Fox News host Bill O’Reilly conceded on Wednesday night that comedian Jon Stewart was at least right about something during their debate about white privilege.
O’Reilly, a skeptic of the idea that white privilege even exists in modern America, faced off against the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” last week. During the debate, Stewart pointed out that O’Reilly’s hometown of Levittown, N.Y., at one time didn’t allow blacks to live there and was built as a racially segregated community.
On Wednesday night, O’Reilly dissected the debate with guest and Fox senior correspondent Eric Shawn.
“Stewart is correct, Shawn, that blacks couldn’t move into Levittown in 1950,” O’Reilly said. “When did that change?”
“Well, he’s correct because the federal government actually backed that,” Shawn said. “The Federal Housing Administration had a covenant in the lease of the house that your parents owned that said that it could only be used by caucasians. That started to change in ’54, ’55 with some court cases.”
“Mmhmm,” O’Reilly said.
“But still, Levittown, by 1960 out of 15,000 homes there were still only 15 owned by African Americans,” Shawn said.
O’Reilly noted that the Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination against black people after 1968.
“So Stewart is right that there was a period of time but the mistake he makes is that there was some kind of privilege associated with living in Levittown,” O’Reilly said. “He’s making it out to be Bel Aire. Trust me, it was a good place to grow up because there were a lot of kids, but there wasn’t any privilege involved in growing up there.”
“And black on Long Island lived in places like Hempstead and Westbury,” O’Reilly added. “Some of those neighborhoods were good and some of them weren’t. But there was integration so we have to give Stewart props for history. Right. But white privilege extending out? Wrong.”
h/t Mediaite
If concentrated derp in its purest form could be carefully titrated and solidified, sculpted into the form of a tall, ugly and irrationally angry white man, then given life with magical pixie dust, unicorn farts and Teatroll wishthink, then you would have Bill-O, the Derp Golem, stationed for all eternity at the Gates of Denial as gaoler of the conservative hivemind.
Bill O’Reilly: “I’m King of the Strawman!!!”
So the “right available only to a particular group of people” (i.e., whites) to buy houses in Levittown is not a “privilege” in O’Reilly’s mind. So basically … he needs a dictionary?
The fact that he’s still talking about it demonstrates that O’Reilly knows Stewart has put one of those punctures into the bullshit bubble that could lead to full on existential crisis.
Yes, and Bill-O is the GOP/Teatrolls’ little dutch boy with his finger in the hole.