Learning Day: The O'Reilly Factor... For Kids!

Your immune system is refreshed and COVID-ready for Thanksgiving this year, but what about that other terrible plague of our times? Boomer ignorance has mutated over two years of isolation, as Facebook infected your dumbass relatives’ heads with deadly ideas. Today we inoculate you with an inactive version, weakened to be child-safe:

Foreign readers will know Bill O’Reilly only from his speaking tour with Hot Dog luminary Dennis Miller. Meet your straight-shooting, blunt blusterer:

He’s a disgraced blogger now, but in 2004, O’Reilly was at his peak. America was liberating Iraq so hard there were freedomquakes as far away as Socializuela. As the frowning face of a network profiting from the unprovoked war it helped create, he proudly sneered at anything resembling weakness. And he was ready to address the most vulnerable people of all: kids.

In the role of your aunt trying to keep him in line till pie, it’s co-author Charles Flowers. We’ll assume he wrote every word in this book that isn’t O’Reilly talking about himself or the good old days of leaded gasoline.

To enumerate O’Reilly’s jackassed public statements would be like naming every ant in a particularly blotchy anthill. Yet The O’Reilly Factor for Kids is unsettlingly agreeable. After the expected dorky pop culture references by an old man trying to “rap” with the “teens,” its views are so broad they lack actual advice.

In fact, print Bill is astonishingly respectful of others, even arguing for ew-ew-gay parents’ right to adopt, and dispelling the stereotype that Chinese-Americans carry bubonic plague.

Maybe Flowers wrote everything rational and O’Reilly just dictated a few anecdotes between taping his show and telling his producer that he wants to stuff a falafel in her pita pocket. Maybe my standards are lax because this was a decade and a half before conservative media adopted its pro-germ-warfare stance. Or maybe O’Reilly sincerely believes that Americans willing to work hard will make it to the top where he can call them out-of-touch elites. The important thing is how dramatically O’Reilly the Author veers from O’Reilly the Man If You Can Call Him That.

Let’s measure the gulf between this hypocrite’s words and deeds from advice to anecdotes. As with all vaccines, we’re going to space out your doses to let your system adapt. Your 2021 exposure is Section 1: People in Your Life.

Friends:

Friends, he informs us, aren’t like the TV show Friends. Except they are? I don’t think he’s ever seen an episode but if he ever meets Jennifer Aniston, he’ll gladly introduce his William Penis-ton.

This is the second page of Chapter 1, and Bill has already paused his moralizing rhetoric to brag about his money and let the youth know he would pretend to be a woman’s friend to fuck her. Goddammit, I’m putting so much work into calibrating your radar for know-it-all assholes here, and their dethroned king wants to trip me up at the gate by proving he’s actually a semi-turgid penis given speech by an evil wizard. No wonder his head is both literally and metaphorically swollen to the point of eruption.

Real friends don’t make jokes or change their minds about attending a sock hop for a fun time.

It’s a painful tale of adolescent changes and growing tired of hearing freshman Billy say, “If I ever met Raquel Welch it would be A very Swingin’ Summer.”

But we know Bill is an asshole.

Look, I don’t assume four-year-old O’Reilly was a full-BO’R asshole. But picture how shitty the adult version is, and add fledgling teenager. His friend was kinder to abandon their relationship than to tell Bill what kind of person he’d become.

See? The first sign of an asshole: granting himself dispensation from his own expectations of everyone else—twice!

Bullies:

We are a nation of multitudes. From coast to coast, we enjoy a spectrum of Americans to mock. But one we don’t call out enough is the misplaced pride of the northeast Irish-Catholic. No one else venerates their grandfathers’ trauma as their own honor:

But we know Bill is an asshole.

With that in mind, let Bill tell you, in 1930s gangster-speak, how he escalated a situation to violence on his punchy dad’s advice, and escaped punishment by interference of the same.

Picking a fighter here is like Alien vs. Predator; the only ethical choice to root for is the vs. To be clear, Billy-boy isn’t an asshole for turning some tie-wrasslin’ into flying fists; those bullies were dicks. But if you choose to punch your response, you can’t get irate about the consequences.

Never being wrong is such a key component of an asshole’s character, Bill bites down on seconds. Do you ever suddenly recall something awful you did or said two versions of yourself back, and shudder at who you used to be? Wash out your News Corp coffee mug and go home. Not once is Bill ever horrified by his teen self, even when he’s bullying a kid for having a loving father with mental problems:

But we know Bill is an asshole.

Since he admits to being wrong here, our lens is on why violence against children in his hometown is more of a property dispute. Maybe Bill got detention because you had to be 18 to hit kids?

Behind every famous shithead, there’s a garbage parent with a giant, blotchy skull. No wonder Bill has a wealth of very real letters like these to prove his points:

Rebellious teen and O’Reilly Factor viewer are such synonyms at this point, I don’t even need to explain to you why a cable news opinion hour would get letters from hundreds of kids. What was a niche in the ’00s is just ingrained in our culture today, like Marvel heroes or punching a tree and screaming when we’re furious at our O’Reilly families.

