Of course, when the gang at Fox News weighed in on the terrorist attack in Paris, they came to all the wrong conclusions. But on the show, “Outnumbered,” one Fox host may have set the record for stupidity.
As you might expect from Fox News, the conversation had nothing to do with the grievances, real or perceived, of these, or any other terrorists. It was focused entirely on stoking fear, and how Americans can protect ourselves from events such as this.
Guest Eric Bolling gets the clip rolling, by talking about how law enforcement tools were being taken away from the police. What law enforcement tools is he talking about? Racial profiling, and “stop and frisk.”
One of the first things Mayor De Blasio did here, was he said we’re gonna pull ‘stop and frisk,’ which means, in deference to the Fourth Amendment, unreasonable search and seizures, they said it was unreasonable to profile African Americans, or anyone, for that matter, and just say ‘Hey, what are you doing? Let me see your ID, let me talk to you.’ …The problem is, that was finding a lot of crimes, some say misdemeanor crimes.
Bolling continues by pointing out that the Charlie Hebdo office had been targeted several times before, and he seems amazed that Paris police only stationed “cops with handguns” in front of the building. What does he want? Bolling explains:
There’s been a very serious push from the left, saying ‘let’s not over militarize our cops.’ That should put an end to that discussion right now. We should over-militarize…we should continue to do that.
“Do you want to live in a police state, though?” host Kennedy Montgomery asks. She goes on to observe that the police should not see citizens as “the enemy,” which is what she believes happens when police are turned into military forces. Ah, a moment of sanity on Fox! Sorry, it was all too brief.
Host Harris Faulkner responds to Montgomery’s statement by observing, “we are being hunted. ISIS has made it very clear.” That comment marks the beginning of the conversation really slipping off the rails.
What if bad guys don’t look like “typical bad guys?”
Faulkner asks Montgomery what she would like Americans to do to protect ourselves. Montgomery doesn’t miss a beat. “I think that the best thing that Americans can do, is arm themselves,” she says. This earns her a “high five” from Bolling.
Montgomery then says that she doesn’t feel like New York cops look at her as the enemy. She’s a 42 year old white woman. Could that have something to do with it? Bolling responds, “You’re not a bad guy, though.”
“Sometimes bad guys don’t look like bad guys,” Montgomery says. That comment brings Fox News’s Supreme Court correspondent, Shannon Bream into the discussion.
That’s my question about these guys. If we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had ski masks on, do we even know what color they were, what the tone of their skin was? I mean, what if they didn’t look like typical bad guys? As we define them when we think about terror groups.
But how dare you suggest that Fox News has a problem with race! Just because the segment starts with a discussion about stop and frisk, which was used mostly on minorities, and ends with a conversation about what skin color “typical bad guys” might have. Fox News would certainly never pander to racist fears, would they? After all, there was a black woman on this panel.
Here’s the video, via Media Matters:
Image via screen shot
