‘Shockingly Racist Even For Tucker Carlson’: Critics TORCH Fox News Host’s Rant About Expelled Black TN Rep. Justin Pearson

Tommy ChristopherApr 13th, 2023, 9:48 am
 

Fox News host Tucker Carlson fired off a rant about expelled-then-reinstated Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson that was so racist, his critics declared it “Shockingly racist even for Tucker Carlson” — a mighty big claim.

Rep. Pearson is the Black lawmaker whom the Tennessee House voted to expel along with Rep. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson over a protest calling for gun reform in the wake of the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School that killed six people. They spared Gloria Johnson, a 60-year-old white woman who participated in the protest. That disparity has been flagged by the Tennessee Three and others as a racist double standard.

On Wednesday, Pearson was reinstated to the legislature, days after Jones, too, was reinstated.

Also Wednesday, conservatives continued a collective freakout over the fact that Jones used to not have an afro, and now he has an afro, and he was less militant seven years ago in a student council campaign video than he is now.

On Wednesday night’s edition of the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson picked up that theme and ran with it in an opening monologue that, like I said, critics claimed was shockingly racist even for him.

Media Matters researcher Kat Abu flagged part of the rant in a tweet, writing, “Tucker’s starting tonight’s show with a wildly racist rant about @Justinjpearson” and adding the clip.

Disability advocate and Young Turks contributor Rayy Vana wrote, “This is shockingly racist, even for Tucker Carlson.”

Award-winning journalist Roland Martin wrote “White nationalist @TuckerCarlson showing his racist ways in trashing @Justinjpearson.”

Anti-Trump Republican Tim Miller observed, “Some real investigative journalism on the Tucker Carlson show tonight. A man who used to wear a bow tie on TV as part of his schtick is observing that Justin Pearson sounded different, looked younger, and had a different hair cut when he was in college.”

Mediaite’s Michael Luciano noted the suggestion that Carlson made about Pearson’s race and his admission to an elite university and noted this isn’t new for Carlson:

It’s not the first time Carlson has suggested a prominent Black figure has gotten ahead because of their skin color. Last year he demanded to see Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT scores after she was nominated to the Supreme Court – a demand he has made of no White nominee to the high court.

Racist though it was, though, was it really “This is shockingly racist, even for Tucker Carlson?”

As liberal pundit Keith Olberman observed in a tweet, that’s a pretty high bar:

HOWEVER!

I give Carlson extra bigotry points for opening his rant with a casually hateful shot at trans people, comparing Rachel Dolezal’s infamous racial identification fraud with gender transition, then lumping his contrast of Pearson into that category.

And while people are keying in on the crack about Pearson’s skin color getting him into school — which was definitely racist, don’t get me wrong — there are more explicitly racist aspects to the rant that put it over the top.

Carlson’s rant about Pearson begins:

These are the trailblazers, the pathfinders, the Daniel Boones of progressive identity politics. One of them is a man called Justin Pearson. Pearson has been in the news recently for helping to facilitate an insurrection at the Tennessee State House. You may have seen him, But you may not know what Justin Pearson was like before his transition.

Back in 2016, Justin Pearson was an earnest young student at Boden, the whitest college in the whitest state in America, a place that costs 60 grand a year for no obvious reason, a rich kid school. Here’s what Justin Pearson looked like then as he ran for president of student government.

He then played a clip from Pearson’s campaign video, which went viral on the right and likely inspired Carlson’s screed. He continued:

“I want to bring everyone together,” said Justin Pearson, in a voice that if you close your eyes, you could easily imagine coming from a suburban orthodontist. Justin Pearson wasn’t White. That’s probably how we got into Bowdoin in the first place, but he did a fantastic impression of it. “What a nice young man. Has he considered the apprenticeship program at Citibank?”

That was the old Justin Pearson before his transition. Here he is now on the floor of the Tennessee Statehouse.

Pause for a second. This is Carlson explicitly equating attributes like formal speech and being “a nice young man” with Whiteness. It’s the kind of slip-up that Carlson is usually careful enough to avoid with some other sort of coded fig leaf, like “suburban orthodontist.”

After a clip of Rep. Pearson sporting an afro and speaking on the floor of the Tennessee House, which also went viral, Carlson again accuses young Pearson of being a “crypto-White kid” — explicitly racializing the contrast he’s drawing:

Justin Pearson has a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, everyone will do exactly what he wants or else face indictment by the Department of Justice. Justin Pearson has changed quite dramatically, as you can see. He transitioned from a crypto White kid into the modern incarnation of Martin Luther King, Jr. himself. It’s remarkable, really, but he’s not alone in that. You see this all the time. Everybody in the Democratic Party wants to be Martin Luther King at this point. Even Joe Biden, who during the famous march on Washington, was enjoying the many benefits of life as a college student in a racially segregated state. Now he’s MLK. They all are.

It actually gets worse, as he goes on to implicitly trash Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by contrasting him with Malcolm X in extremely derogatory and loaded terms, saying “Malcolm X didn’t talk like a sharecropper. He spoke dignified, standard English. He wasn’t running a shakedown racket to fleece guilty White liberals.”

But it’s Carlson’s explicit quiet-part-loud slipup that does it for me. I have to agree. It’s shockingly racist, even for Tucker Carlson.

Watch above via Tucker Carlson Tonight.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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