Fox News host Tucker Carlson aimed at rival cable networks Wednesday night for labeling coronavirus the “Wuhan virus,” and then weeks later billing that term as “racist” and “derogatory.”
The segment began with Carlson stating, “One of the reasons Americans may have missed the significance of this virus is because unfortunately it came matched with politics.”
“On television, talking heads of wasted hours upon valuable hours ‘yammering’ not about the virus and its potential victims, but about how it’s racist to tie the Coronavirus to China, where it came from.”
“Please. Now is not the time to indulge in the lowest and dumbest kind of identity politics,” Carlson riffed.
The Fox News host then took aim at cable networks and Democratic politicians giving “lectures” about what to name the virus.
“One congressman Kevin McCarthy tweeted information about the Chinese Coronavirus, Ilhan Omar, responded this way: ‘Viruses don’t have nationalities. This is racist.’”
“Oh, shut up,” Carlson declared while adding, “MSNBC, they are not shutting up. They give the very same lecture.”
Carlson then played a clip from MSNBC in which McCarthy was scolded for using the term “Chinese Coronavirus.”
“Offensive and racist. These people are a joke, and they are more, importantly, a distraction. China is watching all of this. The Chinese government knows identity politics is America’s greatest weakness. It
Carlson then played a series of clips from competing networks – such as MSNBC and CNN – where hosts and reporters alike billed the deadly virus as the “Chinese Coronavirus,” “Chinese virus,” and “the Wuhan Coronavirus.”
The primetime Fox host then remarked that the networks “will deny those tapes exist.”
“That’s not how they are describing it. Why? Cause China told them not to in the media were happy to comply – and downplay direct threats to this country from China, articulated out of the open clearly in print,” Carlson concluded.
Watch above, via Fox News.