Tucker Carlson began his show on Tuesday night with comical bit of unintentional irony as he tackled Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict for the murder of George Floyd last summer. Tucker suggested that members of the jury only voted to convict Chauvin because they were worried about what would happen to them if they didn’t, and then complained about political parties trying to “impose a different standard of justice on its own supporters.”
“The jury in the Derek Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict this afternoon: Please don’t hurt us,” Tucker whined to open the show. “The jurors spoke for many in this country. Everyone understood perfectly well the consequences of an acquittal in this case. After nearly a year of burning and looting and murder by BLM, that was never in doubt.”
Two of the most prominent incidents of this “looting and murder” that conservatives like Tucker have enjoyed citing over the past year — the burning of a Minneapolis police station and the murder of two federal officers in Oakland during a protest — were false flags by right-wing extremists.
“Last night, 2,000 miles from Minneapolis, police in Los Angeles preemptively blocked roads. Why? They knew what would happen if Derek Chauvin got off. In the end he didn’t get off. If given the maximum sentence under the law, he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Is that a fair punishment? Is the officer guilty of the specific crimes for which he was just convicted?” Tucker said, just asking questions.
“We can debate all that, and over this hour we will. But here’s what we can’t debate. No mob has the right to destroy our cities. Not under any circumstances. Not for any reason. No politician or media figure has the right to intimidate a jury. And no political party has the right to impose a different standard of justice on its own supporters.”
That last bit became even more ironic as this little monologue reached its conclusion.
“Those things are unacceptable in America, all of them are happening now. If they continue to happen, decent, productive people will leave. The country as you knew it will be over. So we must stop this current insanity. It’s an attack on civilization. At stake is far more than the future of Derek Chauvin, or the memory of George Floyd. At stake is America,” Tucker complained.
“So before we consider the details of today’s verdict, a bigger question, One we should all think about. Can we trust the way this decision was made? That’s the promise of our justice system, that it’s impartial, that it’s as fair as human beings can make it. That the cop who killed Ashli Babbitt will be held to the very same scrutiny as the cop who was just convicted of killing George Floyd. That political or ethnic considerations will play absolutely no role in jury deliberations. That justice will be blind. Can we say all of that in this case?”
To be clear, Tucker here is suggesting that a situation in which a cop murdered a civilian on suspicion of passing a counterfeit bill is comparable to a cop shooting a woman who was an active participant in an uprising against the government and was, in the moment in which she was shot, attempting to break into the Speaker’s Lobby in the U.S. Capitol building.
It should be noted, however, that Tucker is nominally correct about one thing here: it probably would be better for everyone if every incident of a cop harming the people they are supposed to protect was given much greater scrutiny by the powers that be. But that wasn’t what Tucker was really trying to say.
You can watch the quoted portion of Tuesday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in the video embedded up at the top of this article.
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