Bill O'Reilly's hateful Baltimore "lesson": Black communities need to "police themselves"

"These idiotic thugs who are rioting and looting are hurting their own people"

Published April 29, 2015 2:14PM (EDT)

  (Fox News)
(Fox News)

On Tuesday evening's edition of "The O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly successfully parroted the racist party line that black people are the ones who need a lesson in behavior -- not the cops who are killing them.

"Who is the big loser in the Baltimore riots?" O'Reilly asked. "The answer is the African-American community."

L. O. L.

O'Reilly continued to remind viewers that Baltimore's mayor is black, as are nine of 15 city council members and the police chief, meaning black people call the shots. Even so, unemployment is just over 8 percent and median household income is just over $41,000 -- much less than the median income for the state of Maryland (over $70,000).

O'Reilly doesn't note that Maryland is the richest state in the country because of extremely wealthy counties surrounding Washington D.C. -- just that Baltimore is, for some reason, floundering. (O'Reilly doesn't mention Baltimore's history of what Washington Post reporter Michael A. Fletcher calls a dangerous mixture of "poverty, crime, and hopelessness, uncomfortably juxtaposed against rich history, friendly people, venerable institutions and pockets of old-money affluence.")

"The facts then dictate that racial persecution really isn't the problem in Baltimore. Something else is in play. And that something else is personal behavior," O'Reilly argued. "These idiotic thugs who are rioting and looting are hurting their own people, and because the entire world sees pictures of blacks rampaging, all African Americans are affected."

"It is long past time for police agencies in America to have a no tolerance policy towards brutality on the part of officers," O'Reilly concluded. "But it is also long past time for African-American communities across America to begin to police themselves."

Watch the clip below:


By Joanna Rothkopf

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Baltimore Bill O'reilly Fox News Freddie Gray Police Poverty Race Video