Former Fox News conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly threw a racist temper tantrum on Tuesday's edition of his No Spin News and Analysis podcast in response to Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker's disaster declaration following the July 4th mass shooting in Lake County's Highland Park.
"There are no words for the kind of evil that turns a community celebration into a tragedy," said Pritzker. "As we mourn together, the State of Illinois will provide every available resource to Highland Park and surrounding communities in the days and weeks ahead as the community works to recover from this horrific tragedy."
Illinois has retained a high firearm casualty rate in 2022 after experiencing its worst-ever tally in 2021. Crimes have particularly plagued Chicago, where weapons have been purloined, purchased on the underground market, or transported into the Windy City from neighboring states with few or zero safety rules.
A 2017 ProPublica report noted "that most of the guns police seize come from Indiana and other states where firearms laws are more lax, police and researchers have found. After they were purchased legally, most were sold or loaned or stolen. Typically, individuals or small groups are involved in the dealing, not organized trafficking rings," ProPublica learned.
Last year, the nonpartisan journalism nonprofit InjusticeWatch stressed that despite those statistics, the narrative dictating whom to blame for the scores of shootings is to scapegoat non-white urban residents.
"Chicago remains one of America's most economically and racially segregated cities," InjusticeWatch wrote. "Amid the skyscrapers on The Magnificent Mile, wealthy tourists and residents shop at pricey retailers where a pair of sandals can easily cost $200. Just four miles west, in the shadow of that storied skyline, some of the city's young people live in poverty and are surrounded by a pervasive sense of danger, where even a walk to school can feel perilous. These experiences can lead them to join cliques, which provide a sense of safety and community."
InjusticeWatch explained that the guilty-by-association portrayal of those internal dynamics steadily distorts public opinion, metastasizes prejudice, and fosters systemic injustice.
"Saying the word 'gang' makes the victim less sympathetic, it makes the situation less sympathetic, it creates an 'other,'" Andrew Papachristos, a professor and expert on gangs at Northwestern University, told InjusticeWatch. "The reality is, gang members are also neighbors, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, [and] employees."
The Chicago Police Department bears a significant chunk of responsibility for exploiting the programmed confirmation bias of outside observers.
"CPD was more than twice as likely to label a shooting gang-related if the victim was Latinx," InjusticeWatch's research uncovered. "Detectives were also more likely to attribute a shooting to gangs if it resulted in a homicide. These shootings were largely concentrated in predominantly low-income communities. Even in cases where detectives knew enough to make an arrest — less than 3,000 in the past decade — they labeled only a third as gang-related. The motive and cause for 75 percent of nonfatal shootings and a quarter of fatal ones is either left blank or marked as 'undetermined.'"
That unofficially sanctioned manipulation of data is the nuclear fuel fusing in the engine of contagious outrage that powers commentators such as O'Reilly while enriching and replenishing his radioactive rhetoric.
"You, JB, are not gonna stop loons! And you won't stop crime, drug crime, drug gangs, because they are minority gangs! That's why you won't stop 'em!" seethed O'Reilly, who was fired from NewsCorp in April 2017 when he was named in a lawsuit and accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment.
"You aid and abet this murderer in Chicago every blanken' day!" O'Reilly then hollered. "You! Don't be sanctimonious with me!"
Watch below via Ron Filipkowski:
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