The Paranoid Style of Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson tried to defend Daddy Trump’s incitement of a violent insurrection by spinning out another racist conspiracy theory on the most-watched program on cable news yesterday:

Following the House impeachment managers’ harrowing arguments on Wednesday, which featured chilling never-before-seen security footage and audio detailing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Carlson kicked off his primetime program by thoroughly dismissing the evidence presented by Democrats.

Carlson, who has repeatedly portrayed the seditious riot incited by former President Donald Trump as just a “political protest that got out of hand,” first insisted that impeachment manager Rep. David Cicilline’s (D-RI) portrayal of the rioters as an “armed angry mob” was inaccurate.

“There are no reports to the rioters that day discharging weapons or threatening anyone with a gun so what is he talking about?” Carlson declared. “Apparently, he is referring to the death of Officer Brian Sicknick.”

Aside from Sicknick’s death, however, the Capitol Police officers’ union has said that roughly 140 officers were physically injured, some seriously, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, some wearing full tactical gear and utilizing shields, tasers, hockey sticks and other weapons. Pipe bombs, guns and ammunition were also found near the Capitol grounds.

Noting that initial reports that Sicknick was killed after he was hit with a fire extinguisher now appear to be untrue—investigators now think it could have been a reaction to a chemical irritant—Carlson then began weaving a tale that Democrats and the media purposely lied about the officer’s death to push an agenda.

[…]

Claiming he wasn’t “going to speculate” what this all means, the far-right Fox News star did just that—and he took a giant leap to do so, bizarrely tying the insurrection to Floyd and the racial justice movement sparked by his death at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer.

“The question is why would they lie about this?” Carlson rhetorically asked. “For an answer think back to last spring. Beginning on Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors in corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in five months than it had changed in the previous 50 years.”

He continued: “How did they do that? They used the sad death of a man called George Floyd to up-end our society. Months later, we learned that the story they told us about George Floyd’s death was an utter lie.”

Insisting there “was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered” by Officer Derek Chauvin, who has been charged with second-degree murder, Carlson added that “the autopsy showed that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose, fentanyl.”

The Hennepin County medical examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide, claiming the cause of death as a “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” The examiner added that the drugs in Floyd’s system were among “significant conditions,” but did not say if they contributed to his death. An independent autopsy found Floyd died of “asphyxiation from sustained pressure” from Chauvin’s knee on his neck.

“But by that point, the facts didn’t matter. It was too late,” Carlson added. “Cities had been destroyed, along with the fabric of this country itself. Scores of people had been killed.”

I am beginning to think that Tucker Carlson’s appeal is not built on economic populism.

Anyone who appears on and hence legitimizes the Tucker Carlson Nazi Hour is fully complicit in its highly material role in making the Republican Party a well of white supremacist conspiracy theories.