Learning Day: The O’Reilly Factor for Kids III

Wearily, you slump against the dorm room door, having survived another stressful Thanksgiving with family—probably the last one to be thankful for in our lives. Outside is a mad whirlwind of political gloom but in h—“Welcome back to the No-Spin Kidz’ Zone!” brays the figure sitting on your bed with his shoes on. “I know we usually rip-rap over Thanksgiving dinner, but with class back in session, I wanted to ‘vibe’ with you about Your School Life! You know me and I always drop it fresh!”

The strangely blotchy shadow leans forward to confirm what the sudden boils erupting on your neck warn; after slumbering atop his pile of gold, Uncle Bill O’Reilly is awake and belching fire in your eyes’ ears for a third year. His forehead glistens in the light, its curvature as high and round as a disapproving glare can be. The squawks and scuttling beneath the bed confirm Charles “Salacious Crumb” Flowers is back as well. Let’s get this lecture over with.

The Dumb Fuck on Clothes

Corey, you wet pile of laundry, they’re not staring at you because you’re the Christian the devil warned them about. They’re staring because no healthy child cares about 2004’s culture war. You are an old man at 14, Corey, suffering the old man’s delusion that cool jackets make one edgy.

At the title jump, it’s already so much weirder than a chapter on clothes ought to be:

I think that “Leave Britney alone” kid was onto something. Bill felt comfortable speculating on a very young woman’s private parts, just leaving his musings out there for any prosecutor who wanted to find it.

…We’re still only three sentences and a fragment in.

Well, here's our first contribution from Charles Flowers. The closest Bill O’Reilly ever came to admitting ignorance was joining the Young Know-Nothings Club in second grade and wearing his “Batter All Immigrants” sealskin jacket to the fourth-form schoolhouse. Speaking of eroticized teacher-student relationships, Bill and a friend who works at a high school had a conversation about underage nudity:

“Kids are comfortable with themselves as they explore new identities,” says his friend. O’Reilly frowns. That sounds unhealthy. The filthy, lying, ready-to-go children should have mastered both of the permitted fashions by age 14.

While he imagines you in skimpy clothes getting flogged, the Notorious BO’R asks that you envision him as your stern taskmaster. “Scantily dressed teenagers fail to impress cranky codger” tells a different story than Bill aims for. A 17-year-old who knows she looks good could not care less about his opinion, yet he simply can’t conceive her. This is almost like when Dutch slathered himself in mud to hide from the Predator, except Bill’s vision screens for younger women mud-wrestling.

Time for some coded warnings about dating boys who don’t frown at you for wearing a tank top!

The real risk is that marrying your high school sweetheart will statistically swerve you from the best emotional and sexual match out there for you, but I guess Bill thinks it's a tragedy that you might have caring sex with someone age-appropriate.

Please remember that Bill O’Reilly spent years treating women in corporate dress the exact way he’s warning you happens only to Lolitas in tube tops who secretly wanted it. What I wouldn’t pay for a copy of the doublethink in Bill’s daily diary from 2000 to 2018 is best tallied in human souls.

Boys, however, should dress to sex, because they have no feelings to be taken advantage of. “Drop dripping drawers with ‘drip’!’” drawls dreary drip:

The one woman in college who gambled Bill might loosen up from a life-changing handjob told him to stop wearing disgusting stained shirts, but her sacrifice was thrown away when he took the wrong lesson from it.

That lesson is demonstrably wrong. The guy who signed Bill's checks wore this shirt, yet looked so frumpy his biography fashion-checked him as a sartorial toddler. A crisp, white shirt can’t make Rupert Murdoch look professional because Rupert Murdoch is gooey and whiter. He is an intestinal worm who grew big enough to buy off INS in cash, and the only outfit that would look professional on him is a guillotine stockade. Yet he has a string of younger wives who can’t wait to leave him, because a fat wallet is a fashion accessory in horrible social circles.

Anyway, this hypocrisy is a Zippo in hell, because it abuts the most spinning of zones:

The Dumb Fuck on Cheating

…Oh no.

How is any joke I write going to add comedy to Bill bloviating on cheats and liars? This is the Juvenalian fight of my life.

Bill O'Reilly, a man levying moral dictates to a coauthor doing the real work of fabricating Bill’s advice, is concurrently cheating on his wife and lying to Americans about weapons of mass destruction in order to help a President, who cheated to win an election, lie to the world about our oil piracy to jump our own invasion deadline a couple days early. We’re all trapped together in the madness of Bill’s world.

