Bill O’Reilly Says That Colin Powell Should Apologize To America For Supporting #BlackLivesMatter

Bill O’Reilly Says That Colin Powell Should Apologize To America For Supporting #BlackLivesMatter

During Tuesday night’s broadcast of The O’Reilly Factor, host and deadly war zone reporter Bill O’Reilly continued his assault on the Black Lives Matter activist movement. As you might recall, Bill-O has already promised to put the grassroots, essentially leaderless protest collective “out of business” because he believes they are directly causing police officer deaths. It doesn’t matter that shooting deaths of law enforcement officers are actually down this year compared to last, O’Reilly is basing everything on the fact that a few protesters said inflammatory things about cops at a march a few weeks ago, so therefore, BLM is putting police lives in direct danger.

Besides bringing up #BlackLivesMatter in interviews with Donald Trump and Glenn Beck, making sure to have them both heavily criticize the movement, O’Reilly spoke with Mr. Pompous Pickle Face himself, Charles Krauthammer, to get his take on the movement. During their conversation, your humble correspondent pointed out that former Secretary of State Colin Powell recently express support for BLM, telling Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd that he was glad the protesters had brought attention to police killings of African Americans. O’Reilly wanted to get Krauthammer’s opinion on this revelation.

For his part, Krauthammer didn’t appear to be too upset, saying that it isn’t really hard to say that one supports Black Lives Matter as an abstraction. The right-wing pundit then pivoted to criticizing the group for not focusing enough on legislation and instead just on radical activism. In Krauthammer’s view, it is easy to advocate for victimized people in the inner-city but more needs to be done that raising awareness.

Of course, that wasn’t a good enough answer for Papa Bear. O’Reilly screamed that the protesters were calling for cops to be killed, once again referring back to the Minnesota march where a few demonstrators briefly chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” Seriously, that short video clip has been on an endless loop on Fox News for the past two weeks, and O’Reilly has referenced it at least five times a show. He then had the following to say about Powell measured support of the movement:

“And Colin Powell’s going out and saying, “Hey, that’s OK with me.” Come on. I mean, I was upset by that. I think General Powell needs to apologize to the American people.”

A couple of things here. One, because something upset O’Reilly, it means everyone should be mad, and if they aren’t, they need to not only apologize, but say they’re sorry to the entire country. Second, once again we have an instance on Fox where an old white conservative dude is telling a black man how he should feel and think when it comes to matters of race. Sure, this is O’Reilly’s schtick, and he does it on the daily, but he still needs to be called out on it every time it occurs. Just because you have a reputation of being a whitesplaining racist old coot, doesn’t mean you are now allowed to get away with it.

Below is video of the segment, courtesy of Fox News:

Justin Baragona

Justin Baragona is the founder/publisher of Contemptor and a contributor to The Daily Beast. He was previously the Cable News Correspondent for Mediaite and prior to starting Contemptor, he worked on the editorial staff of PoliticusUSA. During that time, he had his work quoted by USA Today and BBC News, among others. Justin began his published career as a political writer for 411Mania. He resides in St. Louis, MO with his wife and pets.

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