Parents:

Learning conflict resolution from a guy who got rich by interrupting people? That’s like taking advice on parenting from a guy who calls his own daughter a liar for reporting he choked her mother. Mostly because both of those guys are Bill O’Reilly. Anyway, the school let him play goalie without proper protection, and I think we’ve uncovered the source of all the CTE symptoms in Levittown:

I assume that playing goalie is a tacit admission that his gigantic skull makes it impossible to skate upright, but is perfect for obscuring a regulation-size hockey net.

Jesus, Bill O’Reilly is the frumpiest form of ugly. If you rubbed up against 100 female coworkers in the News Corp elevators for 100 years, he’s the grime-gollum that would eventually form out of their fear-sweat caking your sweater vest.

But we know Bill is an asshole.

The closest thing to a parenting lesson here is “let anger motivate you,” so I want to speak directly to the 1-900-HOTDOG junior Nitrate Scouts: you are absolutely smarter than 90% of adults. You may have less life experience, but the internet is a high-speed socialization engine, and you are correct every time you suspect a grown-up is stupid.

Siblings:

This chapter is classic O’Reilly, opening with his favorite move: a set-up so mild it’s sold in England as vanilla pudding, and its groan-worthy payoff—

— which concludes without enactable advice. If you’re smart enough to listen to him, you’ll learn good is better than bad, but he has no ideas for how to be a kinder sibling.

But we know Bill is an asshole.

He takes a somewhat Darwinian view of siblings even on resources that aren’t zero-sum:

He also cops to being a bad brother with a rare admission of regret, probably because his sister is on the short list of women he can’t regard as mere objects for his pleasure.

Compromise:

O’Reilly understands compromise at the same distance that Superman observes new kryptonite isotopes, so the book makes you fill in the work with the book’s only worksheet.

You can really tell which chapters a groggy Bill recorded after lunch and pleasuring himself to an unwilling audience of journalism grads.

But we know Bill is an asshole.

As the book vanishes up its own ass, this chapter turns inside-out. “My Story” is a half-notion about gamifying compromise into a competition—

—while the first words in the main section are about the common curse of his acquaintance:

Everyone unlucky enough to have Bill in their life is doomed to answer, “Is he always such a fucking asshole or does he just whore his reputation for money?” and this fucking asshole thinks that is such a great story for his book on how to conduct yourself publicly.

Divorce:

God, I want an update to this chapter. It’s the first one without a “My Story” inset, and I bet he’d break his back posing as the wounded party in his hideously revealing divorce. Instead we get high-quality reminders that it’s not your fault and a card with $5 in it from Chuck Flowers.

But we know Bill is an asshole.

The most famous example of loaded questions is “Are you still beating your wife?” and the asshole who made his fortune asking them is accused, under oath, of beating his wife. Let’s hear some guest-tracks from the kiddie gallery instead:

Elyse and this anonymous time traveler prove at least some letters are real, because they call O’Reilly an asshole to his giant face. God, look at the size of that Irish skull. He looks like the white hole on the other side of the Charlie Kirk tiny face singularity.

Unfortunately an army of twerpy Thomases show up to judge others:

Let’s keep the nuclear family in perspective, Tom. After all, it produced Bill O’Reilly, and he was his house’s biggest choking hazard. Give me an absentee father any day over an on-site staircase wrangler.

And then there’s this future 1/6 insurrectionist whose letter was deciphered using the Zodiac Killer coda:

Other Adults:

This chapter is also devoid of “My Story,” which means the adults of Levittown concussed him so much he can’t remember a single incident other than Mr. White:

But we know Bill is an asshole.

Bill, these are Birchian times, and I am going to need you to explicitly state a White guy teaching you to swing a bat is for sports.

Instant Message #1: Pinheads & Smart Operators:

Using the popular IM medium, our author ends Section 1 on Goofus & Gallant bullshit. Disclaimer: it’s not in IM format, it’s not instantaneous, and there is no message. But everything in the book is encapsulated here: patronizing observations, awkward slang, and the supreme confidence that children know, watch, and respect him.

This section has actual advice! And it is terrible. O’Reilly knows you filthy teens are going to get hopped up on party heroin and have rainbow parties, lemon parties...just all manner of fruit-flavored parties. You know why.

These bizarre abbreviations are explained in a glossary: they’re internet shorthand that no one has ever used.

IMHO as a ’90s adolescent, the unmonitored pedophiles that filled AOL’s chat rooms invented every other abbreviation to test whether Flowers was really a confused teen in their area. Or as they taught him to say: YYSSLIBTO ASL OGTFO.

Now that you’re inured to conservative blowhardery, you can enjoy Thanksgiving. But if you get a particularly strong strain seated next to you, ask them to decipher an O’Reilly i-message. It will distract them with a topic they love, and they’ll puzzle the entire meal over the meaning of SMD. For once, they won’t know what to say:

Amen, and pass the falafel.

A smart operator is someone who donates to Brendan’s Movember fundraiser.

...

If these images are borked, you can read this article and every other on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.