Fox's Jesse Watters Is Neither A Good Man Nor A Smart Man

Caution: May contain unhealthy levels of smugness

[wonkbar]a href="https: //wonkette.substack.com/p/15-things-bill-oreilly-got-wrong-while-laughing-at-how-stupid-these-hippies-are"[/wonkbar]Most of the time, Fox News creature Jesse Watters is safely walled off as the interviewer/producer of those HI-LARIOUS "Watters' World" segments on The O'Reilly Factor, where he goes and asks a bunch of dumb questions to uninformed people, cuts them together with movie clips and sophisticated comedic sound effects ("boing" and "record scratch" being particular favorites) and then has a good laugh over how stupid hippie liberals are. Every now and then, though, Uncle Bill lets him off the leash and Watters hosts the show himself, and so we get to see him doing Serious Interviews, like this piece from Friday where he talks to two actual black people, attorneys Andell Brown and Kisha Hebbon, about the Black Lives Matter movement. Neither lawyer is actually an activist with Black Lives Matter, but they are black and alive, so that's good enough for Fox. Watters is very amused that some black people are complaining in 2016 about Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill and the racial disparities in incarceration it contributed to, because that is so very silly!

</p> <p>Watters wonders how blacks could possibly complain about mass incarceration, because as the statistics clearly show, violent crime has declined since the 1990s (a decline that gets forgotten, of course, when Fox wants to suggest there's now a <a href="https: //wonkette.substack.com/p/fox-news-eric-holder-really-should-not-have-shot-those-cops-in-ferguson" target="_blank">huge crime wave</a> thanks to <a href="https://wonkette.substack.com/p/president-obama-divides-nation-says-charleston-shooting-involved-gun" target="_blank">Barack Obama </a>and Black Lives Matter). Mr. Brown actually manages to sneak a fact onto Fox News, pointing out that the national decline in crime statistics had begun in 1992, before the crime bill went into effect, so Watters of course changes the subject to that old Fox News favorite, "black-on-black crime," and asks, for roughly the eleventy-millionth time on Fox since Mike Brown/Eric Garner/Tamir Rice/Freddy Gray/Walter Scott (add your own list of <em>etc's</em> here), why it is that black people don't raise more of a fuss about black people killing other black people, because cops only kill a few out of all the black people who get themselves killed? After all, as Watters points out, even sportsball player Ray Lewis, who's "got a lot of street cred," <a href="http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl-news/4701042-ray-lewis-video-black-lives-matter-crime-baltimore-chicago" target="_blank">has complained</a> that BLM doesn't care about blacks killing other blacks. So what about that, Mr. defense attorney who is not part of BLM but will now be asked to explain why The Blacks are such hypocrites, huh? </p><p>Brown explains, as one must to a small child who needs to hear thing in small words, that crime is a bad thing for everyone, but that all crimes tend to take place among people who live near each other: </p><p/><blockquote>No one wants to see crime happen, and I think it's responsible to address any type of crime. Now, black-on-black crime, trying to separate that out from the larger crime that goes on in this country, I think, is an issue, because it doesn't address the fact that all crime happens among people that share their neighborhood, locality, ethnicity. So, to try to make it seem as if this is only a black problem, is inaccurate and it's disingenuous.</blockquote> <p>Watters has a "gotcha" on that one, because he has real statistics! </p><p/><blockquote><strong>Watters:</strong> No, no it's not just a black problem, but I have the statistics right in front of me here, by the FBI. The percentage of blacks killed by blacks, 90 percent. That's scary -- <p><strong>Brown:</strong> Right. And whites is 84 percent. </p><p><strong>Watters:</strong> No, that's scary. </p><p><strong>Brown:</strong> That's not much of a difference. </p><p><strong>Watters:</strong> No, it's not -- </p><p><strong>Brown:</strong> Not much of a difference for whites. </p><p><strong>Watters:</strong> No, you are right, you are exactly right -- </p><p><strong>Brown:</strong> So it's just about who you live around, that's who is going to be most of the crime. And most whites live around whites, and blacks live around blacks. That's just the demographics... the problem doesn't only exist in the black community.</p></blockquote> <p>Watters is just this close to acknowledging that "black-on-black crime" is pretty much a red herring, since, oh, yeah, most crime occurs within ethnic groups, not across ethnic groups. Except that when it comes to police shootings -- the killing of ordinary people by those who are supposed to be enforcing the law, that's where the racial disparities are a lot different, and also, maybe we should talk about holding police officers to a higher standard than your average criminal? It's a thought, but a thought too far for Jesse Watters, who goes back to his original talking point: </p><p/><blockquote>But -- so then why are Black Lives Matter people pointing fingers at white people, for blacks killing other blacks? How is that the white man's problem?</blockquote> <p>As they'll say in the 24th Century: </p><p><img id="0b54c" data-rm-shortcode-id="484f5bd6d935b4a39cdd30d03733667a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" class="rm-shortcode " loading="lazy" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xNzY3NTM2OC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTczNjM3NjY3Nn0.SHsVaWVn0o8laBr9Zz-l_ESwqDgokWQMiGxPYUcttsg/img.jpg?width=980" /> </p><p>Jesse Watters, you are a stupid, stupid man. You almost got there, almost understood why cops killing black people is a little different from ordinary crime, and then you just couldn't quite make it past your programming, and you failed so hard. </p><p>Finally, almost as a coda, Ms. Hebbon jumps in to give the Fox-News-Approved version of when blacks can start complaining about cops killing black people: </p><p/><blockquote>We have to teach out children better morals. We have to promote better education. We have to encourage more minorities or people in that community to be on the police force, to become prosecutors, to become judges. That's where the problem lies; you have to work within, and then you can start pointing fingers, once you've done your work. </blockquote> <p>So once all black people have straightened up and stopped doing crimes, ever, then maybe they can complain about systemic racism, once they've cleaned up their own act, darn it. It is impossible to be concerned about two things at once. Also, isn't this all just a big distraction from ISIS and Benghazi? </p><p>[<a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/04/08/%E2%80%9Chow-white-man%E2%80%99s-problem%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-o%E2%80%99reilly-guest-host-lectures-black-guest-over-black-lives-matter/209839" target="_blank">Media Matters</a> / <a href="http://www.sportingnews.com/nfl-news/4701042-ray-lewis-video-black-lives-matter-crime-baltimore-chicago" target="_blank">The Sporting News</a>]</p>