Bill O’Reilly says Trump defended Nazis because he doesn’t understand them

By Sam Barsanti | August 21, 2017 | 8:34pm

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We can all come up with various reasons for why Donald Trump had such a hard time condemning the violent actions of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the Charlottesville rally—including “he sympathizes with the Nazis” and “he’s a big fucking dummy”—but disgraced cable news host Bill O’Reilly has formulated a slightly different theory. In a guest post on The Hill, O’Reilly suggests that we shouldn’t blame Donald Trump for being so stupid, we should blame the public school system instead. Citing zero evidence and ignoring the likelihood that Donald Trump has never set foot in a public school, O’Reilly claims that World War II and the Nazis are “barely mentioned” in “many American public schools,” adding that Adolf Hitler is a “distant monster” to these poorly run schools instead of being “as vivid as today’s sunrise.”

The basic tone of O’Reilly’s post is that he’s the world’s smartest man because he’s the only one who knows about what happened during World War II, and he thinks that fewer people would’ve stood with the white supremacists in Charlottesville if they had been better educated about what the Nazis did. Weirdly, though, O’Reilly doesn’t actually spend any time explaining what the Nazis did beyond “mass murder,” making him just as guilty as these terrible public schools he’s complaining about, but it’s not like anyone is actually looking for Bill O’Reilly to make a solid argument about something.

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O’Reilly goes on to say that the evil of Nazis is the sort of weighty topic that demands a lot of emphasis, so even though Trump was apparently right to condemn the violence “on many sides” and to highlight the “good people” among the Nazis, O’Reilly thinks he should’ve waited to make those points at a different time. Because of that misstep, Trump has opened the door for his “legions of enemies” to unfairly label him and his supporters as Nazi sympathizers.

Impressively, O’Reilly then ends his post by saying that all of his could’ve been avoided if Trump and “millions of others” had been willing to accept a “zero tolerance” policy when it comes to white supremacists, but he makes that point without expressing a single word of support for the people who actually stood up to the Nazis in Charlottesville and elsewhere in this country. Perhaps people like Heather Heyer—who is not mentioned in his post—should also be “as vivid as today’s sunrise.”