Fox News host Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson, who recently dubbed the nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody “a form of tyranny” after earlier calling white supremacy a “hoax,” kicked off his primetime program Monday with a new racially-charged screed against the Black Lives Matter “riots.”
The rant, during which the host told his mostly white viewers that the social justice movement was “definitely not about black lives” and to “remember that when they come for you,” lasted nearly 30 minutes, or about 75% of the show’s on-air time.
Carlson, whose stepmother is an heir to the Swanson frozen-food empire, opened by telling his audience that mounting calls to defund the police — a movement to dramatically reduce the size and authority of police forces and either supplement them with community-led public safety or dissolve them entirely — were “wild-eyed craziness, flat-earth stuff” that would result in “a woke militia policing our cities, enforcing Democratic Party orthodoxy.”
On Sunday, nine Minneapolis City Council members — a veto-proof majority — announced their commitment to defund and dismantle the city’s police department. Though the action would likely require a public vote, the council members said they were “taking intermediate steps toward ending” the force through the budget process.
Carlson, whose rant would go on to make #TuckerCarlsonIsARacist trend on Twitter, said such ideas were akin to “rule in the Third World” and an “attempt to bring it here.”