Geraldo Rivera will forever be the journalist who famously gave away troop coordinates on live TV. He’ll also remain in audience members’ hearts as the guy who opened Al Capone’s vault full of dirt. These two examples barely nick the surface of ill-advised acts from Rivera, but somehow, he keeps landing on small screens. The reigning king of the hot mic does not care about looking ridiculous. He’s also not concerned about appearing insensitive, so Rivera told Fox and Friends what the Orlando nightclub shooting victims should have done. If only they listened to his advice (and maybe did some time travel), everything would be just fine.
The gist of Rivera’s preachy lesson — which presupposes that taking down someone who’s peppering the room with bullets is an easy feat — is that the Orlando shooting victims simply gave up. He seems to believe that clubgoers could have bargained or reasoned with Omar Siddiqui Mateen. Never mind the added detail of Mateen not only fired off rounds from a semi-automatic gun (the AR-15), but also used taped up rounds, so he barely needed to reload.
Mateen was clearly unhinged, violent, and homophobic, and he entered the club to do one thing — kill. But Rivera says victims should have manned up and fought back:
“When you’re in that situation and you have no weapons, you have two choices. If you can’t hide and you can’t run, you have two choices. You stay and die, or you fight. For God’s sakes, fight back. Fight back.”
Then Rivera gets his numbers wrong before calling the American people to action. He’s completely serious here, by the way:
“There’s 100 people that he murdered with one weapon that he reloaded. When he reloaded they must, people must, America must understand, we are at war with Islamic terror, with these terrorists. We’ve got to stop them in Raqqa, we’ve got to stop them in Mosul, and we’ve got to stop them in the Pulse, Orlando.”
Rivera’s words defy explanation, especially seeing how Mateen could only be taken out by a SWAT team forcing their way into the building three hours after the incident began. Long before then, people would have decided to “fight back” if at all possible. Unfortunately, many of them were either dead or pretending to be dead. The latter status is actually how some people survived this tragic event. If those wise folks stood up and charged the gunman, there surely would have been more than 49 victims.
Here are Rivera’s ridiculous comments, in case you wanted to lose your mind.