Other than Megyn Kelly’s “Santa is white” comment, nothing exemplifies Fox News racism more than Glenn Beck’s attack on President Obama as a "racist." Yet, Kelly thought Beck was an appropriate person to discuss racial unrest in Baltimore.
Former Fox host Beck was probably booked to trash Donald Trump on the night after the CNN Republican debate. And that’s what happened. But before they got to Trump, Kelly turned to Beck for commentary on a mistrial that had been declared in one of the Freddie Gray cases in Baltimore after the jury was unable to come to a verdict.
In her introduction, Kelly noted that the protests after the mistrial had been peaceful. But, predictably, a split screen displayed a small group of protesters chanting about a**hole cops and calling for “killer cops” to be sent to jail.
Just as predictably, Kelly did not note Beck’s racial history. Instead, she offered some rare and brief sympathy for the protesters as she primed the pump for what she undoubtedly knew would be some racial animosity to come.
KELLY: We see unrest in Baltimore, in part because a lot of the folks there wanted to see a conviction. And they feel that they, as a city, have been railroaded into poverty, into a life in which the cops are out to get them and nobody cares. Your thoughts.
Beck was not the hate-mongering firebrand one might have expected. He saved that for Trump. But the racial hostility was unmistakeable in his whitesplaining.
BECK: The way to make people care is to not burn your city down. That’s not a way to make people care about things. I think they have been railroaded by progressive policies. …Lots of places have. That’s why you get involved in the political system. Are the cops bad? I think there are bad cops but I think there are more good cops. There’s bad people. There are bad bakers, there are bad TV show hosts, there are bad everything. That’s the way society is. The job of people who really want justice is to strengthen the justice system, not weaken it, to strengthen the community ties, not weaken them.
The problem with that is, bad bakers and bad TV show hosts are not normally armed to the teeth as they walk or drive through your neighborhood, stop you and possibly kill you if you have a bad interaction. And they’re also not paid out of your tax dollars.
But Kelly didn’t point out the differences between cops and bakers or TV hosts. Instead, she moved on to prod Beck into an attack on Donald Trump, whom he is known to hate.
KELLY: There are now some people coming out and saying that if he's the nominee - somebody said this on our show last night - Hillary Clinton will win 49 out of 50 states and the Republican Party will face devastation like it's never seen before, that they will give up, they will give up all the gain in state legislatures and so on because so motivated will the Democrats be to get to the polls and stop him.
BECK: I know that I won't go to the polls. I won't vote for Hillary Clinton and I won't vote for Donald Trump. I just won't. And I know a lot of people that feel that way. I know there’s a lot of people in the GOP who are like, look, well he’s better that Hillary Clinton. Maybe, I don't know. I mean the guy last night, he didn't even know what the triad was. He didn't even know what are the missile silos and the Strategic Air Command with the missiles on the planes and our nuclear submarines. He didn't even know what that meant. He couldn't even answer that question. It was bizarre.
He’s also a giant progressive. So I can't vote for progressive. I can't vote for Hillary, and I can't vote for him. I said, probably a year and half ago that I thought we were entering the times of the Whig Party. That the Republicans were going to go to the way of the Whigs, who they demolished back in Abraham Lincoln's time. And I think that's happening. They have not, they got power, they said we just have to have the House and the Senate. We got it. Now they say, we have to have the House and the Senate and the White House. Well wait a minute, we heard that before with George W. Bush. They're not listening. They're not doing what the people have hired them to do. If they put Donald Trump in, try to put him in office, if that's what the people want, you are going to see an end to the Republican Party. It will just be over, there'll just be nothing left.
The "new Fox News" still looks a lot like the old one.
Watch it below, from the December 16 The Kelly File.
It’s the holidays! How come Beck wasn’t wearing a Santa hat and a red straight jacket with white fringe?