Last week, Fox News host Jesse Watters invited a tarot card reader, Paula Roberts, on his show to do a reading for this year’s presidential election. We may never know what went on behind the scenes to lead to Roberts’ appearance, but the segment ended up being a small gift to humanity. I hadn’t heard of Paula Roberts before I watched the segment, but she’s one of my new favorite people!
On the segment, Watters asked Roberts to pull a card forecasting how Trump will fare in the election. Roberts pulled the 5 of cups from a Smith-Waite deck, which depicts a figure mourning three spilled cups and ignoring the two cups behind them that are still full.
“A sense of loss,” Roberts said, interpreting the card. “A sense of loss, but it’s very specific … it’s as if [Trump] may be thinking more about what he’s lost, while not taking advantage of what he still has.”
Fox News being a right-wing propaganda machine, it’s hard to figure out what Watters or his producers got out of this segment. Roberts’ reading is pretty definitive: Trump is going to lose this election. Regardless of whether you believe in tarot or not, that’s not exactly a message that’s going to rally conservative voters.
And you know what? I think Roberts is pretty awesome for being honest about what she saw in the cards. She laughed and acknowledged that she was on Fox (again, no one is even pretending at this point that Fox is a legitimate news network), but she didn’t hold back. I read cards, too, and I applaud her for doing what any good reader does: tell people the truth of what you see, even if they don’t necessarily want to hear it.
So what was Watters thinking, exactly? Did he assume that any psychic he invited on the show would play by Fox’s rules? Did he assume that it’d be easy to make Roberts fall in line? I don’t know, but what I love is that this isn’t even the first time Fox has brought an occultist on one of their shows, only to get cheerfully taken down a notch.
Fox News keeps trying to talk down to witches, and it keeps backfiring
In 2017, Amanda Yates Garcia—the “Oracle of Los Angeles” and author of a memoir called Initiated—went on Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about a binding spell she performed against Trump. Carlson tried his hardest to humiliate Garcia, asking asinine questions like “are spells legal?” and “do witches use eye of newt?”
It turns out, though, that witches are savvier than Fox News hosts. Garcia gently annihilated Carlson, talking about the power of symbolic action, pointing out that the eye of newt thing is a line from Shakespeare, and highlighting some of the harm that Trump caused during his presidency. She even managed to get Carlson to agree with her that student loan debt is out of control.
Normally, if I saw someone shooting themselves in the foot over and over again, I’d tell them to stop. I mean, god, their foot is riddled with bullet holes! They’re bleeding on the carpet! But you know what? Fox should keep inviting witches on their shows. It’s not going well for them, but it’s going great for the rest of us.
(featured image: Fox News)
