of my ancestors’ lands… They threw them into slavery, pretty much indentured servitude… They had to leave the country, just as Africans had to leave.”

A domestic argument about Black incarceration is answered with a seventeenth-century Irish land seizure. The homeland is the rebuttal.

“Back when my people arrived from Galway, in the 1840s, there was little in the way of social welfare… I told the good people in western Ireland who approached me that I hope a fair but tough immigration bill passes.”

He files the column from Ireland and uses Irish listeners as the chorus for an American border sermon. Compassion is granted because his people starved. Restriction is granted because America is no longer empty.

“Whatever I have done or will do in this life, I’m working-class Irish American.”

Not “former accountant’s son from Levittown.” The public name is the ethnicity plus the class myth. That is the hymn’s chorus.

“Last Friday, I appeared on Ireland’s version of The Tonight Show and the host had scores of cue cards from Media Matters… an assassination website.”

He flies to Ireland and performs the Factor there: the press is a hit squad, the quote is out of context, the man at the desk is the victim of a machine. The homeland does not change the manner.

“Visited County Cavan where my ancestors were evicted from their land in 1845. That forced them to come to America legally so they wouldn’t starve. Pardon me if I reject the “white privilege” scenario if applied to my family.”

Standing at the county sign, the famine is converted into a legal-immigrant credential and a privilege exemption. Irish people answered that there was no federal “illegal” category in 1845. He posted it anyway. The alignment is the reflex.

“I’ve seen… Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”

Fox later said he was not an eyewitness to bombings; officers showed him photographs, and he went on a police raid in Divis Flats while researching an unfinished book. He borrows the Troubles as authority. He does not run a brief for Dublin or Belfast. That is the honest limit of “Ireland first.”

“The claims of an Armenian genocide are not based on historical facts. If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place. … It is kind of hard to miss the planned extermination of 1.5 million people, isn’t it?”

Written in The Daily Pennsylvanian under the headline “Historical Fact or Falsehood?” This is not vibe. It is the Turkish state’s denial, typed by a student who had been in the country until he was eight.

“We selected The Young Turks because it means young rebels looking to overthrow the established system.”

The dictionary alibi. The historical name is the Committee of Union and Progress, the late-Ottoman government that carried out the genocide. Armenian organizations have said so for years. He kept the name. A homeland brand is not an accident when you refuse to change it.

“My mistake at the time was confusing myself for a scholar of history, which I most certainly am not… I am going to refrain from commenting on the topic of the Armenian Genocide, which I do not know nearly enough about.”

He withdraws the denial and then withdraws from the subject. For a man who comments on everything, silence on the one Turkish wound is a position.

“The Armenian Genocide happened… I grew up with only the Turkish side of the story… Turks get super mad about this and it’s because it touches their core identity.”

This is the break in a pure-denial file. He names the crime and names why Turks cannot. Keep it in the dossier. A file that hides the reversal is propaganda.

“He has described the 1974 invasion as Turkey taking the island and then “returning” about 60 percent, with the killing stopping, and with Greeks and Turks at roughly 60 and 40.”

Fact-checkers in Cyprus marked that account false. Turkey holds about 37 percent. The 1960 census was about 78 percent Greek Cypriot and 18 percent Turkish Cypriot. The numbers he reached for were the numbers that make the invasion look like a fair split.

“Why is Trump threatening to leave NATO? Because the Israelis have already announced they want to attack Turkey next — and Turkey is in NATO. Israel can’t attack our own alliance, so they have to first destroy that alliance.”

This is the foreign-policy hymn in one post. Harm to Turkey is framed as harm to America. The other party is cast as the wrecker of the pact that protects “us.”

“Turkey is the second largest army in NATO, our top alliance. They’re a bulwark against Russia… an incredibly important strategic ally as opposed to Israel that has done nothing but harm to America.”

On the show he ranks Turkey above Israel as the American interest, cites the Cuban Missile Crisis as Turkish protection of America, and asks why Washington would enter a war against its own ally. That is a Turkey brief wearing an America First coat.

“You Zionists are such unbelievable racists… Among many other countries, there is a very simple answer — one of America’s top allies — Turkey.”

When the pile-on comes, the example he reaches for is not France and not Japan. It is Turkey.

“I’ll use my own ethnic background, so people are offended less. If the Turks had come to me… How do we get the Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Arabs to stop hating us? Step 1: Stop killing them. Step 2: Stop occupying them.”

He can say this. It is not Ankara’s line. The file is not a party card for Erdoğan. It is a reflex: the Ottoman map is the map he thinks in, even when he is scolding it.