O’Reilly Defends Himself Against Accusations of Racism

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is being accused of racism after an interview he did with Donald Trump last Monday. On the show, O’Reilly asked Trump what he thought of black critics who had called him a “racial arsonist.”

Trump said, “I don’t think that’s the perception at all — I think we’ll do fantastic with African Americans and Hispanics, because I’m going to bring jobs back to the country. There is a 59% unemployment rate among African American youth.”

O’Reilly questioned his claims. “How are you going to get jobs for them?” he asked. “Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads, and I hate to be generalized about it, but it’s true. If you look at all the educational statistics, how are you going to give jobs to people who aren’t qualified for jobs?”

Trump responded with some words about training, but liberals had already stopped listening. They were aghast that O’Reilly could dare suggest that black unemployment rates could ever – ever – be even partially blamed on black people themselves. At Salon, Amanda Marcotte said this of the conservative host:

O’Reilly’s preferred theory for economic disparities between black and white people is about some abstract notion of “culture”, i.e. that white people have a superior culture that breeds hard work, but black culture supposedly breeds laziness and sexual degeneracy.

Well, considering that we have liberal educators out there telling us that we are promoting white supremacy by valuing traits like responsibility and hard work, it’s not exactly a stretch. It’s the leftists who claim that blacks can’t live up to these supposedly “white” ideals, not Bill O’Reilly. Their whole goal over the last few years has been to steadily set the bar lower and lower on everything from education to lawful behavior.

O’Reilly addressed the subject this week and defended himself against the ridiculous charges. “Now, the race hustlers who have apparently not walked the streets of poor neighborhoods lately immediately accused me of racism,” O’Reilly said. “And that is why the acute problem of cultural deprivation among underclassed children of all colors is never addressed. The smear merchants hammer anyone who does so.”

“If you reject the conventional road to success, education and hard work, you’ll fail in our capitalistic system,” he concluded.

That’s a fact. But if you’re a liberal who wants to deny reality, it’s all the ammunition you need to smear a man whose only crime is to tell the truth.