On Monday evening's episode of "The O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly vowed to "put #BlackLivesMatter out of business" after a group in Minnesota protested against police brutality days after Shannon Miles allegedly shot a police officer in Texas.
The protesters were chanting "pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon," which is admittedly not the most rhetorically effective means of bringing people to the cause, but O'Reilly behaved as if they were doing so as a direct response to the murder of Deputy Darren Goforth.
Fox News contributor Juan Williams argued that he "didn't think it was connected, they were in Minnesota, the cop was in Houston," but O'Reilly insisted that "everybody knew about it." Williams also noted that the Minnesota protest was related to the use of excessive force by the St. Paul Police Department, to which O'Reilly retorted, "you're giving them the benefit of the doubt."
He turned then to Mary Katherine Ham, asking her whether #BlackLivesMatter is a hate group. "No," she replied, "I don't think they're a hate group," adding that the only way they could be classified as such is if conservatives use the same standards liberals do when assigning the label "hate group."
"I'm dissenting, they're a hate group," O'Reilly said, "and I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to put them out of business. And any media person who supports them, I'm going to put them on this program and put a picture of them on the air."
"But do political movements and political rhetoric, do they cause murder?” Ham offered. “Because if you go down that road, are you allowed to criticize the police in public? Are you allowed to criticize the state?”
"You can criticize the police, but if you call for their demise, that's hatred," O'Reilly countered, before cutting her off and playing a clip of a Texas Senator Ted Cruz making generic statements of support for "our police officers."
Update: Cruz's statement was so generic, the original version of this article confused him with Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
Watch the entire "Unresolved Problems" segment below via Fox News.
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