The ability of Fox News hacks to conflate wildly dissimilar subjects is pretty astonishing. And no one is more adept at this than Fox’s Senior White Nationalist, Tucker Carlson. His arguments on any subject are generally devoid of reason and crammed with racial animus. But on his Wednesday evening Hour of Hate he may have outdone himself.
Carlson has been an ardent opponent of COVID-19 vaccinations for months. He railed against them as fake and ineffective. He spread conspiracy theories asserting that they don’t work and “they” aren’t telling you. He even ordered his dimwitted viewers to harass mask wearers and file false police reports.
Now Carlson is combining his two favorite tirades: Anti-vaccine hysteria and racism (video below). The segment featured a chyron that read conspiratorially, “This is About Finding Out Who Dissents.” And in a manically obtuse bit of blathering, Carlson bellowed that…
“Everybody agrees that segregation was the worst thing this country ever did. Forcing certain categories of citizens into separate, lesser accommodations, barring them from public places, treating them like lepers or untouchables, that was completely immoral and wrong. We were told that a lot and most of us strongly agreed. It was wrong.”
So far, so good. Never mind that Carlson himself never agreed to the proposition he’s making here. And while segregation was awful, there are arguably worse things that this country has done. For instance, slavery, Hiroshima, and more recently, Trump’s negligent and incompetent mismanagement of the coronavirus, resulting in the deaths of more than half a million Americans. But Carlson was just getting started…
“So imagine our confusion today looking out across the country. The very same people, literally the very same, who just the other day told us that segregation was immoral, are now enforcing segregation. Should we be surprised? Probably not, but we still are.”
As usual, Carlson doesn’t identify the “very same people” he’s referring to. He’s also lying that anyone is “enforcing segregation,” as the term is commonly understood. Using Carlson’s alleged logic, quarantining Ebola victims is a form of bigoted segregation. He continued…
“Just this morning the New York Times informed us that unless you can prove that you’ve taken the injection that the Democratic Party demands that you take, you are no longer permitted in bars, comedy clubs, even some dance competitions, in the state of New York. You’re too dirty to appear in public. You’re not welcome near normal people.”
Naturally, Carlson is politicizing this matter by falsely asserting that the Democratic Party is “demanding” vaccinations. To be sure, Democrats have been far more responsible about measures to mitigate the spread of a deadly pandemic. But many of the more sensible Republicans have advocated getting the shot. Even Carlson’s boss Rupert Murdoch bragged about getting vaccinated. It isn’t about people being “dirty” or “normal,” It’s about people being smart and having concern for others. But he still wasn’t finished. Carlson whined that attending sporting events would mean that…
“…you will be sitting in your own roped off section, marinating in your shame with the other disobedient bad people. Medical Jim Crow has come to America. We still have water fountains. The unvaccinated would have separate ones.”
And there you have it. The fabled conflation of vaccine disinformation and outright racism. Carlson thinks that protecting people from a very real virus that is killing people is equivalent to the forced suppression of civil liberties based on skin color. In one fell swoop Carlson has diminished both the deadly consequences of the COVID pandemic and the overt bigotry of Jim Crow laws. And this is an achievement that you can rest assured he is proud of. It’s the sort of nauseating bullpucky that made him the number one show on Fox News. Which says a lot about Fox News – and it’s audience.
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Tucker Carlson: "Medical Jim Crow has come to America." pic.twitter.com/wEpYwlBSfj
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) June 2, 2021
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.
