Fox News Sunday discussed the "fallout from Ferguson" with an all-white panel yesterday. Host Chris Wallace echoed the words of previous guest Rudy Giuliani by suggesting African Americans should blame themselves for Ferguson. Then panelist Kimberley Strassel made it a Fox News twofer by blaming President Obama for “misleading” the black community into thinking the Ferguson investigation would not be fair.
Earlier on the show, Rudy Giuliani doubled down on his blame-the-blacks-for Ferguson talk by saying:
I think just as much if not more responsibility is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community.
… And doesn’t it actually, logically, make sense that (police killings of African Americans) happen more often in the community where there is five, six, seven, eight, nine times more violence than in another community?
Later, in his all-white panel, Wallace validated Giuliani’s comments as he posed a question to Strassel about the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing unarmed Michael Brown:
WALLACE: One of the things, Kim, that was so striking was the tremendously different reactions in the white community and the black community to this. I mean the forensic evidence at least in terms of what went on inside that car all back Officer Wilson’s story. Clearly, Rodney Wilson’s (sic) DNA was inside. It was on Officer Wilson’s body. It was on the gun. It seemed there clearly was a struggle that went on inside there. One can argue about whether Wilson should have gotten out. There’s no question that the big threat to the black community is from other blacks. …But yet it all goes out the window when one of these cases happens.
Strassel agreed with this implicit indictment that the African American community is upset about police tactics out of stupidity or dishonesty or both. Then she piled on by suggesting their (illegitimate) anger had been manipulated by the Obama administration:
STRASSEL: I think this is where there is some culpability in the White House in that. I agree … the president has said all the right things this week, once the grand jury decision was handed down. I think one of the questions, though, was leading up to it. In particular, Eric Holder’s decision to launch his own investigation into the Wilson action and on a civil rights potential case which is a very high bar, as you heard, to do a separate probe into whether the actions of the entire Ferguson police department, to run their own autopsy. All of that led to the impression from the start that there was something not fair or right or suspect about what was going on in the justice system in Ferguson. And that has allowed a lot of people, a lot of the protesters to come out and say, and you get these very varied actions like reactions as you were saying.
A lot of people just think that this was a sham from the beginning. And no matter what the evidence says, that is not breaking through. And I do think that that was the problem. And the president ought to also be talking about those issues that you mentioned. I mean the black on black crime in community is one of the hugest issues out there.
In fact, President Obama has a whole initiative designed to address these issues. But for some reason, Fox doesn’t spend much time on it.
But Strassel offered no evidence that the Obama administration did anything to incite the crowd and Wallace did not challenge her. Meanwhile, nobody mentioned the insulting behavior of Officer Wilson who said both that he had “a clear conscience” killing Brown and that resigning his job was the hardest thing he had ever done.
Watch it below.
This was after that charismatic team of incoherent washed-out police officers Bo Dietl and Mark Fuhrman had been encouraged to rant and rave.
Hannity, of course, referred to the looters repeatedly as “demonstrators.”
Parks has the patience of a saint to put up with this crap and stay calm and rational. I do not. I haven’t seen this much non-stop demonization of non-white people since the ’60s.