Watch Bill O'Reilly's wild rant dismissing Donald Trump's white nationalist ties
After a big wind-up during Monday night’s edition of his “Talking Points Memo” rant fest, O’Reilly concluded: “Truth is, there is no substantial white power movement in this country. Donald Trump won the election because of economics, but the press will never tell you the truth.”
O’Reilly also said “it’s vile to suggest” that white supremacists have been empowered by Trump’s campaign and his electoral victory.
“Individual nuts are everywhere, assigning them status is grossly dishonest. I am so tired of this I can’t tell you,” he finished the segment, which was first flagged by Media Matters.
The Fox News host also rolled out statistics about violent crimes versus hate crimes to make some point about how racist violence in this country is overblown.
O’Reilly said:
Now for some stats. According to the FBI, in 2015, there were about 1,200,000 violent crimes committed here in the U.S.A. The same year, there were less than 6,000 hate crimes reported. I mean, come on. That sound like an epidemic of hate-driven violence to you? Does it?
His numbers are correct: the number of reported hate crimes, as documented by the FBI, is dwarfed by the number of overall violent crimes. But O’Reilly of course makes no mention of the dramatic spike in bias-related incidents reported since the election. In the ten days following Election Day, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented nearly 900 reports of harassment and intimidation across the country, with many attackers evoking Trump by name.
In our nation’s capital, a white supremacist think tank proudly used Nazi salutes and resurrected pre-World War II era anti-Semitic propaganda just blocks from the Holocaust Museum, prompting its historians to release a statement reminding us the the Holocaust “did not begin with killing; it began with words.”
But if you listen to blowhards like O’Reilly, white supremacists aren’t rearing their ugly heads at all, it’s just a “mythological situation” created by a media “furious” that Trump won. Good luck with that.
You can watch the full clip above.