Rapper Killer Mike didn’t mince words while discussing Bill O’Reilly and the recent violent unrest in Baltimore in an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night.
The Run the Jewels rapper, who spoke out after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer and recently guest lectured on race relations at MIT, called Bill O’Reilly “full of sh*t” and compared Jesus to the late rapper Tupac Shakur.
“I like Bill O’Reilly the character, but I hate how white people take him so seriously,” the rapper told Maher. “He’s more full of sh*t than an outhouse. I’m gonna go in a black club and see Bill O’Reilly with a stripper on his lap, I guarantee you that. He’s as fictional as those books he writes.”
Killer Mike also weighed in on the recent violent unrest in Baltimore in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, the results of which he said stemmed from black people living in a community they “don’t own.”
“When people say, ‘Why do you burn down a CVS, why do you burn down your own community,’ it’s because of black people being denied loans, because of black people being snookered out of their homes, gentrifiers coming in or not coming in,” he explained. “Because this happens, you live in a community you don’t own. You’re just occupying a space. Police are there, they’re occupying you.”
The outspoken rapper also compared Jesus Christ to the late rapper Tupac Shakur, saying he was “arguably a black guy, or at least dark.”
“Hung out with a posse of homies, one of them was strapped with a knife. Went to war with the government, lost, like a lot of black guys do,” Mike said of the similarities. “And everybody loved him more after he died, like Tupac.”
Killer Mike recently earned acclaim for his rap duo Run the Jewels’s latest music video. In the video for the duo’s latest single, “Close Your Eyes (And Count to F***),” a young unarmed black man and a police officer, played by Boardwalk Empire’s Shea Whigham, fight in the streets of an unspecified city.
The duo’s latest LP, Run the Jewels 2, has earned rave reviews since its release in October.
Run the Jewels: “Close Your Eyes (And Count to F***) [Explicit Language]
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