Megyn Kelly didn’t just want criticism of Senator Cory Booker’s stirring Democratic National Convention speech last night, she wanted racial criticism of African Americans and their concerns. She proved that first with her choice of black-attacker Sheriff David Clarke and then by prodding him to make more explicitly racial smears.
Clarke, the sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is a regular African American black-attacker on Fox and a Donald Trump supporter. So surely Kelly knew what she’d be getting when he was booked to comment on Booker's DNC speech. But "straight news anchor" Kelly did not reveal his bias to her viewers.
Booker gave a rousing speech that, while heckled (for supporting Hillary Clinton), brought the crowd to its feet when he said, “Love always trumps hate” and “We are the United States of America. Our best days are ahead of us and together, with Hillary Clinton as our president, America, we will rise!”
Ironically, Clarke’s first comment about Booker was, “What’s he so angry about?” If Clarke has ever opened his mouth without spewing hate-filled, angry rhetoric about Democrats and, especially, African Americans, I must have missed it.
Clarke’s comments about African American Booker, while inflammatory, were not particularly racial, until the end.
Excerpts below from the Media Matters transcript, with my emphases:
CLARKE: (T)he only thing he didn’t use was a car in every driveway and a chicken in every pot. A lot of latitudes [sic] there but he talked all around a big problem for the Democrats this fall, and that is their flawed candidate, Mrs. Bill Clinton, who should have been under criminal indictment. She’s a confirmed liar, she left people to die in Benghazi, all that kind of stuff that he just kind of like—you know—acted like it wasn’t there, but that stuff matters to the American people.
So, you know, this thing will go on just like the RNC. They’ll get their pom poms out, and you rah, rah and what not, but stark contrast I think with the Republicans. Donald Trump is the law and order candidate, and this DNC seems to be about embracing criminality and criminal behavior, trying to mainstream criminal behavior, hold these individuals up as if they’re martyrs and symbols of the new civil rights movement.
Rather than challenge that rhetoric, Kelly validated it by asking for more, only with more racial animosity. She deliberately prodded Clarke to race bait tonight’s DNC program, which features mothers of victims of police violence:
KELLY: Well, let’s just talk about—let’s just frame that for the viewers, so they know what you’re talking about. So tomorrow night onstage here, the mother of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, among other mothers of African-American men who were killed at the hands of police officers, will take to the stage.
Michael Brown’s mother is the most controversial, however, because her son was the aggressor against a police officer. And while he lost his life, the DOJ concluded it was because of his own actions in attacking a cop. Go ahead.
Notice how Kelly singled out the one case in which she thought a police officer had been wrongly accused? Or that she overstated the DOJ's findings which were merely that the officer reasonably feared for his life? How she didn’t mention that Brown’s mother is one of at least six other mothers speaking?
While Kelly never seems to tire of not-so-subtly indicting African Americans for not admitting they were wrong about Brown, she has yet to issue any kind of full-throated, public apology for her own bogus, racial-smear campaign against then-Attorney General Eric Holder. I’ve also not heard a peep of remorse out of her about Fox’s championing of racist Cliven Bundy who actually threatened law enforcers (which she at least tacitly participated in).
Clarke was all in for the black-attacking now. With Kelly’s explicit support.
CLARKE: Well, I think they all—if you look at a common denominator among most of those there, they were resisting arrest. Eric Garner was resisting arrest. Freddie Gray was resisting arrest. Michael Brown attacked a law enforcement officer and tried to disarm him. Another one, a guy from Milwaukee, Hamilton, was beating a Milwaukee police officer with his night stick when the officer had no other choice but to use deadly force to save his own life. But, thing is—
KELLY: Right.
For more black-attacking points, Clarke even worked in a lecture about black families:
CLARKE: Look, moms are going to do what moms do. Moms love their kids no matter what. We all get that. But here’s the question I have, Megyn, and I keep asking—where are the dads? When there are no fathers around to shape the behavior of young boys growing up, they grow up to be unmanageable misfits that the police then have to deal with aggressively.
Kelly closed the segment with a murmur of approval and saying, “Sheriff Clarke, always good to get your perspective.”
And that was the only perspective on the subject last night.
Watch what Kelly thinks of as "straight down the middle" coverage below, from the July 25 The Kelly File, via Media Matters.
Yep! I used to laugh at Fox News drooling fanboy Johnny Dollar who insisted Greta and Geraldo were liberals. To this day, Fox News trots him out for generally mild pushbacks in debates against the legion of right-wing headliners dominating GOP TV. Yet, who could miss he pondered running for the Senate as a Republican in New York?
But in the context of the right-wing Fox News bubble where there’s the stark contrast of ideologically rigid conservative hardliners against everyone else, a RINO looks like a lefty.
I remember when he had his TV show. He would have on guests who were scummy and Geraldo would roll up his sleeves, act holier than thou and strike a pose next to these guys. What a phony.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/dnc-protesters-dump-water-on-fox-news-geraldo-rivera-as-crowd-chants-shame/
The latest ratings:
CNN: 6,208,000 / 2,187,000
MSNBC: 4,597,000 / 1,398,000
NBC: 4,293,000 / 1,731,000
ABC: 4,107,000 / 1,351,000
Fox News: 3,330,000 / 898,000
CBS: 3,206,000 / 1,052,000
I think we all can figure the reason. 😉