Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:36 pm
According to Bill O’Reilly, the “white power movement” is a “mythological situation” created by a “liberal press furious that Donald Trump won the election” and now eager to put out “absurd storylines designed to denigrate those who voted for Mr. Trump.”
O’Reilly, always a Trump apologist, claimed his purpose was to dispel this myth but it was actually to lie about it by not admitting to any relevant facts. So we will do that here.
O’Reilly exclaimed,
Creating a mythological situation, that is the subject of the third Talking Points memo. The liberal press furious that Donald Trump won the election, so now they are putting out absurd storylines designed to denigrate those who voted for Mr. Trump. The top one is that somehow the white power movement is gaining momentum in the U.S.A., because of Trump. You may remember that on November 19th about 275 hapless nuts showed up for a white nationalist conference in Washington, D.C. 50 reporters were there to greet them. Let me give you that again, 275 morons covered by 50 journalists. That meeting got more press than a Louis Farrakhan rally ever has.
Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:
Bill O’Reilly is right in stating that there were 275 attendees of the National Policy Institute conference in D.C. and he correctly identified those attendees as “hapless nuts.” And that is all he got right as he sought to defend his hero, Donald Trump from attacks on his ties to white supremacists.
O’Reilly then claimed, “extreme rhetoric is not unusual in a country of more than 330 million people.” That may be. But it is unusual coming from a presidential candidate, then nominee, and finally, president-elect.
And it is unusual when that candidate’s campaign gives important jobs to white supremacist extremists like Steve Bannon, a guy who believes some people are genetically superior to others on account of race. There is nothing normal about that.
The Washington Post tells us that those attendees “exalted at the recent pronouncements from Trump Tower, particularly the nomination of officials whose views they said aligned with their own: retired general Michael Flynn as National Security adviser, former Breitbart News chairman Stephen K. Bannon as White House chief strategist and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as attorney general.”
And this is where O’Reilly’s reasoning goes astray. It is less important how many people did the exalting as why they exalted those picks. Their joy is because their own have attained important positions in the Trump White House; because Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions, are white supremacists.
If the white power movement is a myth, why did Trump give three of their most prominent heroes key places in his cabinet? And obviously, if the people cheering are “hapless nuts” then how much more so must be those they were cheering? Namely, Flynn, Bannon, and Sessions – and ultimately, Trump himself, who selected them?
Trump’s cabinet picks mean, at the very least, tacit approval of the conference’s host, Richard Spencer, who was seen there shouting “Hail Trump!” The SPLC calls Spencer a “radical white separatist” and an “academic racist. Spencer’s declaration at the end of the dinner that closed the conference, says the Post, was “Let’s party like it’s 1933.”
O’Reilly claims,
“That doesn’t sound exactly sound like a Nuremberg rally, does it? Yet, folks like those are routinely demonized by left-wing media as racist, or whatever. Truth is, there is no substantial white power movement in this country. Donald Trump won the election because of economics, but the press will never tell you the truth. Instead, they continue to brook rubbish.”
The truth is, many of Trump’s rallies did sound like Nuremberg rallies, particularly when he demanded personal oaths of loyalty from his followers and when they enthusiastically gave him the Hitler salute. You know, like those “hapless nuts” O’Reilly identified at the National Policy Institute conference in D.C. Same salute; different venues.
Then there is Trump’s rhetoric, filled with Nazi tropes like “secret meetings” and “international banks.” Even his “Make America great again” echoes Hitler’s “Make Germany great again.”
Having ignored all the relevant facts, including explaining how the thousands who went along with this racist nonsense at Trump rallies are not also “hapless nuts,” O’Reilly went on to pronounce his investigation closed:
“Summing up, the press is trumping up, pardon the pun, a white power movement storyline that simply doesn’t exist. It’s vile to suggest that it does. Individual nuts are everywhere, assigning them status is grossly dishonest. I am so tired of this I can’t tell you. And that’s the Memo.”
The only thing vile is O’Reilly’s attempt to cover up the racist facts. The white supremacist movement does exist and Donald Trump has a deep relationship with the white supremacists O’Reilly claims are not a thing. Up through July alone Trump had retweeted white supremacists a whopping 75 times.
So yes, Trump supports the white supremacists and they support him and it is no accident but affinity. He is their guy. It is not a myth. The media did not invent it. The media reported on it. If O’Reilly doesn’t want to see his hero associated with white supremacists, he should tell Trump to stop palling around with white supremacists.
And if the white power movement, as O’Reilly calls it, is a fringe movement still, it is a fringe movement that now has members about to have jobs in the cabinet of the next president of the United States, a fringe movement that has taken heart – their own words, mind you – at the election of Donald Trump.
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