Between Wednesday and Thursday nights, Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson was in rare form when discussing the riots in Minneapolis supposedly in appropriate response to the heinous, police-involved killing of African-American man George Floyd. Carlson didn’t mince words, noting that “news organizations like CNN” want Americans to “hate one another” and wondering if liberals would still support rioting if it involved destruction of their property.
On Wednesday night, he reminded viewers of how “[r]ioting is a form of tyranny” and “oppression,” but “CNN welcomes it, however, in fact encourages it” since rioters are instead called “protesters.”
Carlson added (as he would on Thursday): “America is a diverse country. Diverse countries only survive if the groups within them can coexist peacefully and thankfully, almost everybody in America wants to coexist peacefully.”
However, he noted that liberal media outlets like CNN don’t seem keen on that: “[N]ews organizations like CNN do not want that and that’s why every day they work hard to fan racial resentment to make different groups distrust and hate one another.”
Amazingly, CNN largely kept up this tune with a litany of analysts, commentators, contributors, hosts, and reporters until late Thursday night into early Friday when the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct was lit on fire. Only then did Don Lemon and friends repeatedly emphasize that what was going on was wrong. Huh.
Going back a few hours to Thursday primetime, Carlson mocked Minneapolis elected officials as the kind of people who’d listen to MSNBC host Joy Reid, as evidence by their conclusion that there should be “a national emergency” declared on racism.
“Meanwhile, mobs in downtown Minneapolis kept looting, stores kept burning…How exactly does racism have anything to do with looting ATM machines or stealing Playstations from Target,” he added.
After noting that the liberal media and their allies in elected offices “richly profit from” storylines of division, Carlson arrived at the case of MSNBC contributor and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. as an embodiment of making a living off race baiting (click “expand”):
CARLSON: If you've ever wondered if yelling “racist” at the people you want something from is an effective business plan, Eddie Glaude is living proof that indeed it is. By regularly screaming "racist,” Glaud has been able to write an academic career all the way to an endowed professor at Princeton. It's a job with such high pay and so few actual requirements that Glaude can dress like a British lord and spent most of his day shuttling by limbo between cable news heads. Talk about a sweet gig. As long as Eddie Glaude continues to denounce people as a recess, the right people, he can probably keep that job forever. So naturally Eddie Glaude has no interest in explaining how exactly racism makes people loot Target. It just does, okay? And if you disagree with the premise, you’re a racist yourself and shut up. As he told viewers on MSNBC, it's all about the "context."
EDDIE GLAUDE [on MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin, 05/28/20]: It’s human beings natural inclination while they feel wronged, when they feel put upon, when they’re living under oppressed conditions, it’s to lash out. And this is a history of the modern west, the history of the world in some ways and so part of what we have to do is understand the context of what happened.
CARLSON: Oh, the context and squint your eyes and think, the context. Of course. There's a context of setting fire to McDonald's, says Professor Glaude. It's interesting.
But Carlson wasn’t done. He then said a quiet part out loud, which was wondering how Glaude would feel if rioters decided to wreak havoc and burn down his property. Carlson made clear to note that he hoped this doesn’t happen to Glaude or anyone else (click “expand”):
So, you have to wonder how would Eddie Glaude Jr. responded something like this happen to him? If looters descended on his house? Would Glaude gently describe them as protesters? If they made off with his [INAUDIBLE] necktie collection? If thugs with bandanas on their faces smashed the windshield of his BMW with rocks, would Eddie Glaude call the police or would calling the police be racist? Just how long in other words could Eddie Glaude maintain his fraudulent racial justice shtick in the face of the kind of violence that he routinely excuses on television. We’re thinking not very long. That’s just a guess.
Let’s hope Eddie Glaude is never tested on that, certainly anytime soon. Let's hope none of us are tested. The problem with outbreaks of mob violence is you really have no idea where they’re going next. You can’t know. Sometimes, they subside. Often, they metastasize. They’re unpredictable and they’re mortally dangerous and that’s why you don’t encourage them.
One could also throw in their workplace to this analogy. As we saw during the 2018 mail bombs sent to news organizations, it’s a criminal, evil, and reprehensible, regardless of one’s political differences. In other words, it’s acceptable to hold multiple opinions in disagreeing with someone and not wanting anything to happen to them.
In the Floyd case, Americans of all ethnical, political, and racial backgrounds have expressed horror. And in the media, it’s been the same, whether one tunes into ABC, the Fox News Channel, or picks up a copy of The New York Times (more on them shortly). But outrage about arson, destruction of property, and looting? For some, that second thought makes you a racist.
Carlson stated that “things are falling apart in Minneapolis and as they collapse, our leadership class seems thrilled” in “doing nothing to calm racial division” but rather have “eagerly stok[ed] it.”
His example this time? Charles Blow’s latest Times column with the headline “How white women use themselves as instruments of terror” and this as the subheading: “There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.”
“The New York Times is telling you every single person of a certain color and sex has a hand in genocide. They are stained by blood guilt. They are murderers. Every one of them. What do you do to our murderers? You know the answer. It's hard to believe our leaders are actually talking like this but they are, a lot, and loudly. And if they keep it up, things will not end well and yet they show no signs of slowing down,” Carlson surmised.
