Bill O’Reilly: A Personal History
Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year stint on the Fox News Network came to an abrupt end on April 19th, amid numerous allegations of sexual harassment…
Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year stint on the Fox News Network came to an abrupt end on April 19th, amid numerous allegations of sexual harassment, and an ensuing advertiser boycott and pull-out. In order to fully convey the cultural and political legacy of this bloviating, hate-engorged loofah-fucker, and to fully illustrate the boundless schadenfreude I feel at the news of his demise, I want to share a personal anecdote. And in order to deliver that anecdote, I’m going to evoke a very Bill O’Reilly phrase, one you hardly hear outside of conservative circles these days: “Before 9/11”.
Before 9/11, my mom was a political apathetic, and I was an 11-year-old nose-picker and aspiring bat biologist. My mom was conventional, and religious, but supported abortion rights and disliked the easy accessibility of guns. Her favorite news programs were The Today Show and Entertainment Tonight. My only political views were that people should wear seat belts and only flush if they’d gone number 2.
But when I came home from middle school on September 11, 2001, I found my mom sitting in her recliner, staring ahead, still the way she only was when somebody died or if I was in trouble. Fox News was on the TV, and the twin towers were falling on an unceasing loop, layered with unhelpful commentary. At 8pm, The O’Reilly Factor cut through the din, and a calm, collected Bill demanded the swift capture of Bin Laden. A guest sputtered that the Taliban had “unleashed the dogs of war”.
After that, Fox News was on constantly in our home, and The O’Reilly Factor became appointment television.
On a network filled to bursting with conservative perspectives, Bill O’Reilly stood out for his seemingly clear thinking, intellectualism, and cool temperament. My mom, corn-fed on Midwestern politesse, could not handle the screaming fights of Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes; couldn’t get past the dripping double-entendres of pervy Sheppard Smith. O’Reilly was measured and thoughtful. He taught his viewers new vocabulary words — like verisimilitude and boondoggle.
O’Reilly read history books and ended his programs with careful, snarky-smart essays about the perils of political correctness and the society-upending implications of gay marriage. He provided my mother with intellectual stimulation and comfort, like a challenging but respectful father. He would report; she would decide. And she always decided he was right.
So I received a constant stream of conservative, Rupert-Murdoc-sanctioned opinions that rankled me, and quickly began defining myself by my opposition to them. On January of 2002, I sat with my mother before Fox News and watched Bush’s State of the Union address. Anti-terrorism and war was bandied about; a gay marriage amendment was mentioned. O’Reilly came out in vociferous, self-assured support of both.
I stood up and ranted at the television and my mother, head swirling with fury despite a total lack of political knowledge. I didn’t know I was any kind of gay or any kind of trans, but attacks on queer people always and immediately jabbed me in some unseen, very sensitive nerve, made me feral and full-throated with rage. My mom would tilt her head to the side and give a pacifying , I can see why you feel that way, Erika, but she could see things the opposite way, too. Fair and balanced.
This defined the tenor of all future political disputes. My mother did not believe in arguing her position. As hours of Fox News drew her focus and slowly morphed her beliefs, she never risked telling me that Islam was evil, free speech needed to be curtailed, and gay marriage was wrong; she would simply say that people deserved to believe what they wanted, that fighting about such things wasn’t polite. My frustrated adolescent pleas to be seen, to be accepted, to receive empathy, were one side of the debate. Fox News was the other. She balanced me out every night.
While I figured out my own beliefs, Bill O’Reilly was experiencing unbidden revelations of his own. A video from early in his career surfaced. In the clip, a younger, chestnut-haired O’Reilly doesn’t understand a phrase on the teleprompter — “play us out?,” he asks someone off-screen, “What does that mean, play us out?”. Then he explodes into screams of “FUCK IT, WE’LL DO IT LIVE, WE’LL DO IT LIVE!” His face transforms from its typical confident, thin-lipped smirk, into a roaring, blank-eyed maw.
