On his Fox show on Monday, Tucker Carlson fought back against MSNBC AM Joy host Joy Reid for suggesting on Saturday that he's a "white nationalist" and an immigration hypocrite, since he had a great-great-grandfather who came to America from Switzerland in 1860.
Leftist freelancer Jessica Mendelsohn (with her Twitter hashtag "#resistancegenealogy") said "our friend" Tucker shouldn't complain about immigration from "failing countries" and neither should anyone else. "People in genealogical glass houses shouldn't throw stones. As Americans, we all live in genealogical glass houses."
Then Reid added, "Absolutely, Tucker has been one of the most aggressive at putting forward what a lot of people have seen as a blatantly white nationalist view of what immigration should be like."
Carlson took on Reid and Mendelsohn, suggesting their arguments sounded like an elaborate parody:
CARLSON: I didn't even know that until Reid's show aired because I have zero interest in the subject. That was more than 150 years ago. It is irrelevant to the decisions that I make as a father or as a citizen or an employee of Fox News.It tells us precisely nothing about our modern immigration policy. America's economy has changed quite a bit since the Civil War.
Yet according to MSNBC, this fact is a conversation ender. A single 19th-century Swiss relative means you are now required to support green cards for everyone who jumps the borders or overstays a visa in 2018. Boom! Case closed! As Reid's guest put it, people in genealogical glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Meaning me.
Well, as is so often the case, it's hard to know exactly whether this was meant as a legitimate point of debate or whether it was part of an elaborate parody, Monty Python does DACA.
As for being accused of "white nationalism," Carlson called that projection:
CARLSON: So, Joy Reid is accusing us of racism. Let's pause for a moment and savor the irony of that. Reid's entire public career has been built on race-baiting. Try to watch her show for 20 minutes and see for yourself.
This is the woman who urged the Democratic Party to give up on white voters who voted for Obama and then Trump, saying their votes weren't worth fighting for. That was last August. In October, she suggested that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was somehow a bigot because he grew up around Irish Catholics.
After House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot and nearly killed by a progressive activist last summer, Reid openly wondered if we should hope for his recovery. Watch.
After a clip of Reid wondering "are we required in a moral sense" to put aside Scalise's apparently awful views and root for him to live, Carlson continued:
CARLSON: So, when Joy Reid accuses you of harboring racist thoughts, trust me, it's projection. But it's also a political tactic. Reid can't explain why this country so badly needs to import millions of additional poor people. Nobody on the left can explain that because there's no real answer, so they attempt to short-circuit the conversation with slurs. That's a shame.
He said charges of racism have sadly turned into white noise from overuse: "Anyone who gets in their way gets shouted down, in this case, as a racist. That doesn't work anymore. What was once a devastating attack on a person's character is now just background noise. When everything is racist from ice cream trucks to Dr. Seuss, nothing is. The term has been devalued by reckless overuse, and that's a shame because it still applies."
