July 8, 2015

Fox News discussed a spike in violence in Chicago “fair and balanced” style: with three people making negative comments about African Americans.

The discussion, which occurred on Hannity, echoed one from the previous hour on The Kelly File. Just like in that segment, the only guests here were two known black-attackers.

Sheriff David Clarke, a regular Fox News guest, has accused President Obama of “kick(ing) white voters in the teeth” by showing sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement. Clarke recently “analyzed” black crime on Fox by saying, “Modern liberalism celebrates black underachievement. It finds excuses for subhuman behavior and it blames other people for some flawed lifestyle choices - questionable at best - lifestyle choices made on behalf of many young black males, unfortunately.

The other guest, Heather MacDonald, has not been on Fox so often. But Media Matters has this summary:

MacDonald has a history of racially inflammatory comments, including claiming that young African-American males have a “lack of self-discipline”; that it is “common sense that black students are more likely to be disruptive” than white students; and that black men possess a “lack of impulse control that results in ... mindless violence on the streets.”

MacDonald got right to blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and President Obama for the Chicago violence. And suggesting that African Americans shot and killed by the police deserved it.

MACDONALD: What’s been happening, Eric, is this specious movement called ‘Black Lives Matter,’ whose thesis is basically that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. There’s been non-stop demonization of law enforcement from the highest reaches of government. I include the president in that and police are second-guessing themselves in interacting in high crime neighborhoods because they’re worried about getting caught on a cell phone using force against somebody who’s resisting arrest. The cell phone video is not gonna capture the entire interaction and police are backing off. …It’s the law-abiding residents of these communities that most need the police to protect them from the epidemic of kids being raised without fathers that is the real root cause of the violence we see in the black community.

The Black Lives Matter movement was a fraud. Nobody’s gonna be out there protesting the death of seven-year-old Amari Brown. Nobody protested when a six-year-old Marcus Johnson was killed in St. Louis, in March. Everybody was still converging on Ferguson, Missouri. Black lives only matter, it seems, when the police shoot somebody in good faith, not when it’s a thug.

Rather than challenge MacDonald, Bolling piled on. “Sheriff, would you agree, a lot of the black community is saying we need to spend more money in Chicago but it doesn’t matter how much money you spend in Chicago if the parents aren’t providing guidance for these kids, you’re gonna have an elevated crime rate, no matter where you are, Chicago or elsewhere.”

Clarke agreed and said that “failure to embrace education” and “ineffective parenting” added to the “self-inflicted pathologies and maladies” he sees in black communities. He also blamed liberals for “trying to eliminate the use of jails and prisons as an effective crime control tool." He claimed the left only cares about black lives, “when the police have to use deadly force - and most of the time, in the overwhelming amount of the time, it is a justifiable use of force.”

Bolling interrupted to demonize further. “For some reason, now it’s becoming the thing to do, to resist arrest,” he said. He happened to have ready a cellphone video of a black man arresting arrest. And while we’re not supposed to generalize about police brutality from deaths like Freddie Gray’s and Eric Garner’s, we are supposed to generalize about Black People Behaving Badly from this.

“Weigh in on the new wave of resisting arrest,” Bolling said, based on this one clip.

MacDonald suddenly forgot that cell phone video is not reliable. “It also emanates from our politicians who are saying the lie that the police are racist,” she said.

Crossposted at News Hounds.
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