Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner kept up her servile devotion to Donald Trump yesterday as she deliberately changed the subject away from Trump’s attack on NFL football players taking a knee during the national anthem and began lecturing African Americans about black-on-black crime.
As John Amato, at Crooks and Liars, quipped, one could almost see “the apparition of Rudy Giuliani seep out from her body for a quick second pulling her strings.”
Faulkner had statistics of violent deaths in Chicago at hand so we know she planned this deflection in advance. She also dishonestly used Martin Luther King to cloak her attack.
FAULKNER: If you’re going to take a knee, why don’t you go to the streets of Chicago and do what Dr. King did so effectively? His daughter, his older daughter, was tweeting about it this weekend, Bernice King. “My father did this and it worked.” That is a cause and a venue worth doing.
But one look at King’s Twitter account makes it clear that she supports the #TakeAKnee protests and sees them as in line with her father’s activism. She also tweeted, “Many who quote #MLK today, and use his words out of context to deter nonviolent protest, would have hated him openly then.”
Of course, nobody else on the otherwise all-white panel pointed out Faulkner’s deception. She continued her scolding, unchallenged:
FAULKNER: I’m wondering why we’re doing it in the stadiums of escapism… Why is it happening there? Why shouldn’t it be happening on the streets? And whether it’s death by cop, death by neighbor, death by whatever, it’s happening in droves in the city of Chicago.
Cohost Sandra Smith read criticism from NASCAR team owner Richard Childress without pointing out that NASCAR is a mostly white sport. She followed up with Trump’s praise for Nascar.
Jason “Benghazi” Chaffetz called it “wholly American to disagree with your president and vocalize that.” But, he thought players should “stand united” during the anthem. Then he went on to show what a uniter he really is with a gratuitous swipe on U.S. schools for honoring the separation of Church and State: “And shame on those who are teaching these young kids that, you know, we go to these schools and they don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance [more than once a week]… and you can’t say a prayer.”
Nevertheless, Chaffetz, who voted for Trump while claiming not to endorse him, said Trump “probably over-spoke” by calling NFL players “SOBs.” “But my goodness, take another venue,” he lectured. He claimed that when Trump is “standing with the flag, he’s going to win that argument every time.”
But that wasn’t enough black-scolding for Faulkner. She asked white cohost Kennedy, “Why is it, Kennedy, do you think, that we can’t talk about black-on-black crime, ‘cause that’s what I’m talking about?”
“I’m not talking about what they’re taking a knee for right now in the NFL. I’m talking about the total picture” Faulkner continued. “If Black Lives Matter, why don’t they matter as much in Chicago?”
On Fox, the “total picture” of African Americans is always about Blacks Behaving Badly. In this case, as Amato noted, it coincidentally helps turn around a bad sitation that Trump brought on himself and melds its with his ‘law and order platform’ (which the police have denounced) that focuses on Chicago.
Watch Faulkner once again play Trump PR agent below, from the September 25, 2017 Outnumbered, via Crooks and Liars.