Evidence comes from a white-nationalist confab at the Ronald Reagan Building in the District, where white nationalist Richard B. Spencer spoke this month to a crowd of like-minded individuals. O’Reilly was appalled by ratios: “About 275 hapless nuts showed up for a white nationalist conference in Washington, D.C. Fifty reporters were there to greet them. Let me give you that again, 275 morons covered by 50 journalists,” said the Fox News host.

To prove his point that all this white nationalism stuff is nothing to worry about, O’Reilly went to hard data. According to the FBI in 2015, argued the host, “there were about 1,200,000 violent crimes committed here in the USA. The same year, there were less than 6,000 hate crimes reported. I mean, come on. That sound like an epidemic of hate-driven violence to you, does it?” Trump launched his presidential candidacy halfway through 2015, raising a relevance question about O’Reilly’s citation of this data.

In finishing off his argument, O’Reilly grabbed a few soundbites from Trump supporters explaining their politics. One of them said, “I appreciate any candidate that’s going to do more to keep jobs in America.” Riding that sentiment, O’Reilly quipped, “That doesn’t exactly sound like a Nuremberg rally, does it?” It was “economics” that won Donald Trump the 2016 presidential election, argued O’Reilly.

AD

AD

Let us hope that O’Reilly is right about the need to chill about white nationalism in the Trump era. Too bad there are several reasons to doubt his conclusions and to surmise that he’s merely covering for his vanilla-milkshake-sharing buddy, Donald Trump. Here are just a few considerations that the King of Cable News omitted from his analysis:

• That white nationalist conference? It featured a talk by Spencer in which he said, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Some people in the crowd responded with Nazi salutes.

• As the New York Times notes, Spencer and other white nationalists have cheered Trump’s appointment of Stephen K. Bannon as chief White House strategist. Before joining forces with the Trump campaign over the summer, Bannon was executive chairman of Breitbart News, an outlet that has provided a roost for the alt-right, a wide-ranging group that includes white nationalists.

AD

AD

• During his campaign for the presidency, Trump famously failed to rebuke anti-Semites. As O’Reilly fails to point out, journalists who wrote critically of Trump often received anti-Semitic abuse over Twitter and phone lines as well. The problem got so bad that the Anti-Defamation League scrambled a task force and wrote up a report. Regarding connections with the Trump movement, the report was precise: “There is evidence that a considerable number of the anti-Semitic tweets targeting journalists originate with people identifying themselves as Trump supporters, ‘conservatives’ or extreme right-wing elements. The words that show up most in the bios of Twitter users sending anti-Semitic tweets to journalists are ‘Trump,’ ‘nationalist,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘American’ and ‘white,'” noted the report. When asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the anti-Semitic attacks against a particular journalist — Julia Ioffe, who’d written a profile of Melania Trump in GQ — Trump memorably declined to denounce the activity, though he was more forceful in a “60 Minutes” interview after he secured the presidency.

Any honest effort to address the impending Trump presidency and bigotry would have included mention of this dynamic. That’s a standard, though, that we’ve learned not to expect from O’Reilly.

• All sorts of studies and analyses have examined the motivations of Trump supporters. One found that racial anxiety is central; another found that such anxiety and economic considerations drove support; and a general yearning for “change” was cited by Trump voters. There will be more studies, but O’Reilly’s contention that “Donald Trump won the election because of the economics” glosses over his well-documented appeal to white nationalists.

AD

AD