Tucker Carlson Claims Immigrants Are Making the Potomac River Dirtier: ‘I Watch It’
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Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a personal anecdote in order to defend his recurring comments about how immigrants make America “dirtier.”
Carlson spoke to The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott for a profile on his role as a Fox News opinion host advancing right-wing populism in the Donald Trump era. While the profile delves into how Carlson rails against the elites, it also addresses the outrage Carlson has faced for comments he’s made like “We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.”
At one point in the conversation, Plott asked Carlson about those remarks. Carlson seemed to be shocked by the question, leading to this exchange:
When I asked him how one could square segments such as the one I’d just watched with his comments last year, for example, that immigrants make America “dirtier,” he looked appalled that I might wonder whether one take was more sincere than the other. “I hate litter,” he said. For 35 years now, he said, he has fished in the Potomac River, and “it has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants, who I’m sure are good people, but nobody in our country—”
“Wait,” I said, cutting him off, “how do you know they’re—”
“Because I’m there,” he said. “I watch it.”
Carlson was recently blasted by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who called him a “white supremacist sympathizer” for saying her congressional district is inundated with garbage, during a segment when a guest on his show claimed it’s because “it is occupied by relatively few American citizens. A very high percentage of her district is, in fact, illegal aliens.” (Carlson’s guest later tweeted an apology for not “do[ing] justice to a complex issue.”)
Carlson said the following in response to the white supremacist accusation:
“It’s so far from the truth that it has no effect at all other than to evoke in me contempt for the people saying it, because I think it’s that dishonest.” He went on to defend his most controversial segments as an effort to show how America’s “obsession with race” and “constant talking about race” is a “diversion tactic” used by “people who don’t want to talk about economics.” “And the reason people don’t want to talk about economics,” he said, “is because the economy is rigged for the benefit of a small number of people. They don’t want to talk about it—they would much rather the population was high and hating each other on the basis of race.”
The Atlantic profile also notes how Carlson has developed a reputation at Fox for his “willingness to denounce Republicans,” like recent segments calling out GOP megadonor Paul Singer and the American Enterprise Institute, and even notes how he’s “praised Elizabeth Warren’s economic policies” on occasion.
In response to criticism quoted in the piece by conservative David French, Carlson reacted by laughing, calling French a “buffoon,” and saying of his own political evolution, “I’ve made a complete break mentally with the world I used to live in.”
