Tucker Carlson isn’t a fan of diversity, so it’s not surprising that he would complain about the more-diverse-than-usual makeup of Joe Biden’s cabinet picks. On Friday night, Tucker delivered an angry screed complaining about how Biden has picked five people of color for his cabinet, and five women, and compared such attempts at inclusiveness to “the Antebellum South” and “the ancient caste systems of India.”
“This is called identity politics. It is the most divisive possible way to run a government. No wise country allows identity politics,” Tucker complained, though he never explained how the government could forcibly stop someone from caring about having diverse groups of people represented in leadership positions.
“In identity politics, there is no such thing as the common good,” he added.
Tucker is distorting the topic here. In reality, identity politics — on the left, anyway — is about supporting groups that federal and local governments, businesses and other organizations have traditionally disadvantaged. Those disadvantages certainly never went away. In the present, to cite one example with readily available data, women still make significantly less money on average than men, and Black workers make significantly less money than white workers. Leftist identity politics attempts to address those sorts of blatant inequalities.
Tucker, however, does not like that idea.
“Not all people who look alike are alike. Stereotypes are bad, remember? In this country appearance is not everything. In America, you are more than your ethnicity. Life here is not determined by your DNA. That was the promise anyway. And for a time, roughly from the end of the civil rights movement to the beginning of Barack Obama’s first term, that seemed to be working fairly well,” Tucker said, indicating he thinks that America had solved racism until it elected its first Black president.
But he was just getting warmed up with that rhetoric.
“We all agreed to try to drop the stereotypes and try to judge people for what they do, not on how they were born — but no longer. We’ve got new rules now, rules that, in fact, are very old rules. They stretch back to the Antebellum South and all the way to the ancient caste systems of India. According to these rules, Joe Biden’s rules, your place in society is determined by your birth. Certain groups get benefits, other groups get punishments. It’s as simple and as primitive as that,” Tucker whined.
That last bit is particularly egregious since it was conservatives who maintained the role of slavery in the South before the Civil War, not leftists — and Tucker Carlson is certainly on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Attempts to bring the living standards of marginalized peoples up to that of people who were born into relative privilege is, in fact, the opposite of what Southern states were doing before the war with chattel slavery.
You can watch the quoted rant from Friday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News in the video embedded up at the top of this article.
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