Bullshit human rights: Breitbart News' "Cartel Chronicles" and the militarized framing of humanitarian crisis on the US-Mexico border.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]