In office, Trump was the greatest threat to U.S. democracy. Now it may be Tucker Carlson.
Opinion by Max Boot
When Donald Trump was in office, he posed the most dangerous threat to American democracy. With the former president now golfing full-time, the most dangerous threat may well emanate from the Fox “News” Channel — and specifically from its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson. He seems to be on a mission to make America’s worst problems even worse.
Carlson has a long history of pushing vaccine conspiracy theories that endanger people’s lives. On Tuesday night, he attacked covid-19 vaccines, claiming without providing any evidence that “the way the authorities handled the covid vaccine did not inspire confidence,” “all these people [were] lying about it” and “the most powerful people in America worked to make certain that no one could criticize it.” He never did say what these lies supposedly were — he just left his audience with the impression that the vaccines are part of a plot against them by powerful, shadowy forces. One fact Carlson did not mention: His boss, Rupert Murdoch, has already been vaccinated. His conspiracy mongering is likely to discourage Fox News’s elderly viewers — who are at the highest risk of dying of covid-19 — from getting safe and effective vaccines that could save their lives.
Having done his level best to injure public health, the next night Carlson sought to exacerbate racial and political divisions. On Wednesday, he argued that “they” (whoever they are) are lying to “you” — the Fox News viewer — about the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. “The known facts bear no resemblance to the story they’re telling — they’re just flat-out lying,” Carlson said. He didn’t say what the real story was — perhaps, like half of Republicans in a recent poll, he thinks antifa was responsible for the assault?
Rather than try to make his case for an alternative reality, Carlson segued into a diatribe about the Black Lives Matter rallies last year that were sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He claimed that protests “changed this country more in five months than it changed in the previous 50 years” — and it was all based on “an utter lie.” Floyd wasn’t “murdered by a cop,” Carlson told viewers. He “almost certainly died of a drug overdose, fentanyl.”
This is the claim advanced by attorneys representing the cop who pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for roughly nine minutes, but it’s not true. The medical examiner ruled that Floyd’s death was a homicide. While Floyd had fentanyl in his system, the cause of death was “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” A private autopsy requested by Floyd’s family found he died of asphyxia, or suffocation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/12/tucker-carlson-conspiracies-fox-news-dangerous/
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