After the midterms the celebration I kept seeing treated the results as a return of something. Not a return of policy. A return of categories.
Bill O’Reilly put up a short clip on it the next day: [VIDEO]
He starts with the numbers. Democrats took the Senate (54–44 as he had it) and the House (228–139). He had expected the House loss. The Senate was the bigger surprise. Money, bills, gas, utilities. The filibuster stays, so sixty votes still matter for a while.
Then he plays the tape of Ro Khana. Diversity and Inclusion is back. Three Black governors. First Latina governor in Texas. First Muslim U.S. senator. First gay senator. “I love this America.”
His question is simple. Why does the skin color, the race, the sexual preference matter here? That is the mentality of the extremists, he says. DEI is not actually back. Courts have ruled against it almost everywhere. What happened is that some extremists got elected.
He is not against diversity or inclusion as words. He has said as much before. He is against the counting. Against treating equal opportunity as insufficient and equity as the required correction. Race mattered a hundred years ago. It does not organize the outcome now, he argues, if you develop the skills. The extremists want the other situation because it leads somewhere else.
On the Republican side he says they do not care about DEI. The problem is empathy. People who cannot pay the electric bill or the gas do not need to be told the other side is radical. They already know. They need the party in power to notice the bill. He says he told Trump to sit the utility, insurance, and oil heads down and tell them they are killing the golden goose. One statement came out. No follow-through. The message that actually reached voters was mostly “look at the radicals.” True, he grants, and not enough.
Two years will go fast. The next presidential campaign starts next summer.
That is the clip. The celebration treated the seats as proof that the categories still organize the win. O’Reilly treats that as the extremist habit, not as the reason the votes moved. The affordability argument sits underneath both readings.
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