Bill O’Reilly couldn’t drop the subject of “white privilege” following his heated debate with Jon Stewart, arguing Thursday night on “The O’Reilly Factor” that the idea of white privilege “creates victimization.”
Stewart had pushed O’Reilly to “admit that there is such a thing as white privilege” Wednesday night on “The Daily Show.” O’Reilly eventually conceded that “whites didn’t have it as bad as blacks,” but was adamant that discussion of white privilege wasn’t necessary in the post-Jim Crow era.
O’Reilly reiterated Thursday that he does believe it’s harder for blacks to succeed in America, but argued that the “white privilege theory” actually “creates victimization.”
“It gives people an excuse to fail or to do bad things,” he said. “What happened in the past is important to understand, but creating current policy around it is foolish.”
After getting in the last word in the debate, O’Reilly said there “are no hard feelings” between him and Stewart.
Watch below, courtesy of Fox News:
Ignoring the reality of white privilege for the purpose of policy-making seems pretty stupid.
Tah. O’Reilly came in like a gorilla, all bluster and bromides, but when you stripped it all away there was one little blinking mouse of an argument: It’s not as bad as it was, and some people surmount the difficulties and achieve things, with the nearly-stated implication that because that happens the prejudice and hardships aren’t there at all, somehow. OK yes it’s a canard masquerading as an argument, calculated to let racists believe that any problem is due to a “culture of poverty.”
It MAKES ME NUTS ok I’m calming down now.
Why hasn’t this video gone viral?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysoOB9w0tF4I hates thems meeses to pieces…
The non-existence of white privilege is one of the fundemental principles of Foxthink. To admit its existence is to threaten the entire edifice with collapse (not but what the Outer Party members aren’t perfectly capable of doublethinking the entire edifice right back into existence after a day and a half to three days of existential crisis, of course).
It’s like the sacrosanct principle that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery and would have happened even if there had been no slavery. It’s a thing you have to tell people to mobilize them to defend the very thing whose existence is denied.
Mobilizing people to defend acknowledged injustice is next to impossible. We’re social creatures and we are hardwired, to some extent, to rebel against injustice. It has to be concealed and disguised or twisted around into a positive good. If you have complete control over all institutions and means of mass communication, it’s possible to convince people that slavery is just part of the natural order, that minorities are subhuman, or that it’s necessary to make perpetual war against your neighbors in order to capture people to sacrifice to the sun god.
When you don’t have that total monopoly, however, you have to convince them that the injustice doesn’t exist, that it’s a base slander against you contrived by an utterly-depraved and malign enemy in order to justify the perpetration of injustice against you.
Getting an Inner Party orator like O’Reilly to admit that there’s such a thing as white privilege is impossible.