Just hours after Deputy Darren Goforth was murdered in Houston allegedly by a black man there was an anti-police demonstration at the Minnesota State Fair by Black Lives Matter.
This ominous statement is how Bill O’Reilly began his August 30 “Unresolved Problems” segment. Sadly for our friend Bill he wasn’t getting much sympathy from his own panel for his concerns about Black Lives Matter. Both Juan Williams and Mary Katherine Ham quickly dismissed O’Reilly’s assertion that Black Lives Matter was a hate group. Williams, perhaps more schooled in geography than O’Reilly, pointed out that “They’re in Minnesota, the other people are in Houston” before explaining that the Minnesota protest was aimed at specific problems with the St. Paul Police Department. Ham warned O’Reilly “if we go down the road where political speech is inspiring these acts, whether on the right or the left, we get to the point where we cannot criticize the state in public…”
That O’Reilly could find no support from his pre-selected guests should not be taken as indicative as to how far out of the mainstream he is. Throughout the rest of the week, his Fox News cohorts used their echo chamber to promulgate their non-sensible meme that Black Lives Matter was somehow a hate group. One Fox New host decreed that it was “shut it down time” meaning that the government had to start shutting down Black Lives Matter protests and arresting its leaders, as people are “drunk on rights.”
These comments, while disturbing, could very easily be dismissed given Fox News’ general antipathy towards black lives, civil liberties, and reasoned discourse. Yet, to do so would be to ignore how the underlying logic in these comments, that political protests for racial justice somehow cause murder, has seeped into the mainstream.