This is such a terrific pre-internet problem to have. The next time a boomer calls young folks lazy, entitled quitters, remind them they could pay at least six months’ rent by refusing to learn to operate a postal scale. If this woman had the crimebrain to simply dump packages in the trash, she’d be retiring in 2024 with the last of the pensions.

It’s unclear if Bill realizes her vice was being honest enough not to commit federal offenses, but he’s criticizing her failure at a role that, in his own example, requires more technical education than his. This morally smug cheater, whose only job is to bluster at an audience that can’t reply, is going to claim you can't fake your way through life. A tree stump could do Bill's job if its roots were intractable enough, though only one of them thrives the deeper its core rots.

Bill has so much integrity he would never cheat, except the two times he told us he did and the decade-long streak we learned about later. The real takeaway is his specific type of nightbreed can still burn to recall what it was to have once been a man. To quote Hot Dog Brigadier #1211 Matthew Harris, I sure hope the concept of shame comes back to our culture real soon. [Post-election addendum: it did not!] Congratulations Matthew, you are this month's Hot Dog Lucky Fan Winner of Unpaid Content Provide-to Contest ! Fabulous models are waiting backstage to give you a stick-and-poke tattoo of a sprite from a cursed video game only released for the Serbian edition of TurboGrafx-16!

Success is the biggest lie he's told in this chapter about not lying. Confusing America’s maddest relatives can be done by anyone who waits till fifth grade to drop out. You could do it even after three hard tackles on the Levittown High football team (Team cheer: “Be aggressive, Grand Wizards!”), which fields 12-man O-lines and considers playing defense an unmanly admission of weakness. Anyone could make money at a propaganda machine whose morning standup focuses on terrifying Americans that if we get healthcare the government will replace our grandparents’ oxygen masks with a pillow. Those are not gains but extant assets in the overflowing royal coffers of the nation of Assholia.

Success requires you to exceed your previous limits, and The Richest Man in Babble-On’s entire sense of self is that he already rules so hard it would injure his magnificence to change. Step-Uncle Bill cannot succeed, because he will never reach for anything farther away than the tactile allure of his own dick. (Try this at home! Wrap a snakeskin belt around an overripe banana that your boss gave you without asking.)

Okay. Deep breaths.

RJ you shill, nobody believes you, but I don’t judge. Your suck-up skills obviously grew from dad from getting punchy after four beers and a TV rumor about a Hispanic mayor imposing Sharia law.

The Dumb Fuck on Reading

Set course for an adventure called imagination! Bill extols the value of books in the most whimsical way available to him: shoving Charles Flowers to the ground and telling him to finish this chapter before Daddy Levittown gets back from a lunch date with Newt Gingrich's forehead. God, what is it about Republican obstructionists that they all have skulls big enough to bathe two rabid raccoons in?

Who is the beneficiary of this apologia? Name one child who picked up the habit of reading in the back half of high school after enduring 111 pages of an angry old man berating them? Bill isn't preaching to the choir so much as scolding imaginary altar boys in their crisp, white cassocks.

On Bill's advice, do not invite him into your home. But if you do, strew the threshold with garlic.

Anyway, Bill hates the modern Republican party because they ban books. You all read it here.

The Dumb Fuck on Self-Esteem

Oh no, it’s the cheating chapter’s evil twin. Here’s his mottled ego’s time to shine. I’ll warn you in advance: he unwittingly makes the case for giving kids a chance to discover and develop new abilities, but thinks its lesson is that adults didn’t let him flounder enough.

Florida, I know the answer is no, but I’m asking differently than usual: are you okay in 2004? Maybe you’re feeling like an outcast because you just illegally filtered election results for the governor's brother and doomed the entire planet? Buck up, you’re so powerful your teen mewling is generating 10,000 angstroms.

This page is zero day for Boomer bitching. Who takes self-esteem advice from the network that canceled post-mortem Mr. Rogers for teaching kids their worth? Let’s look at how their ilk dragged us here on a raft of dead participation trophies, against all our pleas. Flowers argues self-esteem lies within, before Bill adds a dick-whirling leap at the delusion of growing as a person. Like all neocon talking points, it sinks its fangs into a virtue that lowoks good on any sheet of paper with dimensions too small for nuance.

It’s not that you can’t sing, O’Reilly, it’s that the only note you hit is MI MI MI MI. Have you tried not hammering a tune like it’s a wall within arm’s length of your divorce papers?

