Geraldo Rivera claims that the civil rights movement only cares about black lives if they are killed by white police officers.
Rivera made this bold statement on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show (Andrea Tantaros sitting in as host) last night in a discussion of the indictment of six Baltimore cops for the death of Freddie Gray from a spinal injury while he was in custody.
The former ABC and NBC newsman, 71, who now works for Fox, reported from Baltimore during the recent civil unrest , where at least on one occasion he got into a confrontation with protesters.
Taking part in a panel discussion on the FNC program, Rivera — a self-described militant moderate — seemed to be alluding to black-on-black crime in the inner city when he offered the following comments about the black lives matter call to action.
“Earlier today, Baltimore registered its 100th homicide this year. Baltimore has almost as many homicides as New York. Baltimore is 600,000 [people]; New York is 8.4 million. So it’s 15 times the murder rate of New York, Baltimore is right now… I believe the Freddie Gray case will mark the decline into irrelevancy of the modern civil rights movement. It seems that they are only interested–black lives matter, black lives matter only when they’re killed by cops, particularly white cops. Where is the outrage of the 100 Baltimore citizens who’ve been shot dead this year? There is none. And I think now you have the cops backing off, arrests are plummeting, Baltimore will become…a blood bath, it is a killing zone right now.”
Rivera also insisted that the Maryland prosecutor overcharged the six officers in the indictment, making convictions on least some of the more serious criminal counts unlikely.
Last week, in commenting on ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos’ controversial $75,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation, Rivera revealed that he was fired by ABC in 1985 just for a “lousy $250 donation” to a family friend who was running for mayor of New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The Celebrity Apprentice runner-up further suggested that the stated reason was only a pretext and that he got in trouble back then for complaining that an ABC exec friendly with the Kennedy family spiked his 20/20 story about actress Marilyn Monroe’s relationship with Bobby and John Kennedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdmBSLoTOlQ
In February, Rivera courted more controversy when he claimed that hip-hop culture has been more culturally destructive to minorities in the last decade than racism.
Separately, it was reported this week that Geraldo Rivera and his wife are putting their Edgewater, New Jersey home/compound, “with expansive views of Manhattan and the George Washington Bridge” on the market for a listing price of $3.75 million.
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