Newt Gingrich carried on Donald Trump’s African-American-outreach-by-insult on Fox News. In showing off his deep understanding of the anger fueling one Charlotte, North Carolina protester in the wake of the police shooting of Keith Scott. Gingrich announced, in essence, that her life totally sucks and that it will continue to totally suck. And it’s all President Obama’s and other African Americans’ fault.
Megyn Kelly took time out from live coverage of the Charlotte unrest with racist Mark Fuhrman in order to discuss politics with Gingrich. “There’s plenty of politics going on and that’s why we booked Newt Gingrich,” Kelly said. Translation: Time to start exploiting the unrest to help Trump. She offered no such opportunity to a Clinton surrogate.
Gingrich got right to blaming “the blacks” for all racial problems in the country:
GINGRICH: Well, look, I think this is an American tragedy. 53 years after Martin Luther King’s great “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, eight years after the election of an African American president who’s had two consecutive African American attorney generals, race relations are decaying in this country.
Then Gingrich offered up his special brand of insight into the situation by all but repeating Trump’s insulting “appeal” to African Americans: “You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?” With a little side lecture about black crime:
GINGRICH: Part of the reason for that young woman’s anger is way beyond violence. It’s schools that don’t work, neighborhoods with no jobs, random violence, of a sense of being powerless even though there’s an African American president.
[…]
Most Americans, I think, desperately would love to fix the challenge of the inner city and they know it’s not working. That young lady who was so angry a while ago. Her anger wasn’t just about the problem of police violence. She has a life that has no future. She has a life where she’s gonna have a hard time getting a job, a hard time living in a safe neighborhood, a hard time being able to go out and get the education that she ought to be getting.
Gingrich concluded that condescension by saying, “So I think this is a place where America can have a serious dialogue and not just the usual back-and-forth politics.”
"Straight news anchor" Kelly didn’t question a word. She merely gave an update from the Charlotte police about the shooting of a protester, which the police said was done by another civilian.
She came back to Gingrich to help politicize. First, Kelly hilariously said, “Forgive me, Mr. Speaker, for asking a political question,” when it was obvious politics was the only reason for him being there. Then Kelly took a veiled swipe at Hillary Clinton for “coming out and saying, ‘This is abominable and that it needs to stop’ before we have all the facts. And yet North Carolina is a critical state in this election. Just quickly on the politics of what’s likely to happen from here.”
Gingrich got a full minute of uninterrupted airtime to attack Clinton – plus another little lecture about black crime:
GINGRICH: Well, look, here’s the great challenge for Secretary Clinton. When she was at Yale as a law student, she was a co-editor of an anti-police, left-wing alternative newspaper that described police as pigs. Her natural instinct is to take the side of the people who are against the police. Her first comments about this were antipolice.
This is not a country which wants to see what we’re seeing here tonight. Now, no matter what the excuse, this is not a country that wants to see looting. It’s not a country that wants to see random violence.
And again, you mentioned citizen upon citizen. Well, watch and see how many people die in Chicago this week with no one noticing because they don’t fit the current left wing political mantra.
The fact is the current system isn’t working. It’s not working in education. It’s not working in jobs. It’s not working in safety. And that’s why Donald Trump, I think, may do surprisingly well in the inner city because he is at least offering a chance to dramatically change things.
Gingrich didn’t offer one example of how Trump may “dramatically change" anything. Nor did Kelly ask. Nobody mentioned Trump’s plan to make stop-and-frisk nationwide (which Trump is already comically walking back) as his solution to stop black crime.
Instead, Kelly thanked Gingrich and took another swipe at Clinton. Not all of Kelly's comments are on the video but Fox News' transcript has them in their entirety:
KELLY: I want to tell the audience that Hillary Clinton earlier today said “There’s still much we don’t know about what happened here in North Carolina and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but we do know that we have two more names to add to a list of African-Americans killed by police officers in these encounters. It is unbearable and it needs to become intolerable.”
And then she went on to say the targeting of police officers also needs to stop. Then she tweeted out, "Keith Lamont Scott, Terrence Crutcher and others this has got to end." However, we do not know what actually happened in these cases.
An investigation is underway. […] And there is question about whether any presidential candidate should be very careful not to get out ahead of the story before we know—we know exactly why a death occurred.
Yeah, Kelly’s just asking for a friend.
Watch it above, from the September 21, 2016 The Kelly File.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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