Conservative radio host Geraldo Rivera and far-right pundit Dan Bongino got into a shouting match in a recent Fox News segment regarding racist police violence in the aftermath of 20 year old Daunte Wright's murder.
Wright was killed by Officer Kim Porter, who claims she mistook her gun for her taser before fatally shooting Wright at a traffic stop.
Rivera said of the tragedy that "you can't reach for your taser and take out your 9 millimeter and shoot somebody and expect everybody to go kumbaya."
Bongino accused Rivera of "further inflaming the situation," and the segment devolved into an argument from there.
Watch below.
Bongino absurdly claimed there was "no systemic racism" and accused Rivera of "pretending to be a cop," while Rivera decried Bongino for having "a 10 minute career as a cop."
After Bongino told Rivera to "take a Valium," he went on to blame Rivera for incidents of aggression toward police from civilians in cities like New York:
"Why is that happening, Sean? It's happening because people like Geraldo continue to pump out a race narrative with no data to back it up at all. ... All you want to do is see the country burn."
Rivera exploded:
"I wanna see the country burn? You son of a b**ch! I wanna see the country burn, you punk? You're nothing but a punk. You're a punk, Bongino."
The segment added nothing substantive to the discourse on how policing in this country should change, as Black and Brown people are disproportionately harassed, beaten, and murdered by police and treated more harshly than whites at every stage of the U.S. legal process.
People weren't surprised, given the segment was on Fox News' Hannity.
But as Gil Scott-Heron famously said, "the revolution will not be televised," and the most formative discourse on Daunte Wright's murder and the greater pattern of police disproportionately targeting Black people isn't being broadcast to millions.
Fox News has since had Dog the Bounty Hunter on to talk about policing and race in the United States.
Daunte Wright's murder happened 10 miles away from where the trial of Derek Chauvin—the officer who killed George Floyd last summer—is taking place. As the nation continues to reel from the trial and from Wright's murder, a video of Chicago police shooting 13 year old Adam Toledo, who had his hands up at the moment he was shot, has further confronted the United States with another police-inflicted fatality.
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