Tucker Carlson spent the opening segment of his show stoking the flames of racial animosity, devoting ten minutes to a soliloquy about how the left is overblowing the problem of cops murdering unarmed Black people.
According to Tucker, the fact that some people perceive the rate at which cops murder unarmed Black people as being higher than it really is, means somebody force fed them wrong information.
During this rant, Tucker went off on a weird, irony-filled aside in which he — well, I’ll just tell you what he said. Just know that there are two layers of irony here: the intentional and the unintentional.
“It’s worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information, this disinformation as we’ll call it,” Tucker said.
“So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon. Which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it.”
Tucker is being sarcastic, of course — he and his team didn’t do any research about QAnon. But don’t think that’s the end of Tucker’s faux-journalistic endeavors on this subject.
“Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed, because we have heard she traffics in disinformation. CNN told us. But nothing there,” Tucker went on.
“Next, we called our many friends in the tight-knit intel community. Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones? Who is lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other, and certain to destroy our core institutions?
“Well, none of the above actually. it wasn’t Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was cable news. It was politicians talking on TV. They’re the ones spreading disinformation to Americans. Maybe they’re from QAnon.”
A few points.
First, Tucker himself traffics in misinformation regularly. Last week he repeatedly, over several days, blamed frozen windmills for Texas’ winter storm energy woes, even though more traditional energy sources, and mismanagement by private providers, were primarily responsible.
Likewise, Tucker spent this opening segment claiming that actually we don’t have a problem with police killing Black people. Never mind that Black people are three times as likely to be killed by police than white people — meaning they are killed by cops at a grossly disproportionate rate. Tucker did not mention this statistic.
Third, Marjorie Taylor Greene is definitely a politician who has talked on TV many times, so it’s tough to understand how she would be absolved from guilt under Tucker’s own ridiculous argument.
Fourth, QAnon is a real and well-documented conspiracy theory adhered to by millions, and many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol were adherentsof its lies. In fact, they took part in the uprising because they believed in QAnon.
Tucker is right, however, that QAnon is not a website. Instead, the cornucopia of conspiracy nonsense has spread through social media and message boards.
You can watch the quoted portion of Tuesday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News in the video embedded up at the top of this article.
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