Following up on his Monday night monologue that spared no one, Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson continued to savage the liberal media (but CNN and MSNBC in particular) on Tuesday and Wednesday for “assisting the riots” as glorified “revolutionary organizations” from their comfy, safe homes and TV studios.
Seconds into Tuesday’s show, he noted journalists alongside other public professions like athletes and celebrities as having “sided with the people burning down police stations” that have now moved onto physically attacking police officers and, in cases this week, killing them.
Focusing specifically on 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones’s endorsement of violence and a BuzzFeed article giving tips for going out into the streets, Carlson called it an example of the press not “simply covering the riots, but assisting” them with CNN specifically “on board.”
With some help from senior political analyst Brit Hume, Carlson teed off on the Black Lives Matter movement’s demands (plus those of their media allies) to not only defund police, but end all police (click “expand,” emphasis mine):
CARLSON: It’s dangerous when we try to stop looting and burning and killing, says Don Lemon. I hope they stand up and fight, he says from the safety of this television studio. But what exactly are they fighting for? They certainly are fighting but why? Don’t ask Don Lemon. He doesn’t know. Not a reader, something about Trump probably. What does Black Lives Matter say? Much of the rioting is being committed in their name. Go to their website if you have a minute. Here’s a post from three days ago “Defund the police.” That is the position of Black Lives Matter, the most popular group in America among corporate leaders. Defund the police. No more cops. That is what they are fighting for. That seems like a position but in the democratic party. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has endorsed it, as a sitting member. So has Jane Fonda, so has so many celebrities. They said so in a recent open letter. Then three days ago, The New York Times published a piece making the same demand: “No more money for the police.” No police? That’s right. The articles for the elimination of all cops and all prisons in the United States. So if we did that, who would keep order? Well, The New York Times an answer to that. “Rapid response social workers would keep the peace” and “alternative emergency response programs.” That is their plan. If you live in a gated community, it might sound like a good idea. You’ve got your own police force. You have no plans to replace them with rapid response social workers. So, you’re set no matter what. There aren’t going to be any rapes on your street but what about everyone else? What’s going to happen to them? Don Lemon and Rashida Tlaib don't care at all. Your neighborhood is not their problem. They’re in it for the revolution.
(….)
HUME: [W]e haven't had a normal media for a number of years now….Has any country on Earth, Tucker, tried harder to write the racial wrongs as this country has? If it has, I’d like to know which it is….Is there a controversy here over the death of this man in Hous — this man Minneapolis? There is no controversy. A week ago or so, Americans were totally united. It was a hideous scene we saw there with that cop with his — with this knee on that man's neck and him dying. The public revulsion was universal. Nobody defended that. You wouldn't know that. People are now in the streets to say no more of this. Nobody wants more of this. The country was united. Now, we’ve seen these hideous scenes of destruction, police shot, one of them — as you pointed out — has died. And — and — and our leaders on the left, at least, give no sign that they’re much disturbed by that.
Later in the show, Carlson slammed “Ministry of Truth” CNN and MSNBC as having abandoned their “sacred duty” to “report the news” in favor of becoming “revolutionary organizations turning out propaganda” despite the fact that much of the media had spent the previous two-and-a-half months “calling for you to be arrested instead of going outside without permission.”
The great Saagar Enjeti of The Hill further buried the shameful press, succinctly summarizing their evolution on the riots that have only now started to subside (click “expand”):
ENJETI: The media’s handling of this story from the beginning has just been disgraceful. First, they just chore — they cheered on rioting and looting and crime. Then they tried to blame it on Russians and white nationalist because apparently that’s the only group that we can selectively apply the rule of law to. And now, as you say, now they understand where — they know exactly where public opinion is going on this, so they’re trying to manipulate it. They’re selectively covering it. They’re saying, well, are there some people out there who are committing crimes? You can see as clear as day what is happening before your eyes and I thought you put it perfectly earlier today on your show when you said that this is the first working-class uprising — or this is the first uprising against the working-class masquerade.
CARLSON: That is exactly right. It is a revolutionary downward at the pesky people in the trailer parts who don't behave. I have to say, can the rest of us let them get away but this? I'm not one for vengeance. I'm not calling for it, but I don't think that people who’ve encouraged violence on television should be allowed to pretend that they didn't and resume their normal lives as if they didn't do anything wrong.
ENJETI: No, we can't ever forget. This is when you find out who really is on the side of law and order and who isn't and so many of these people are playacting revolutionary. At the very worst, they’re whitewashing it. But mostly, they know exactly what they’re doing which is that this is a cynical ploy, which is to use the cultural elites in this country. The commanding heights of American culture want everybody to believe America is an irredeemable racist nation from the very beginning. Because every second that we’re not talking about that, we’re not talking about the concentrated capital in the hands of the corporations and the elites, especially in the media, the people who own these companies who are saying that no, no, no, no what’s really the issue is race and it’s not class.
Moving to Wednesday, Carlson called out the media for having “cheered…on” rioters to “do whatever they want” “from their TV studios” and while they support peaceful protests that support their causes, they “crush” peaceful protests for causes they don’t like, such as those demanding the end to coronavirus lockdowns.
And after a fascinating and important dive into statistics of all 2019 shootings involving unarmed African-Americans, Carlson noted that, based on current projections, there were would be over 700 murdered African Americans for every deadly incident with police officers. In other words, Carlson said it was proof that there’s no “genocide…occurring.”
“Are African-Americans being hunted as Joy Reid recklessly claimed on MSNBC recently? Or is something else happening? Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie? A provable lie --- a lie used by a cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife raised hatred as their path to power even if it destroys the country. You have the facts now and you can decide what's really going on,” he concluded.