Bill begins by saying todays’ kids’ unearned confidence is toxic, but only makes it to the end of a made-up example about himself before unwittingly bemoaning the only parents who’ll vote yes to his HOA proposal of paper-bag testing new residents. The notion that giving people the tools they need will tear down their so-called superiors’ successes has been done by much more entertaining Randian shitheads. And even The Incredibles had to drown that notion in genocide and terrorism to stutter-step the actual rebuttal that we should help everyone live up to their potential.

Or is it made up? Garbage archeology best practices dictate I fact-check this chorus claim to an unsettling degree, and for once, he’s telling the truth! Here is the Charminade High Men’s No O’Reillys Club Municipal Opera. Look how happy they are! Brimming with self-esteem because Bill isn’t there to tell them, in voce fortissimo, to stop believing in themselves. Their future is bright! And modulated.

That cheap punk O’Reilly thinks manners are only for mortal beings, but his definition of bad self-esteem is blind to his belief in the divine right of King Assholes. Instead he settles on “Children should be banned from activities they haven’t learned yet” before the lazy, entitled grump wanders off the range, leaving Charles Flowers to dispense some You’ve Heard This Speech Before.

What an ironic whiff! This braggart fails the only topic he’s qualified to speak on, while still getting money and free attention for exuding the problems he makes up. Or as he puts it from his cross-media pulpit, “The problem with you spoiled kids is my parents pitched a fit to nab every opportunity I ever wanted.”

I’m a terrible actor, Bill! Should I have been banned from my school’s production of The Problematic King & I? Or did my stumbling portrayal of Thai Vizier With Two Lines & Uh-Oh Makeup underline how charismatic the leads were? I had fun doing drama and being close to my dramatically talented crush. I made friends! Sometimes it’s good to let kids fail at things so they don’t grow up to write entire books about how they’re the best at everything except singing, or any other pursuit that requires communicating emotion.

Maybe I lack self-esteem, but if I were Bill at this stage of civil damages, I would actually be very meek about sharing my unrequested shower thoughts.

Anyway, meddling parents saying their kids deserve a chance to earn those trophies is false self-esteem on Planet Factor, or else code for “a headache for hardworking teacher Bill O'Reilly, who quit teaching to become rich and famous for esteeming himself too highly.” Are you lost? I’m lost. Thankfully, here comes each chapter’s required waypost of bragging about what an asshole he is.

You didn't think this chapter was going to end without Grandpa Bully polishing his own knob, did you? God, it is tedious how proud this ghoul is of fucking suckballing. O’Reilly gazes into the abyss and inevitably celebrates his weaknesses’ greatness. He thinks as long as he adds “And by the way, that’s not bragging” to “I get paid heaps to smell my own farts” he can admit he’d do it for free just to savor the aroma of brimstone. Bill O’Reilly is a snake eating his tail while describing how great his rattle tastes to a female producer.

The Dumb Fuck on Sports

Great, here comes the countdown to pretending golf is a sport.

Adam, your school is broke because Bill mobilizes the kneejerk anti-tax voter against any politician who doesn’t consider balanced budgets a telltale sign of The Jewry. Moving on, sports teach us cooperation and how to excel without winning at all costs, says the guy who can never be wrong and once tried to get his ex-wife’s boyfriend fired.

Oh my God. He got kicked out of the ragtag Bad News Bears team with heart, and went to join the snooty country club team across the lake. He doesn't even realize he's the bad guy in this John Cusack movie. Who among us couldn't strike out 1960s Long Island pre-teens whose mothers smoked and drank through pregnancy? This was an era when dads feared that eating green vegetables caused homosexual Frenchness. Baseball was our most popular sport because everyone got a few minutes to recover after sprinting forty feet and the world record for the mile at this time was still measured in cock crows.

He fumed for days. Jesus Christ, Bill, I know your kind don’t reflect in mirrors, but the fog of your coffee breath hasn’t even receded from the section about loser parents fighting coaches. Every L’il Bill story in this book is about why adults are right to hate him. How detestable a teenager must Billy O’Reilly have been for his backup male role model to consider him a lost cause in molding virtue? He was abandoned by his only father figure who didn’t menace the other ones—in the chapter about sports bringing out Bill’s best!

I don’t think Brooks Brothers Gollum understands that sportsmanship is different from an enemies list, but I’ll save you some squinting; he tells a long metaphor about how coworkers who refused to suffer his entitlement should have bunted home his glory instead of taking risks to perform their best.

