Leave it to Fox's Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly to downplay the use of pepper spray and harm that was inflicted against non-violent protesters this past Friday at the University of California, Davis campus that we covered over at our Occupy America site here and here and the overwhelming and non-violent response by the students that we covered here at Video Cafe with the Chancellor Linda Katehi's walk of shame with thousands of students lining the roadways as she left the campus.
November 21, 2011

Leave it to Fox's Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly to downplay the use of pepper spray and harm that was inflicted against non-violent protesters this past Friday at the University of California, Davis campus that we covered over at our Occupy America site here and here and the overwhelming and non-violent response by the students that we covered here at Video Cafe with the Chancellor Linda Katehi's walk of shame with thousands of students lining the roadways as she left the campus.

Kelly went so far as to describe the pepper spray as "a food product, essentially" and both she and O'Reilly justified the officers excessive use of force by claiming that they possibly felt threatened by the number of students surrounding them and they also claimed that they were legally within their rights to spray them because the students were resisting arrest. They also told O'Reilly's audience that pepper spraying someone would be less harmful to the protesters than trying to just physically remove them from the premises and that somehow the police were going to be in a less threatening environment with trying to arrest them after they made multiple rounds with the pepper spray on the students than they would have before they took that action, which I find completely ridiculous since their actions obviously incited the crowd in a way just trying to physically remove them would not have.

They also ignored that the students were still roughed up even after they were sprayed and that many of them had the spray shot down their throats at close range. And they lied and said no one was hospitalized when in fact actuality, two of them were.

Bravo Fox for yet another segment making sure that your viewers are only less informed than those who don't watch any news at all. Uncle Rupert must be so proud.

For anyone that thinks we should take lightly the militarization of our police forces across the country or the use of pepper spray, I'd just ask that they go read Digby's piece on it here -- Police, pain and peppers.

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