‘These people are freaks’: Former Fox News analyst compares network to bar scene in Star Wars

United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters called Fox News guests “freaks” in a special tell-all programme about working for the network.

On the show titled Fox and the Big Lie: Trump returns to campaign trail amid ‘stolen election’ lawsuits, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr Peters said: “When I left, the guests got more and more bizarre, more distasteful”.

Mr Peters worked at Fox News for years as a military analyst, until 2018 when he accused the network of “assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law”.

In the room where talking heads would wait to speak to pundits on the show, it became “like the bar scene in the first Star Wars film,” said the colonel. “These people are freaks. Ah, and then you realise, you’re one of the freaks!”

A reporter behind the scenes asked what he means by “freaks”? Mr Peters replied: “People with no qualifications who could not even speak cogently, who could only speak the lines they’d memorised praising Trump, as though he were a heathen God that had to be appeased with slavish rhetoric,” Peters explained.

“Fox isn’t immoral, it’s amoral,” he later said in the interview before referring to his ex-colleagues on the network as “prostitutes” and accusing President Trump of being “enthralled to a foreign power, a hostile foreign power”.

In 2018, after he quit the network he told CNN: “I am convinced that Vladimir Putin has a grip on President Trump,” adding, “I hope I’m wrong”. He’s also criticised the network for “doing it for ratings and profit” and “doing a great grave disservice to our country”.

Mr Peters was initially glad to be associated with the brand, and thought it a necessary conservative and libertarian source, but, he said “with the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine, and I don’t do propaganda for anyone.”

The Independent has contacted Fox News for further comment.