While the non-Fox world recoils in horror at the McKinney, Texas video of a white police officer pointing a gun at a group of black teenagers in bathing suits and shoving one black teen’s face into the ground, Megyn Kelly spent nearly a half hour trying to make the story another Fox episode of Blacks Behaving Badly. UPDATED: Kelly's white guest is probably the real thug.
“The folks in the middle of this mess say the video today seen by millions only tells part of the story,” Kelly said at the beginning of her 14:38 segment on the matter. Then, she proceeded to tell only part of the story, herself.
Fox’s Trace Gallagher did a report that quoted two people. One, an African American who wrote on Facebook, “Look, I LIVE in this community and this ENTIRE incident is NOT racial at all. A few THUGS spoiled a COMMUNITY event by fighting, jumping over fences into a PRIVATE pool, harassing and damaging property… Not EVERYTHING is about race.” Gallagher’s other source was a white neighbor who “had to send his family away because he’s getting threats.”
Kelly’s sole guest for this segment was a white resident named “Sean” who declined to reveal his last name. It soon became clear that Sean was the guy who called the police, or at least one of them. And he did so, he said, because he didn’t like the music the black teens were playing at their pool party. He said it “wasn’t appropriate for kids my son’s age” or, in his opinion, some of the teens.
The Grio has reported, “Black and white witnesses agree: McKinney pool party fight started when white mother slapped a black teen.”
But Kelly didn’t mention that. Instead, she deliberately promoted the “black kids were racist thugs” angle.
Sean said that the violence began when he was taking his family home because his son was scared.
“What was it that scared your son?” Kelly asked, obviously pumping for Blacks Behaving Badly details.
When she didn’t get anything juicy (just that the shouting was intimidating), she moved on to the video. She asked Sean if he thought the police officer used excessive force on the young woman. And surprise! Sean didn’t think so.
Sean said the officer “kind of had to match that situation with a good amount of aggression and kind of calm the crowd down. …The only people he were going after were people who just got up and started running and it wasn’t just black kids.”
Kelly played “good cop” by asking “how can you justify” the officer’s behavior to the 14 year-old girl. But I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts, as my mother used to say, that Kelly knew from the pre-interview that Sean was going to tell us it was the girl’s fault.
And surprise! He did!
SEAN: I think the officer gave her a chance to leave multiple times, told her to leave and she refused and one of the things I don’t think is also being talked about is the officer ran out of handcuffs and I think if he would have had handcuffs, he would have been able to cuff this girl and it wouldn’t have gone this far but he was kind of sitting on her back waiting for other officers to bring cuffs over.
In further support of the meme, Kelly asked Sean, “Describe that scene that that officer walked into.”
Sean told Kelly the only fight before the police arrived occurred between a “young black girl and two middle-aged white females.” He said that happened while he was on the phone with the police. That appears to be the incident referred to by The Grio. So, clearly, there was no fighting when Sean called the police, just the music he didn’t like. Yet Kelly never seemed to consider that maybe Sean was biased.
Instead, Kelly pressed for more Blacks Behaving Badly details. “What is the status in the area now, because we’ve spoken with some residents who say they’re scared. …One guy says he’s had death threats and has had armed security posted outside his house.”
Sean claimed the whole neighborhood is “pretty uneasy,” He said, “There’s a protest that’s happening tonight and based on what we’ve seen nationally, a lot of the neighbors are kind of concerned about how it may end. And you know, I think the majority of us, even as a whole community in Craig Ranch, have been labeled a certain way and that’s not sittin’ well with anybody. Most of the people I’ve talked to support what the police did and most people don’t think this is a race issue. This is a out-of-control kids issue.”
Later, Kelly discussed the matter with racist Mark Fuhrman and African American radio host Richard Fowler. Fowler did not call out Fox’s despicable use of Fuhrman in a racially sensitive story. Nor did he call out Fox’s obviously anti-black agenda at work.
Even though, as Raw Story noted, Kelly deliberately and gratuitously maligned Dajerria Becton, the girl the officer tackled.
“The girl was no saint, either,” Kelly said of Dajerria Becton. “He had told her to leave, and she continued to linger. When a cop tells you to leave, get out.”
Kelly did not mention that, according to Becton, she was in the process of complying with Casebolt’s order when he violently took her down after being called to the scene of a pool party.
“He told me to keep walking, and we were walking and I guess he thought we were saying rude stuff to him,” Becton told KDFW-TV.
Watch it below, from the June 8 The Kelly File, via Fox News and Media Matters.
UPDATE: It turns out Sean has an arrest record for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. And worse.
Bet she would’ve been on top of things if the escapees were Blacks.
FoxNoise: We’re a bunch of privileged white assholes who decide when white cops are being unfairly targeted for beating up half-naked Black girls.
(On a side note: When the story first broke and I saw what the girl was wearing, I had to ask myself what the cop’s problem was. Did he really think she had some sort of concealed weapon that she was going to pull on him? That the episode of “Married with Children” where Bud’s making an exercise video that’s been financed by some mobsters was real? At the end of the episode, it turns out that the back-up exercise girls—who are basically wearing nothing more than bikinis—are actually Federal agents and they’ve all pulled out some big guns on the mobsters. Bud’s only question is where did they hide the guns because he’d “thoroughly” checked them out—at which point, he’s also arrested, presumably for his overzealous body checking.)