At this point I speak fluent O'Reilly, and Bill was either backstabbing everyone while telling himself he had to beat them to it, or somebody held his asshole behavior to account. This dingbat just finished defining self-esteem as a high-pitched screech that means—in your surface-dweller language—abandoning the weak to falter in endless hypercompetition. Yet when a 1980s woman is brave enough to rebuke his misdeeds, he fashions his grudge into a pearl he’ll huck at children decades later. How was it that the Sports chapter revealed his entire ass in a section that includes Cheating and Self-Esteem? Is this his origin story? Did his mom’s intercession nuke his confidence? Does he know in his heart of hearts that he doesn't deserve his spoils? Reader, we have arrived at the heart of the book, hand me a stake!

The Romans, as you no-good, fun-loving teens may know, had an expression. No wonder nobody wants Bill on their baseball team. Latin is a fun language ruined by people who quote it. I’m a middle-aged nerd who writes a comic about Roman history and renames all my digital devices Latin phrases and even I’m not the target demo for a sentence this pompous. Tech-bro dickheads asking if you've read Marcus Aurelius is the new fi-bro asshole asking you if you've read Sun-Tzu. Bill has read neither and lunches with both.

The Dumb Fuck on Teachers

Oh look, a bonus backstory: the war on teachers. Bill's contempt for educators runs hard through this chapter, and his Fifth Column is doing its part:

Julia sells out her faith for a C in life sciences by changing a quiz answer from “Adam’s rib” to “mitochondria”, while Anonymous is now going to have to suffer dad screaming “What’s wrong, you ungrateful little brat?” an extra day this week. How dare this jerk teacher care about a kid’s mental state? Anyway, the entire nation's textbooks are determined by Texas and populist uprisings usually start by killing the intellectuals, in case you want to learn two unrelated facts today.

Bill O'Reilly doesn’t understand sarcasm because everything he says is insincere, but his mom berated his editor into letting him give it his best shot with that Brad Pitt line.

After a hundred pages of yelling at us to respect all authority, Captain Malignant Rumor starts sowing the seeds of rebellion against teachers and coaches who didn’t give Bill his coveted star position. We only get half a page of text before Bill grabs your elbow roughly to recount a woman who wronged him:

Teen Billy O’Reilly throwing spitballs at your head and insisting he’s the class clown is the “prank” seed that propels the oak of doxing a centenarian. Christ, what an asshole. Why do I set myself the task of weighing his humanity year after year? What Pilgrim’s ghost cursed me to expurgate the sins of colonial America through the lens of America’s proudest shithead?

I don’t think the Blue-Eyed Banshee understands human interactions absent any conflict. Even when he admits he's in the wrong, he withholds all details and calls a dead woman bad at her job.

Let’s skip over the next seven pages instructing how to defy teachers who aren’t as gifted as O'Reilly was, while noting he only gave us a five-page chapter about parents expressing love (what the rest of us call “power struggle”). This is a handbook for Klingons, and I am experiencing bij reading it.

The absolute gall—! Admitting he abandoned children’s education for more money, within the book he’s selling you about things kids need to know. Criticizing teachers while recognizing they must work unpaid overtime to do their jobs properly. Exposing minors to the radioactive bleed of his ego. Inventing lower forms of braggery for how rich and famous his medium-talent clod’s ass is. Please turn to page 132 for our processional hymn, “Christ, What an Asshole.”

If you are a Long Island coach or teacher who was bullied into letting this Teen-Steamed Ham be his fatheaded twerp self, please send me your stories. Ditto every Florida girl named Tammi who got yelled at for wearing hip-huggers. He’s already broadcasting his hypocrisies himself, but I need salacious details so that I can achieve blackout hategasm.

Oh, and one time everybody clapped:

Bill, you weird growth on the navel of humanity, they were dead silent because their teacher once again clumsily brought sex into conversation with people half your age and lacking any of your power. You’re like a ChatGPT that was only trained on the Beetle Bailey cartoons they can’t reprint.

The Dumb Fuck on Making Plans

We can skip this Eyewitness Report, because it’s just old souls complaining that other teens have too much fun. We’ll also blaze right past Old Man Rogan reprinting the time his decision to quit Inside Edition and drift through grad school gazing at crimson tits warranted a Boston Globe article. To make plans, he recommends you write down your goals but not how to work towards them, followed by two examples of fate’s capricious cuts mocking mortal piloting plans.