I showed this clip to my mom, hoping O’Reilly’s verbal abuse would remind her of my father, hoped it would make her see that he was an asshole with no capacity to recognize his own wrongness. But she didn’t say a thing. There was always another side to the story, an unbiased perspective that my angry, progressive self couldn’t see.
I became political. I joined the debate team and made it to nationals, having learned from O’Reilly to package my opinions in faux-intellectualism and punchy, persuasive certainty. I became co-President of my school’s Gay Straight Alliance, and got in trouble for interrupting lunch periods with speeches about the annual cost of enforcing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Sometimes, my mom would get quiet and pointedly ask if I had something to tell her, but every time I demurred. Our house wasn’t a safe place to figure out you were queer. It wasn’t a safe place to cry about being threatened with a beat down and called a fucking dyke in the school showers. It was a No Spin Zone.
I stayed out of the house as late as possible, going to student congress and driving surreptitiously to trans support groups at the Gay and Lesbian Center of Cleveland. I applied to go to college in Ohio’s liberalest, gayest city. I drank in friends’ basements and puked in cardboard boxes.
Meanwhile, Bill O’Reilly was being sued by a former producer for a series of sexually explicit and harassing phone calls. Again, damning clips surfaced. In the phone recordings, O’Reilly whispers lasciviously and tells his then-producer to use her vibrator to “blow off some steam”, then instructs her to insert a loofah into her cervix. At one point in the tape, he forgets the word “loofah” and instructs her, instead, to fuck a “falafel”.
Again I delivered this news to my mom; again she seemed nonplussed. O’Reilly settled out of court 2 weeks later. His ratings went up 30%. I went away to college and started bumming around with a bunch of anarchist lesbians and trans people and started blogging about politics. When I spoke on the phone with my mom, I gave her an anodyne account of my life, all grocery shopping and grad school applications. We both defaulted to Midwestern denial of the chasm that separated us. She ignored my public, loud coming out posts and kept using my old pronouns, and I acted like I didn’t notice.
Fox News knew for over a decade that one of their most famous broadcasters was a rapey piece of shit, but they acted like they didn’t notice. The falafel lawsuit happened back in 2004. For 13 years they overlooked it, happy to shellac over the cracks in his weary visage and accept advertiser revenue and cuts of his book sales. It took a barrage of sexual harassment reports, voiced by five different women, and the loss of 21 sponsors, for Fox to decide O’Reilly was tainted. Once the network determined that O’Reilly was a liability, an internal investigation uncovered scores of additional threats, enticements, and nasty comments, some of which had been reported years prior.
It took the election of Trump to shock me back into confronting my mom about her politics. After years of choosing cowardice and silent, I could feel the rights and safety of myself and the people that I love on the chopping block. Suddenly I was a teenager again, foaming at the mouth and crying for her to understand, and she was her same self, placid in her easy chair, expecting me to stop being so emotional, and respect her right to disagree about my basic humanity.
Conservatives used to love using September 11th as a reference point.. It was a line in the sand, a crossed Rubicon excused them unleashing all manner of Islamophobia, jingoism, and moral traditionalism. I understand the appeal of such lines, and see my life divided up into similarly stark eras: Before Fox News and After Fox News; Before and After Trump. Some decisions cannot be revoked; Some canyons cannot be broached or sealed back up, no matter how many layers of TV anchor makeup you shellac on them.
My initial reaction to O’Reilly’s firing was to dash around my house yelling, delightedly, that my nemesis had been killed, and that this man who taught my mother to not see me would probably die of a heart attack soon; that eventually, all my enemies die. It felt good to imagine him withering, meeting retribution for his decades of lies and hate. It felt like being right. It felt like unleashing the dogs of war.
This piece was originally read live at The Skewer, Chicago’s Live Monthly News Review, at Cafe Mustache in Logan Square.