What is the impact of high-profile violations of liberal and democratic norms on support for human rights around the world? The literature on the spread of human rights norms focusses on why some norms are more likely to be accepted than others, but pays little attention to how prominent international violations of those norms might affect their acceptance. This study uses three survey experiments, in China, India, and the United Kingdom, to explore how ethnic and religious discrimination in the United States affects public preferences towards minority rights in other countries. Do American violations encourage people to follow the United States’ example and disavow those norms? This study finds that American human rights violations are widely reported in both open and authoritarian countries' media. However, the impacts of those violations varies widely. For respondents in India, where ethnic tensions are a common feature of the news cycle, exposure to news of American violations did substantially decrease their concern for minority rights at home. However, survey respondents in China and the United Kingdom, with relatively little mainstream day-to-day coverage of ethnic tensions in their country, became, surprisingly, significantly more concerned about minority rights at home when exposed to news of American violations of minority rights. The study demonstrates that when ‘critical states’ like the United States respect or violate well-established human rights norms at home, these actions may have unintended and heterogeneous impacts on human rights across the globe.