Appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer railed against Al Sharpton, telling host Bill O’Reilly the civil rights activist “should not be anywhere near the White House” because of multiple transgressions.
Krauthammer specifically pointed to Sharpton’s role in the Tawana Brawley case/”hoax,” adding that the MSNBC host “stokes racial hatred deliberately,” is an “enabler” and a “racial agitator” of those who, as O’Reilly describes it, feed “the black underclass” a “hopelessness situation.”
Bill O’Reilly: Now, the black underclass, the people who are poor and live in neighborhoods that are dangerous and people who feel they don’t have any chance, all right, that they’re just — the system is stacked against them. That is entrenched right now, and then the people like Sharpton and these demagogues that feed them this hopelessness situation, and it’s not your fault, it’s white privilege and all this keeping you down. That’s an industry in itself, is it not?
Charles Krauthammer: No, there’s no question that there’s a class of racial agitators who live off this, and to some extent we really have to criticize people who know better who are their enablers, the ones who fund some of those organizations like, you know, like Al Sharpton, for example.
The President of the United States should not be inviting into the White House — forget about all the other sins Al Sharpton has committed and the fact that he’s a tax cheat and all that, but you go back to the original sin: the Tawana Brawley case, which was an out-and-out hoax of a black girl, a distressed black girl, making a deliberately false accusation of rape against a deputy — I think it was a prosecutor in New York state. Sharpton was behind that the whole way. In the end he said, sue me. and he was, in fact, sued by the guy, found to have defamed him and then never ended up actually paying the fine. So this was adjudicated in a court, and a man who does that, who stokes racial hatred deliberately, should not be anywhere near the White House.
O’Reilly: Why is he, in your opinion? Why? Certainly President Obama knows the controversy surrounding Mr. Sharpton, and yet he doesn’t seem to care.
Krauthammer: It doesn’t start with Barack Obama. Go back to the election campaign of 2004 where Al Sharpton was one of the Democratic candidates. Do you remember the deference with which all the other democratic candidates treated him? This is a man who, given his history in the Brawley case and incitement in several riots in New York City, race riots in New York City, should never have been given any of that deference. And in part…among whites, it has to do with, sort of, racial guilt. They have to show deference…they would be considered racially insensitive unless they give him a deference.