To be clear, Kelly and her other guest, Richard Fowler, did push back on this, though by playing dumb (both said they didn’t get Jackson’s point), and Kelly followed up by clarifying that Sharpton does not eat fried chicken for health reasons, even though that has nothing to do with what Jackson was saying. His “joke” wasn’t that Sharpton personally is a fan of fried chicken, but just yuk-yuking about buying off black voters with a Kentucky Fried Chicken endorsement.

A little less overt but still obnoxious was “The O’Reilly Factor” earlier that evening when Bill O’Reilly argued that “one of the reasons Barack Obama won was because African-Americans voted for him to the tune of 93 or 94 percent” and that a major reason was “because of his skin color.”

His guest, Eboni Williams, tweaked that a bit, saying, “Some of it was because of maybe his skin color, but not because he said oh us downtrodden victim-hood mentality.”

It’s noteworthy that, on both segments, the guests in question were black, and even the “fried chicken” joke came from a black guest, Kevin Jackson. But that’s how conservative propaganda outlets like Fox News generally operate. The pretense is that they agree with liberal values like racial equality — look, they have black guests! — but then that pretense is used to advance odious, easily debunked racial stereotypes.

The conservative audience for Fox News tunes in to hear about how black voters are stupid, venial, easily bought off and the “real” racists, and Fox News is going to shovel that nonsense at them, even if they have to drape it into faux claims to be doing it in the name of basic liberal values like equality.

(They do the same thing with gender issues. The relentless drumbeat of anti-feminism on Fox News is almost always performed by a woman or in the presence of a woman, whose indulgent laughter signals that it’s not “really” sexism that’s going on.)

Fox News may have a more sophisticated format, but they are still peddling the same racist stereotypes that Trump is needling, albeit more blatantly, in order to rally conservative voters around him. And most, probably all Republicans politician out there— hell, quite a few Democratic ones— are perfectly happy to go onto Fox News. They even host Republican debates. That is what mainstream conservatism is: Really frigging racist.

And really, Trump still plays the same game of plausible deniability as Fox News, even if he likes to stick a toe over the constantly shifting line more. Even his noxious “pussy” moment was played in exactly the same way “The Kelly File” played the “fried chicken” joke. A woman was the original source of the word (giving cover to deny that it’s really sexist), Trump issued a bunch of disavowals of such illiberal language, but everyone in place got that you just have to say that in order to placate the PC police. It’s a game, and he plays it well. But so does everyone else in the conservative movement.