Megyn Kelly offered a jaw-dropping defense of the racist emails uncovered in the DOJ investigation of the Ferguson police department: “There are very few companies in America” that don’t do the same thing.
In yet another Kelly File use of the Department of Justice's Ferguson report to attack African Americans (and give a pass to the police), Kelly hosted The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens. As she described it in her introduction, Stephens believes “The real story” about Ferguson is “a community in which honest people are afraid to tell the truth.”
Which is basically, a nice way of saying, don’t blame the white police, blame the black residents.
Stephens said, “It seems to me the real media story isn’t ‘hands up, don’t shoot.’ The real media story is a community in which honest people want to tell the truth and they’re afraid of what amounts to neighborhood vigilantism.” Or, as he said later, “People terrified of neighborhood thugs” and a community “being victimized internally.”
As for the gratuitous stops to raise revenue, found by the DOJ, Stephens said, “It’s not a story of institutional racism in Ferguson, it’s a story of bloodsucking government that’s trying to get every ounce of revenue that it can.”
But it’s hard to see how anyone without a racial animus could arrive at such a conclusion. From The New York Times:
Their report described a city where police officers did not know the law or did not bother to follow it. Internal documents showed Ferguson police officers conducting “pedestrian checks,” in which they stopped people walking down the street and demanded to see their identification without any probable cause. One officer cited in the report told investigators he considered people who refused to show identification to be suspicious or aggressive, and typically arrested them.
… Poor, mostly African-American residents have described being trapped in the court system for years as they are repeatedly jailed, even when trying to make payments. Meanwhile, the Justice Department found, police officers and city officials regularly fix tickets for each other and their friends.
Federal investigators also found that city officials circulated racist jokes on their government email accounts without fear of punishment. One portrayed President Obama as a chimpanzee. Another included a photograph of African women dancing topless along with the caption “Michelle Obama’s High School Reunion.” A third joked that a black woman should receive a crime-prevention award for having an abortion.
Kelly dismissed the findings as “a few bad apples.” But even worse, she argued that it was “problematic” to cite the racist emails because almost all organizations do the same thing!
KELLY: It’s problematic for so many reasons, not the least of which is there are very few companies in America – whether they’re public or private – in which if you sic 40 FBI agents on the company and review every email and every document and every communication you can, between the employees, you won’t find any racist emails, any inappropriate comments – and then to tar the entire organization with that, it is additionally problematic.
It makes you wonder about what kind of emails get circulated at Fox News, eh? Because I have NEVER seen any kind of emails like that anywhere that I’ve worked.
Watch it below, from last night’s The Kelly File, via Media Matters.
What Kelly conveniently overlooks is that a Police Dept. is not quite the same thing as a corporation. While racist emails that may circulate through the average corporation are despicable and racial discrimination should not be tolerated, this kind of behavior in a Police Dept. is far worse because of the direct, authoritarian position of power that the Police have over the citizens – traffic stops, search & seizures, confronting citizens for their “manner of walking along roadway”, etc. The difference should have been mentioned but Kelly was too busy just brushing it off a nothing to be concerned about since most everyone else does it too. Pffft.
But look at who she works for now, and who she answered to as a litigator. She probably had that drawing of them using Holder as a Pinata blown up poster-sized and hung in her office.
I knew I could count on Fox “News” to tell me the real story of what happened. See, it’s not racism, it’s the evil gubmint!