In what has to be one of the more bizarre segments I've seen on Faux "news" in a while, the panelists on this Saturday's Cashin' In used the protests across the country as an excuse to once again attack New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Al Sharpton, President Obama and Eric Holder for heaven forbid hurting the tender sensibilities of the NYPD for daring to discuss race relations in the United States, because we all know that talking about them openly is the real problem.
If only these leaders would just keep their mouths shut and never say a bad word about any police officer ever, things would be just fine. Everything would have been just fine if only the black guy in the White House had behaved like a white person.
I hate to break it to these talking heads on Fox, but if they'd like to see who is responsible for setting race relations back in the United States of America, it's not the President of the United States or the Mayor of New York City. All they really need to do is to go take a good long hard look in the mirror.
And leave it to the likes of Wayne Rogers and Jonathan Hoenig to try to turn this from a conversation about the protests and Fox's favorite topic which is bashing liberals and black leaders, to one where they're singing the praises of the "free market" and claiming that we wouldn't have any problems with racism if their libertarian dream world that only exists in their minds ever came to fruition.
Their real problem is they only want "freedom" for a certain class of citizen and the "freedom" they really hate is freedom of speech. That's not allowed if it interferes with their version of reality.
Rough transcript:
BOLLING: Welcome everybody and welcome back to the '70's. Cops assassinated as America's finest are under attack again, let's remember what life was like the last time this happened. Crime was substantially higher, the economy substantially weaker, many cities like New York's Times Square were off limits. Wayne, it looks a lot more like we're going into 1975 and not 2015.
ROGERS: Yes it does Eric and it's unfortunate. I mean, we've got the same kind of thing going on not only with the cops but the people who are inciting the riots and that sort of thing. The fact is you've got Al Sharpton who is an outrageous person who basks in this kind of stuff. He feasts on this kind of stuff for his own personal aggrandizement. It's terrible. It's outrageous.
Second thing that's going on is the media coverage of this has been awful I think. The media helps to hype this because they show over and over again the things like that. By the way in the same week that Ferguson was going on there were over eighty people killed in the city of Chicago. I didn't see Al Sharpton and I didn't see Rev. Jackson there. They were... and that was even a worse tragedy.
And in addition to that we've got people who foment and try to help this thing and push it along and without... in an ideological way, and disregard the free market system, disregard the benefits that come from that and talk about poverty and this and that and the other when for example we've got a great example right offshore in Cuba where socialism has lived for fifty years. Their standard of living is awful. Ours is great. You've got to listen to the United States people.
BOLLING: Alright, so Jon, let me talk to you a little bit. Mayor de Blasio draws the line between the people or the mayor and the cops, that can't be good for safety in this city. It can't be good for businesses in this city, right?
HOENIG: Well, there's a respect for the cops, respect for the rule of authority, respect for law Eric. I mean, this is the basis for which any sound society is based and all these protests, I've been scratching my head, what are these protests about?
That the police hate African Americans? Well, what about all the African American cops? That it's open season on blacks in this country? It's just simply not true. I mean, this whole chant “black lives matter,” life matters and America in fact is more safe now than it's been in decades because we're more individualistic than we've been in decades. Treat people as individuals and racism goes away.
BOLLING: And Juan, a lot of these people who are... look at the other cities, look at Ferguson, look at Los Angeles, look at Oakland. People are rioting. They're protesting. It's violent. It's less safe. Businesses can't thrive there, but a lot of these things are on the backs of some real liberal ideologies.
WILLIAMS: Well, there's no question about that Eric. I think you saw that in the campaign that de Blasio ran in New York were he was clear that he thought that the income divide, the financial divide in that city was fostering an atmosphere of inequity and part of that was the police, that the police were protecting the affluent while they were harassing, intimidating, stop and frisk profiling minorities, but especially poor minorities. So I think that you're exactly right.
I will say that I don't think that the race relations in the country are any better because of what has come from this. I mean, clearly as we see in the polls now, more of a divide between black and white than we've seen since guess when Eric? The '70's.
BOLLING: And not only that Juan, I'm going to bring it to Michelle, but Juan points out things aren't better, President Obama last week said under his watch, race relations in America are better, yet he's the president who said, you know what, once someone mistaked me for a waiter. He also has an Attorney General who said you know what, I've been followed in a department store. I would go out of a limb and say this administration Michelle, may be worse for race relations in America than better for race relations in America.
FIELDS: It has. I think President Obama has set us back at least thirty years when it comes to race relations in this country and look, de Blasio, these protesters, what they are protesting are the very same policies and people that helped make New York City safe. New York City is so much safer now because of the policies we have and Bill de Blasio, you know, he's working against the policies that really made New York City what it is in terms of the economy and in terms of it being safer. In the '70's no one wanted to go to New York City. Now you can go there and it's safe and what Bill de Blasio is doing is he's telling New York City that he's on the side of the protesters, the thugs, the ones who celebrated and cheered when those two police officers dead bodies were on the ground.
BOLLING: Juan, you want to respond to that?
WILLIAMS: Yeah, that's not right Michelle. Look, the person who killed those cops...
FIELDS: Why isn't it right?!
WILLIAMS: ... was not a protester. He was a mentally insane person who shot his own girlfriend....
FIELDS: No, no, no no!!!
WILLIAMS: … his own mom was afraid of him.
FIELDS: It's funny, with liberals, with Gabby Giffords, it's Republicans' fault, but when it comes to this it's not Democrats' fault. Of course it is!
WILLIAMS: Michelle, I would never have said that about the shooter in Tuscon...
FIELDS: He posted on his Instagram!!
WILLIAMS: Michelle, this is not a tit-for-tat, left vs. right issue. It's too serious. I will say this to you. I think that if you don't understand why there are so many people in the street, people who feel that they have been the targets of intimidation and harassment, you do not understand. (crosstalk) This is about class. It's about income...
BOLLING: Okay, fair enough... (crosstalk)
WILLIAMS: If you're a minority, you should not be treated differently by the police.
BOLLING: Fair enough. Wayne last thoughts right here.
FIELDS: Juan, the person who killed these cops did not put those things on Instagram.
ROGERS: Excuse me. As I said earlier, we have an example of where the free market system has been destroyed and right off of the coast in Cuba we've seen fifty years of that and it doesn't. The free market supports freedom. Freedom is one of the things that's good, it cuts across all races and everything else and we should support freedom and if the cops are supporting freedom, we should support the cops.
BOLLING: You've got it. We're going to leave it right there.
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