Tucker Carlson Says Buffalo Shooting Suspect Not Motivated by ‘Hateful Right-Wing Rhetoric,’ But ‘Mental Illness’ 

Tucker Carlson scoffed at the idea that the 18-year-old White man who wrote racist screeds before allegedly murdering 10 Black people in a Buffalo grocery store was motivated by “hateful right-wing rhetoric.”

Carlson has been highly critical of the media’s response to Saturday’s shooting.

On Thursday, the Fox News host slammed a domestic terrorism bill passed by the House the day before. It would provide additional federal resources to prevent domestic terrorism. The House approved a similar piece of legislation in 2020 but it stalled in the Senate.

Carlson criticized the bill, stating that it doesn’t define the term “White supremacy” and claimed that repeating the words of Martin Luther King Jr. could get a person deemed a White supremacist. He aired a montage of lawmakers advocating for the bill and stated,

You should know that their definition of those terms is probably different from yours. So if you were to quote Martin Luther King Jr., whose monument stands on the mall, and say that the U.S. government ought to treat people based on who they are and what they do and not how they look and how they were born, should assess people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin – if that’s your position, you are by definition according to the people you just saw a White supremacist. This is scary.

Later, he blamed the shooting on mental illness.

“So they are continuing to tell you, in the face of all available evidence, that the mass murder you saw over the weekend in Buffalo was inspired by hateful right-wing rhetoric when in fact that mass murder was committed by someone with diagnosed mental illness that the adults around him apparently ignored,” he said.

While the suspect is reported to have undergone a psychiatric evaluation at a hospital last year, it has not been publicly disclosed if he was diagnosed with a mental illness.

Carlson then claimed the bill is simply a pretext for squashing dissent.

“So you saw a shooting by a crazy person that has been hijacked by partisan forces to crush political dissent, to attack civil liberties in this country. You should care about that,” he concluded.

Watch above via Fox News.