Bill O’Reilly’s attempt to delegitimize the Women’s March on Washington was so ridiculous that his own Fox colleague, Charles Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist, diagnosed him as “afraid of these women” and recommended a valium.
In his Talking Points commentary last night, O’Reilly did his part to assuage his buddy Donald Trump’s sensitive fee fees over his inauguration crowd size, surpassed by the Women's March crowd size, by arguing that the march was some kind of sinister sham. (Transcript excerpt via FoxNews.com):
O’REILLY: What Americans have to understand is that there is an organized effort to get Donald Trump out of office. This is a largely unreported story. The woman’s march over the weekend, a perfect example. That wasn’t a spontaneous event. It was organized by far left groups, which received millions of dollars from the liberal activist George Soros.
In fact, Soros has ties to 50 of the groups that attended the woman’s march this weekend. Fifty. And according to the media research center, sources pumped $90 million into those groups. Some of the top of march organizers were members of the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Bernie Sanders campaign. Again, this was not some spontaneous uprising.
It’s a well-thought-out political spectacle. Designed to denigrate the new president.
Can’t you just hear the gears turning in O’Reilly’s head? He wants to help his BFF but can’t tell Trump's brazen lies about his crowd size. So O’Reilly did the next best thing: he tried to gaslight us about the gigantic crowd sizes of the women’s marches.
It looks like O’Reilly got his talking points from elsewhere. Before I had a chance to write this post, I happened on a Jezebel article yesterday that referred to a Right Wing Watch post that stated:
Glenn Beck opened his radio show today by attacking the media for failing to report that last weekend’s massive Women’s March on Washington was nothing more than an “astroturf” rally orchestrated by George Soros and radical Islamic groups.
O’Reilly left out the part about “radical Islamic groups” but maybe he’s just saving them for later.
Fortunately for us, Krauthammer was not buying the lie. He appeared on The O’Reilly Factor immediately after the Talking Points. (All future transcript excerpts via FoxNews.com, lightly edited):
O’REILLY: What about the Soros factor? When you have this kind of billionaire behind 50 of the groups that sponsored the march and donating, according to reports, $90 million to those groups, that seems to be a little frightening when there is one guy and his crew, you know, pushing this as a Democratic movement, when it really is a contrived movement, is it not?
KRAUTHAMMER: You can put all the money you want into all the organizations you want. But the half a million people or so who showed up in Washington were not coming because of the waving of money or because of a bunch of groups had the funding. Look, all groups have for funding. The conservative groups, liberal groups, far left groups, big deal, that was real people showing up. My question to those real people was, where the hell were you on Election Day? You know?
(CROSSTALK)
O’REILLY: But don’t you feel they showed up because they were told to show up? I mean, look, if you look at the totalitarian governments in the—
KRAUTHAMMER: Who tells anybody to show up?
O’REILLY: These people live—
KRAUTHAMMER: Yes. What is the threat? What is the threat? Why do they have to go?
O’REILLY: Well, they have to go. They don’t have to go to a negative, they have to go to be with her brothers and sisters and to show their solidarity and that they are good people and fight the fascist racists. I mean, it is a whip up. And if you study history, all the totalitarian regimes were fueled with whip ups, okay? And people turned out to the streets. Were they spontaneous? No. They were well organized and targeted and the target this time is Trump to get them out of there before the four years are over.
KRAUTHAMMER: Look, you know, if you are talking about the fascists and the ‘20s and ‘30s, they actually took over governments, essentially by force. We are not talking about that. They, you know, when you are talking about people showing up, being whipped up, you are saying free people read the internet, they decide they sympathize with this idea or group, they get on a train, they get in a car, they cross country, they go to a demonstration. How is that different from the march on Washington in 1963? Were they swept up? Yes, by a civil rights movement.
O’Reilly went on to claim that the difference between the Women’s March and the civil rights movement was because “The civil rights movements in the ‘60s and all of the demonstrations that took place were against injustice. And “The same thing with Vietnam.” As if O’Reilly would have been on the side of those protesters under a Trump regime.
But Krauthammer remained unpersuaded. Finally, there was this exchange near the end of the discussion:
O’REILLY: I think there's something more nefarious going on behind the scenes than you do.
KRAUTHAMMER: Oh, come on. So, you are afraid of these women?
O’REILLY: I’m not afraid of anybody.
KRAUTHAMMER: Are you?
O’REILLY: I’m not afraid of anybody.
KRAUTHAMMER: Yes, you are … I would recommend less paranoia, less conspiracy, and a little relaxation. It will be okay.
Krauthammer also jokingly said he'd prescribe a valium.
Watch O’Reilly do his part to help the Snowflake-in-Chief deal with his crowd size below, from the January 23, 2017 The O’Reilly Factor.
It has been announced that O’Reilly will interview Trump on Super Bowl day.
