Bill O'Reilly on Maxine Waters: 'I Didn't Hear a Word She Said, I Was Looking at the James Brown Wig'

It was a speech readymade for the outrage of Fox News and they certainly couldn’t resist. In the Fox and Friends segment, O’Reilly is shown split-screen with Waters, adding some of his famed insights, which include smirking, looking to the side, and fist pumping— all of which were combined with a whiff of O’Reilly’s signature smugness. In short, it was exactly what you’d expect from Fox and Friends and from O’Reilly in particular.

But there was more. “What does that mean, Bill?” one of the hosts asks O’Reilly. He responds, “I didn’t hear a word she said, I was looking at the James Brown wig. If we have a picture of James, it’s the same wig.” The hosts of Fox and Friends, who, like many on their network, regularly confuse casual racism with wit, laughed at O’Reilly’s insight and provided more of their own. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt jumped into the hilarious back-and-forth between her male colleagues to tell O’Reilly, “you can’t go after a woman’s looks.” She added that “[Waters’s] hair is pretty” and that James Brown had “girl hair.”

O’Reilly conceded that Waters is a “sincere individual.”