Fox News’s Tucker Carlson echoed Mitch McConnell when he claimed that because Cory Booker is a senator, there is no white supremacy problem in the US.
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Video and transcript via Media Matters:
Carlson said, “In a sane country, that’s the point in which the entire room would have burst out laughing when Senator Booker said that, precisely because of his title really, Senator Booker. Cory Booker’s parents were highly paid IBM executives, he grew up in a rich all-white neighborhood by the way, he attended Stanford, then he got a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford. Then he got a law degree from Yale. He’s currently a senator from New Jersey, he will win reelection pretty easily in 2020 if he seeks it. New Jersey is one of the richest states in this country, second I think. It’s also a majority white. If white supremacy were a huge problem in America, how did Cory Booker become a senator? Yet somehow he did. America has given Cory Booker amazing opportunities precisely because it’s not the hateful place he pretends it is. Cory Booker is one of the most privileged people in the world, he is living proof. But it doesn’t matter. Actual official racial discrimination of the kind embodied in Jim Crow ended half a century ago but as it recedes from living memory, it becomes even more important to the Democratic Party.”
Video:
Change Tucker Carlson to Mitch McConnell and Cory Booker to Barack Obama and you have the same argument that McConnell made on Tuesday against reparations. McConnell claimed that since Obama was elected president it erased centuries of slavery, violence, and oppression against African-American. It is easy to see why Tucker Carlson is one of the darlings of the white supremacist movement.
Carlson’s argument was also a variation on that old Republican chestnut, how can there be climate change when it snows?
Tucker Carlson defends racism on a regular basis on his show, but it is the casualness of how Fox spreads the messages of racism that has taken a new turn under Trump, and it presents a toxic danger to American society.
Fox News and Carlson aren’t just mainstreaming racist views. They are mainlining them into the minds of millions of Americans on an almost daily basis.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
