Bill O’Reilly once again cloaked vile racial animosity for Black Lives Matter under a thin cloak of concern for African Americans. And yet his African American guest did not call him out on it.
The very title of O’Reilly’s Talking Points commentary was offensive: “How Black Lives Matter is killing Americans.” What O’Reilly argued, without citing a single criminology expert, was that Black Lives Matter has somehow hamstrung police and caused murder rates to go up.
O’REILLY: First, the stats, and they are stunning. Since the Ferguson chaos, murders in the USA’s 50 largest cities are up close to 17 percent. And much higher in cities with large black populations. In Chicago, for example, this year alone, shootings up around 80 percent. Why? Because the Chicago police have stopped stopping suspicious people. So-called pedestrian stops are down 90 percent in the Windy City. When you fail to police proactively, people commit more crimes.
In fact, experts disagree about the cause of the rising murder rates, which are still well below the peaks of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But O’Reilly made it sound as if there was no question that Black Lives Matter is solely to blame.
Even worse, O’Reilly pretended he was doing a public service by demonizing African Americans:
O’REILLY: The media will not spotlight that much of the violent crime in America is being committed right now by young black men. In fact, black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at a rate 10 times higher than white and Hispanic male teenagers combined. And blacks of all ages commit homicide at a rate eight times higher than whites and Hispanics combined. Conclusion? There is a violent sub-culture in the African-American community that should be exposed and confronted.
I think one could easily argue that there’s a violent sub-culture in the white community, too, but O’Reilly never seems to notice. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.
But O’Reilly wasn’t done demonizing Black Lives Matter. He now suggested the group is somehow anti-American.
O’REILLY: In addition, Black Lives Matter is now infringing on freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.
O’Reilly was referring to an incident at DePaul University when activists rushed the stage and disrupted an event with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and allegedly threatened him.
I in no way support that kind of behavior. But where was O’Reilly’s outrage when Donald Trump endorsed violence against protesters at his rallies? Or threatened to curtail the First Amendment and the media? I may have missed something but I am certain that O’Reilly has never demonized Trump the same way.
Sadly, guest Eric Guster, who followed O’Reilly’s Talking Points, supposedly to rebut him, was yet another liberal who either pretended or was duped into believing that a Fox host was making a good-faith argument. In fact, O’Reilly was mounting a kind of more-muted Trump spectacle. Only instead of “Little Marco,” we got “killer Black Lives Matter.” Like his buddy Trump, O’Reilly played to the worst racial stereotypes for the purpose of political gain.
Watch him get away with it, below, from the May 25 The O’Reilly Factor.
“Bill O’Reilly’s making this up: His latest racial bloviating is just plain fiction”
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/27/bill_oreillys_making_this_up_his_latest_racial_bloviating_is_just_plain_fiction/
I’m so tired of FOX’s blarney they’re telling the truth the liberal media ignores or suppresses. This is unadulterated bulls—t. The black on black crime issue like other stuff FOX whines about like #Benghazi is covered by media outside of FOX’s bubble. They just don’t spin it for partisan purposes then obsess over the spin for months or years on end.
FOX News covers only a small sliver of the news they can exploit. They’re agenda driven. If you watch, say PBS “NewsHour”, they cover a much broader range of stories worldwide, not just report the same tired memes over and over again.
So FOX more times than I can count brings up the black crime issue, which leads to a discussion on law enforcement profiling blacks (while leaving the honest white FOX viewers alone), which leads to a demand we stand 100% behind law enforcement no matter who they abuse or kill (as long as they aren’t a white person FOX viewers identify with), and finally a 2nd Amendment argument of let us white folk carry guns everywhere (and let us use them with the same latitude as police) because that’s freedom.
My job (programmer) is 100% related to police and courts. Does O’Reilly think his infantile understanding of crime is not understood by politicians and law enforcement? How stupid are his viewers? I’ve got to ask.
Well there you have it, straight from BillO’s — something: shootings are up . . . because the cops aren’t shooting people.
That’s the same kind of rightwingnut “logic” that brought us “cutting taxes increases revenue”, and “an unarmed protest group (BLM) is killing Americans” . . .
.