Anyone who has watched The O’Reilly Factor lately has probably seen Bill O’Reilly rail against the “grievance industry.” It’s a term closely tied to “race hustlers” in his mind. As I’ve previously posted, it’s little more than cover for O’Reilly to launch his own grievances against minorities and others. Watch my video mashup from just one show that demonstrates this unmistakeably.
On Monday, April 7, O’Reilly complained in his Talking Points Memo commentary about the Democratic Party’s “grievance industry” in which “crazy people are now controlling the debate and because of that, constructive, effective problem-solving will be hard to come by.” He concluded, “The grievance industry is unleashed.” But no sooner had he finished than he teased the following segment - which unleashed his own racial grievance:
Next on the rundown, a white man hits a black child with his truck in Detroit. A mob just about kills the man. A viewer warning: our next story very intense.
O’Reilly didn’t need to say “black mob” for us to know that’s what he meant. In the discussion that ensued, O’Reilly repeatedly tried to make the story explicitly racial despite the demurs from a local reporter and some of the actual facts showing otherwise – such as a black nurse coming to the aid of the white man and calling the mob off him.
But wait, there’s more. Following that segment, O’Reilly – just like colleague Todd Starnes – twisted the facts of a Muslim parent’s objection to church flyers advertising an (Easter) egg hunt being circulated in a public school. Got that? It was was the circulation of the church flyer in school the parent objected to. But O'Reilly described it as an objection to the egg hunt, itself:
Directly ahead, an Easter protest. A Muslim father objects to an egg hunt on religious grounds.
How does that helps arrive at effective problem solving?
And then, in the same teaser, O’Reilly added, “The CEO of an internet business forced to resign for supporting traditional marriage.”
During the Easter Egg hunt segment, it was conservative Mary Katharine Ham who suggested that the show was cherry picking Muslim villains and should maybe focus on the vast majority of everyday Muslims. Liberal Juan Williams, on the other hand, couldn't seem to think of enough ways to show his disgust at the Muslim parent.
But O’Reilly took his grievance to another level: He complained that public schools are now “so afraid of guys like this man” that “I think this is almost like a disease in America but nobody’s treating it … because the mainstream media sympathizes with the secularists. …You can’t even tell kids they can have a good time on Easter. You can’t even tell ‘em that now.”
And then to top them all off, O’Reilly trotted out his signature grievance, the War on Christmas:
Look, this Christmas deal that I have been covering for a decade now. They all come out of the woodwork. And there’s a reason they do. So there is a core of people in this country who wants to wipe out any vestige of Christianity – in particular from the schools.
So O’Reilly accuses minorities and Democrats of using their victimhood to, essentially, fleece “regular guys” like (white, elderly) Fox viewers and then ramps up the hostility by playing the victim of their “scams.”
Before we call a wah-mbulance for Mr. O’Reilly, let’s acknowledge that he’s got quite the grievance industry of his own going. And since he does it undercover of pretending otherwise, I think we have to call that a hustle.
You can view the complete Talking Points segment here and the complete Detroit attack segment here.