How are you going to fly right in life when you can’t even fly a USAF MR-64 Goshawk? Our author knew a real-life Richard Corey tragedy and exemplifies him as Cadet Goofus. The double tragedy of teen suicide is that you aren’t around to stop an asshole from writing your final epitaph.

These two pilots unintentionally proved determinism, so he’s obviously working without a plan for this chapter on making plans. Instead, he spends most of it trying to prove he can hang with the youth:

Ah yes, Old Abe. Famous among our U.S. Presidents for living to a wizened age. Bill was a year or two younger than Lincoln at most when he wrote this. I’m sure Honest Abe would appreciate being quoted by a liar whose storm of rabble-rousing preceded an ideologue sneaking into a public venue to shoot someone in the head.

How? How is any News Corp lawyer letting him go to press blabbing about extracurricular shower activities to younger people even while Andrea Mackris is rolling a wheelbarrow up to Fox News’s bank? Five more women accused him of harassment after this! In a chapter about making plans he demonstrates himself unable to learn a lesson and choose judiciously. This is the O’Reilly clan’s most self-injurious failure since his pregnant mom lost her nerve at the top of the stairs.

Let us give thanks that young Factor fans never learned better planning advice than “write down some law of attraction wishes and occasionally stare at it to see if you’re closer.” As strategies go, I guess it beats shitting in the other hand. The example from his own life is Bill O’Neck-Baggins noodling around Harvard until another serial sexual harasser called him up and told him he’d won the Irish Asshole Sweepstakes. That’s it. That’s how you achieve success! Make plans, have giant skull, get lucky. I must summon the occult spirit of Jason Pargin to voice this point emphatically enough [Jason Pargin does step forward and lend me his authoritative adult tones]: This is Bill’s own account of the success he cannot stop wobbling his jowls about!

I have never seen a whiter business plan, and I worked in the construction industry. Inside Edition was A Current Affair for people who refuse to take their blood pressure medication, and this lackadaisical wad of chewed gum quit the easiest job he’d ever had. All Pighead did was answer the phone when Santa Ailes gifted him an even bigger opportunity to fuck up, and he thinks you can replicate that! If you aren’t a rich media goblin’s dream version of himself that can handle studio lights without turning to stone, I guess you’ll die poor. Have you tried having harassably great boobs to get rich? Fuck!

Smart Operators and Pinheads

We get a paragraph each on grade-school civilized behavior requirements, but only after an entire okay-I-get-it page explaining why sunburns are not cool…literally, DUDES! If you work at Fox News, it’s urgent advice to avoid the burning gaze of the day orb, 'ere ye venture forth from thy coffin in the loam. But we’ll fast-forward to why smart operators let Daddy punish them:

Bill wrote this book when his kids were still toddlers, meaning his only credentials for understanding the teenage mind are an unfathomably deep anger and having terrible judgment about how to talk to the opposite sex. And still he can't defer to child psychologists without a colloquialism that drags their expertise to even stature with his ignorance. Me, I’m just impressed his big head can conceive shrinkage without first calling his producer’s hotel room. Ugh, Bill O’Reilly’s hat size is the number that flashes on the screen as your computer crashes while trying to divide America by zero.

What the fuck is he talking about? “Are you bored? I’m not. You have only yourself to blame. Forgive yourself. I did. Got any blow?” I don’t understand what’s happening and I’m scared. Let’s slow it down 400% and decrypt it:

The fastest hot rod is a child's imagination, says the man who grew up in a neighborhood so milquetoast he considered Billy Joel to be its local hoodlum. Sure! This is the Splendid Bland Beast we let whoopsie-gab us into a crime against humanity! This guy! Your tax dollars could have built bridges and solar panels and the world’s largest fiberglass butt sculpture instead! But this butthead!

Suck my butt, O’Reilly. Isn’t there a Factor lady-employee somewhere who’s done 90 minutes of work without hearing what you’d like to do to her butt-clitoris? In fact, butt my balls, you irrelevant buttbrain.

And you, dear reader—You made it to the end! I award you five self-esteem points for not-cheat and did-read. The school year is ruined now, but you did learn important lessons about success (be white and middle-class), teachers (the good ones quit immediately), and sports (slide into base cleats up). Most importantly, you passed Christ, What an Asshole 301 with a B+, the highest Factor grade attainable. That earns you varsity stripes in Chorus and Shower Monologues. Ms. Martin and I are as proud of you as Butt O’Reilly is of himself.

Brendan has nothing to plug. Go like this picture of Dennard break-dancing instead and then pre-order How to Dodge a Cannonball.

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