By The TRUTH HOUND
If anything good has come out of the reported Orlando shooting incident, it’s that the media’s mind-bending malpractices which have cursed us for way too long are becoming quite obvious. It’s simply a question of when the big media and its ally, the central state, will overplay their hand.
Yet, some news outlets deserve special attention. When it comes to the nightly reports and commentaries of Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, and the output of Fox News in general, clarification is badly needed. There is a major deception going on here.
Case in point: O’Reilly’s regular “memo” report on the evening of June 14. See link here: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/bill-oreilly-takes-stunning-stance-154449244.html
That link carries a written report and footage of one of the most misleading pieces of “journalism” in recent memory. In the report, which is being widely referenced as a key turning point in the gun debate, “conservative” anchor Bill O’Reilly nearly does a “180” and embraces some notable measure of gun control, mainly regarding AR-15 rifles like the one reportedly used by alleged Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen.
(Editor’s note: Mateen, recall, was shot dead by police and cannot testify but the corporate media rushed to declare him guilty before he was even cold, in a total breach of basic journalistic precautions. Innocence until guilt is proven has been thrown overboard, along with a key journalistic tenet – “never assume.” Taking police reports, especially verbal ones, at face value does not wash.)
Yet this O’Reilly gun report, apart from the specifics which I’ll examine in a moment, follows the basic Fox News protocol on representing “conservatism” in media and commenting from that angle regarding government and society. As a preface to examining O’Reilly’s smug, patronizing, highly misleading lecture, here below are key points that must be digested in order to understand where the Fox News enterprise is coming from ideologically:
- First of all, Fox is a leading voice in peddling the fantasy that conservatism and patriotism can only mean unwavering support for the military. That is categorically untrue.
- An entire conservative worldview that was long practiced by widely respected true conservatives, like late paleo-conservative writers Joe Sobran and Samuel Francis, has been erased by the Fox crowd and other conservative poseurs such as those at the Weekly Standard. That almost forgotten worldview, which was represented by “Mr. Conservative,” the estimable late lawmaker Robert Taft of Ohio, recognizes that truly conservative patriotism calls for state power to be limited in ALL areas, which naturally includes putting limits on military spending, and especially limits on military missions. To not limit military power is to increase the surveillance over citizens at home, and to give a blank check to secret courts, black budgets, massive CIA abuses and needless deaths and injuries to U.S. troops and innocent foreign non-combatants.
- Which leads me to the next point. O’Reilly said that only Democrats, leftists and liberals oppose the USA Patriot Act, while saying that this spy-state law need not be watered down, and in fact should be bolstered, so “we” can go after the “ISIS savages” that are said to be lurking under every manhole. O’Reilly ignores the fact that genuine constitutional-conservatism sees a strong need to firmly push back against spy laws like the Patriot Act, or even dissolve such laws, since any “war on terror” that destroys our liberties is a lost war anyway.
- Terrorists throughout history have confessed that their main goal is not bloodshed in and of itself. It’s to use real or threatened bloodshed to destroy the culture and liberties of the target country. In other words, the action is in the reaction. So if Americans adopt more gun control, that’s just fine from the point of view of America’s real foes, such as they are. Anyway, how can our troops “defend” our domestic freedoms if the O’Reillys of the world who believe in nonstop wars also push for dissolving those very same freedoms? You cannot have a warfare state without a growing, massive surveillance state at home. The two cannot be separated. Don’t even attempt to tell me otherwise.
- The ongoing war on terror, for which winning cannot be defined much less achieved, is the perfect way to invite endless attacks against the U.S.—something that true conservatives who fought against U.S. interventionism labored to point out before the false neo-conservative movement, which includes Fox News, took over the conservative movement through William F. Buckley’s “National Review” and through the “Rockefeller Republicans.” This new vanguard of counterfeit conservatism, starting in the latter 1950s, overcame Barry Goldwater. And, having hijacked the “conservative” mantle, this vanguard redirected Republicans down the path of globalism, “world order” and war, erasing the worldview of America First and the non-interventionism called for by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among other founders.
- Now I’ll specify that, with the context of conservatism clarified, O’Reilly’s call for limits on AR-15 rifle availability makes far less sense. On the one hand, he wants to blow ISIS off the face of the earth, without mentioning that when Russia stepped in and started doing just that, the U.S. made Russia back off and sent in more U.S. troops, which is saying nothing about the evidence of ISIS being created by Western Intelligence to justify a continuing war on terror that’s highly profitable for defense industries, among many other intrigues.
- As O’Reilly remarked in his homily about guns: “There is too much gun crime in the USA, and high-powered weaponry is too easy to get,” he said. “That’s the fact. So let’s deal with it. We all have the right to bear arms, but we don’t have the right to buy and maintain mortars. Even if you feel threatened by gangsters or a New World Order. No bazookas, no Sherman tanks, no hand grenades.” Note the use of hyperbole here, which means exaggerating a concept to make a point. Owning an AR-15 is NOTHING like obtaining a tank, mortars, grenades or a bazooka.
- NO ONE EVER SAID THAT AMERICANS WHO SUPPORT THE SECOND AMENDMENT SEEK TO OWN SUCH EXTRA-DEADLY MILITARY ITEMS! REPEAT — No one ever said it. This is what I call “the fallacy of the non-argument,” which means raising an issue that nobody raised and knocking it down, as if you’re fighting a real opposing view when, in reality, the opposing view was simply manufactured out of thin air. That makes O’Reilly a pure propagandist.
- So, let’s be clear, Bill. The more astute among us know when our chain is being yanked by the fake friends of conservatism such as yourself. Fox is an utter fraud. “That’s the fact,” Bill.