All these years I’ve been working for a “George Soros-funded website” and I’ve never gotten one check from him!
Sweetie, women found their voices 40 years ago. But they are still quite often treated as second-class citizens and they are tired of it. They have every right under the Constitution as men.
A man like Donald Trump has said repeatedly that he still sees women as second-class, as nothing more than sex symbols who exist solely for his pleasure. They have heard that this man wants to take away their right to proper health care. They are angry and they are afraid,
But they are also strong, stronger than they have ever been. They are strong enough to stand and shout that they aren’t going to take it anymore. They gain strength in their numbers, all over the planet – even in Antarctica. They reject the disrespect they have heard come from Donald Trump’s mouth.They are going to fight for their rights and nobody better get.in their way.
I’m sorry you don’t agree. But of you really listened you may have learned something.
Relax, I know, that was close, 2.8 million more voted for someone with a private email server over the pussy grabber.
These women are what is wrong with society, today! They are a disgrace and do nothing but make America a laughing stock! They should be holding their heads down in shame!! I don’t care if there were marches all over the world that day. It still doesn’t change the fact that these women are a disgrace to our country!!! I don’t care about any other country but my own!!! They can look and act like fools in their own country, it’s not my concern!! They sicken many many women in our country!!
This years Super Bowl will be televised by Fox. In the past President Obama gave pregame interviews to whichever network broadcasted the game. When Fox had the game in 2011 and 2014, they sent Bill to do the interview which he interrupted the President each time he tried to answer the question. It’ll be interesting to see if Bill does it this time and allows his guest this time to answer the given in advance questions.
Bill O’Reilly and Trump are pals who socialize together. O’Reilly has a massive conflict of interest in covering his milkshake sharing buddy and should recuse himself from is right-wing pro-Trump editorializing. Fox News would expect no less from the msm.
I don’t know how much of that information is available publicly or by subscription. Meaning, I’m not sure if page views or unique visitors to NBC.com’s streaming inauguration coverage would be made public like Nielsen ratings.
OTOH, YouTube, which would have also carried a lot of the streaming video, only counts “views” publicly. So if Kevin were to watch part of one of our videos, close the page and then come back and watch the rest, I would see that as two views and never know if it was the same person or not.
The reality of those marches is that when people heard about them, they chose to go to them. I know over a hundred people who went to marches in multiple cities as a specific way to show their dissatisfaction with the Pence White House, their concern about its announced intentions, their disgust for the bigotry of the Tweeter in Chief, and their refusal to just take the bullying and the attacks now being thrown at them on a daily basis.
O’Reilly can whine all he wants about this. It will not change the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by a wide margin, that he only squeaked by to game the election, that he holds the lowest approval rating in our memory for a new president, and that his dreadful inauguration was marked by low attendance and lower ratings than he had fervently hoped to see. If O’Reilly had the slightest interest in actual facts and not in the spin he refuses to admit he engages in, he would note that the online viewing numbers being touted by Spicer and Conway are not showing what Trump wishes they did.
For the record, Spicer attempted to play up hits on online streams of the inauguration at various websites including CNN and Fox News, as a way of somehow giving a huge boost to Trump’s television ratings, which fell below the numbers marked by Obama and other presidents, and were over 10 million shorter than those marked by Reagan in 1981. But Spicer and Conway are dissembling about what the online numbers actually mean. Registered hits or page views on a website are not the same thing at all as Nielsen Ratings. Nielsen Ratings measure what channel was being viewed on a television set at any given time, usually broken out in 15 minute chunks. So, if the sample family’s channel was tuned to the local ABC affiliate for the whole time of the inauguration, ABC gets a higher rating, and it’s noted that the inauguration was being watched.
Unique page views or stream views are a different matter. Because it’s metered not from the user, but from the website. This means that the same person could leave the page and return to it, or could close their browser and re-open it to the specific page multiple times in an hour or even in a minute. I frequently do this in reading articles even at Newshounds. So quoting a number of 16 million hits at the CNN stream of the inauguration and equating that to the 31 million TV viewers estimated by Nielsen is a nonsensical comparison. It’s comparing apples to breadsticks. Those 16 million hits may only represent a quarter of a million people, or only tens of thousands of people. And many are likely to have only looked at a couple of minutes of the stream before turning it off.
I also note that Spicer and Conway carefully forgot to discuss the number of stream page views noted for the Obama inaugurations. Because it would show that even those were higher for Obama than for Trump. In trying to double down on this ridiculous lie, these guys are only proving that they cannot and must not be trusted. If they would lie about this, and the subject itself is trivial, then how should we think they’ll conduct themselves when it comes to something that really does matter?
And I would like to know where my cut of the Soros money is. Myself, my twin daughters and my girlfriend attended the NYC march. And we weren’t told to attend. And I paid for the train tickets and an early dinner to boot. And didn’t receive a damned penny from Soros.