When Bill O'Reilly issues his trademark denunciations, those on the receiving end are harassed and sometimes get death threats. For years, O'Reilly attacked abortion provider Dr. George Tiller and we know what happened. Hopefully, O'Reilly's newest target, a California college professor, won't meet with the same fate!
Last week (December 14th), America's white, Christian daddy directed his venom at the "totalitarian left" on college campuses. Along with his fellow right-wing travelers, he believes that today's campuses are hotbeds of nasty tolerance which is corrupting our innocent youth. He began his Talking Points with the claim that "colleges across the country are dominated by far-left teachers who are now hysterical about the election of Donald Trump."
He played video, surreptitiously obtained via an anonymous student and released by the president of the Orange Coast College Republican Club, which shows an Orange Coast College professor, Olga Perez Stable Cox, who, after citing the bigotry of the Trump campaign, described the election as "an act of terror."
O'Reilly immediately attacked the professor: "Of course it is simply gibberish slander, intellectually absurd. Yet the college pays that instructor to 'assault,' using her word, her students. I mean, come on. Who wants to hear that kind of diatribe in a psychology class?"
And that's when things started going in a dark direction. After he asked, "What can be done to stop the madness?" he provided a history lesson on how totalitarian regimes "controlled the schools." He warned, "Now we have the totalitarian left in America and if you don't see it their way, you are attacked and demonized." He added that students "can be punished through the grading system" and warned, "This cannot continue."
O'Reilly continued his attack: "It is up to each individual state to monitor what happens in their public colleges and high schools. Even in private school, if the institution gets taxpayer money, the state has a right to know what is going on. It is time for governors to hold college administrators responsible for crazy stuff going on in the classrooms. Academic freedom is one thing. Harming students with insane ideology is something else."
The oh-so-tolerant right wing has already started the vilification of the teacher who, as Raw Story reported, has gone into hiding "after some Trump supporters began circulating both her photo and her home address." According to AlterNet, "[T]he sheer number of harassing messages, as well as the violence some expressed, was frightening enough to force Cox to leave the state for a period," as per the president of the local teachers' union.
Cox has also been targeted by a right wing "Professor Watchlist" which is a group that serves to "expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom." (One of her "crimes" - accusing Mike Pence of being anti-gay which, of course, he is!)
After O'Reilly contributed to a climate of hatred in which an abortion provider was brutally murdered, he received a "Courage Award" from the hate group, the Family Research Council. Maybe he's hoping for another award?
When O'Reilly talks about stopping the madness, he should look in the mirror.
Watch below, from the December 14, 2016 The O'Reilly Factor.
Par for Fox’s dishonest course – they do this sort of crap all the time – you take some statistical outliers and use them to demonize all your political foes by extension.
As Scooter says, O’Reilly is being a hypocrite here. Projecting as usual.
So, sadly, yes there will be violence. I feel sympathy for this professor but they’re clearly going to make an example of her. The best we can do is to keep our eyes open and note what these people are doing as they do it. Keep in mind that Fox News will work overtime to deny anything untoward is happening, even while encouraging it to go on. They are now running stories saying that the massive number of hate crimes committed after Trump’s squeaker in November are “fraudulent claims”, when all they’ve been able to come up with is a handful of those. (I frankly wouldn’t be surprised to see anywhere from 30-50 bogus claims in a large number like that, which is what Fox News is trying to hide behind, but that deliberately forgets the other 950 that are factually documented…)
This is going to be a fairly grim time. We need to document it and to stick together in opposing the viciousness and the bullying every time we see it happening. Do not be the last person to speak up lest you wind up like Martin Niemoller.
