If Jon Stewart was once the Yoda of cable news, does that make Bill O’Reilly the Sith Lord? Trevor Noah certainly thinks so. The Daily Show celebrated Fox News giving O’Reilly the boot by taking a look back at his most memorable moments of fear, anger, and hate, from his battles in the supposed War on Christmas to his on-air temper tantrums.
Of course, no supercut of O’Reilly’s greatest hits would be complete without his most racist classics, and as Noah points out, O’Reilly’s white Christian victimhood shtick was just one part of the equation. The O’Reilly Factor host also had a special relationship with the black community, which led to moments like the time he responded to then-candidate Donald Trump’s promise to create jobs for black youth by suggesting that they are unemployable: “How are you going to get jobs for them? Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads.” (You know it’s bad when you’re interviewing Donald Trump and you seem like the racist one.)
But O’Reilly’s most infamous moment may have come when he once suggested that guest Marc Lamont Hill, a professor of African American studies at Columbia University, looked like a cocaine dealer:
“Bill O’Reilly’s lucky that black people aren’t all the criminals he thinks they are,” noted Noah. “Otherwise, that guy would have popped a cap in his ass.” Let’s not forget, though, that a decade of racism was not enough to get advertisers to drop The O’Reilly Factor. Instead, it took a New York Times story that revealed that Fox News had paid out $13 million to settle five sexual harassment complaints against O’Reilly to finally pressure advertisers and then the network into giving him the boot.
Noah, for one, is ready to say goodbye: “It’s sad to say, but farewell, extremely old friend.”
