He’s a real nowhere man…Making all his nowhere plans for nobody…Doesn’t have a point of view…Knows not where he’s going to. -The Beatles
Over the years we have made Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly a lot of money. We bought into his carefully-crafted persona as a populist champion of traditional values with his top-rated Fox News show, as well as best-selling books like Who’s Looking out for You and Culture Warrior.
However, recently the house of cards that is O’Reilly’s iffy worldview has shown signs of collapsing.
From reporting inaccuracies on gun control, to no longer defending marriage, O’Reilly is now scoring goals for the other team. Similar sellouts and flip-flops aren’t news when they come from politicians. But given how O’Reilly has branded himself as the man with the moral high ground inside the “no spin zone,” it definitely has the potential to damage him much more. Nobody, right or left, likes a hypocrite. O’Reilly is now “evolving” so fast it would even give presidential candidates from Massachusetts ideological whiplash.
I submit there are only three kinds of people that do this—those suffering from bi-polar disorder, squishes, or phonies.
The fact O’Reilly is a man of little conviction is not open for debate. The only debate remaining is whether or not his audience will hold him accountable for it. One of my 10 Commandments of Political Warfare is that you never abandon your base, but that’s exactly what O’Reilly has done.
He has repeated the Left’s spurious claims about the Bible’s alleged contradictions and how it’s only an allegory. In another interview with a well-known Christian minister, O’Reilly referred to the very successful mini-series The Bible as “fundamentalist Christian beliefs” and that the Old Testament is essentially fiction. Finally, and infamously, he referred to people who believe in the Word of God as “Bible thumpers.”
Many believers expect this from the liberal media they long ago tuned out. But now they’re being betrayed by the very people trying to make money off of them.
A Pew Research Study last year found an overwhelming number of conservatives, Fox News’ core audience, still believe in traditional values and attend religious services regularly. So the top-rated host on the supposedly right-leaning Fox News is now using the liberal media’s talking points and clichéd putdowns against his own audience. That’s not just abandoning your base, but betraying them as well. It’s only fitting that O’Reilly’s next book is called Killing Jesus, because that’s exactly what he’s doing.
If you accept the premise O’Reilly’s belief system really begins and ends with what’s best for O’Reilly, then perhaps he’s simply following in the footsteps of his network here? Last year, Fox News grand pooh-bah Rupert Murdoch urged Mitt Romney to abandon marriage and openly promote immorality during the presidential campaign. Fox News anchor Shepherd Smith referred to the wildly successful Chick-fil-a day as the “national day of intolerance.”
With “friends” like this who needs the liberal media?
Granted, Fox still treats traditional American values like faith, family, and freedom the fairest of all the current networks, but given its current competition that’s faint praise. Sort of like bragging about being the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
Furthermore, O’Reilly is not just promoting the very agenda he previously made a career (and millions of dollars) out of opposing, but he’s also advocating the core worldview of the Left as well. By claiming that we can’t base our laws on “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” as our Founding Fathers did, O’Reilly is directly contradicting the Declaration of Independence which says there is a God, our rights come from Him, and government’s one and only function is to protect those God-given rights.
If our rights don’t come from God then they come from the government, and what government can give it can then take away. If our laws aren’t based on the natural law revealed by our Creator in nature then they come from mortal and morally flawed men, which means there are no absolute standards of right and wrong. Therefore, O’Reilly is echoing the worldview of the secular statists presiding over $17 trillion in debt and the slaughter of over 50 million unborn Americans. The theistic worldview O’Reilly is attacking is the one that gave birth to liberty, and created the greatest period of prosperity and progress in human history.
In 2004 O’Reilly found himself mired in a tawdry personal scandal that threatened his career. When it was resolved, he went on his show to thank his base for having his back. "The good news is that (you) seem to have given me the benefit of any doubt when some in the media did not,” O’Reilly said at the time. “You guys looked out for me and I will never forget it.”
Apparently he has forgotten. At a time when we need someone with O’Reilly’s megaphone (which we paid for) to have our backs like never before, he’s not giving us the same benefit of the doubt we once gave him. He’s collaborating with our opponents and kicking us when we’re down instead.
In my “no spin zone” the word for that is treacherous.