When a man named Dan Bailey confronted Tucker Carlson at a sporting goods store in Montana, saying, “You are the worst human being known to mankind,” he gave Fox’s top-rated hate monger a dose of his own medicine.
In case you missed it, Bailey posted on Instagram a video in which he quietly confronts Carlson (you can view it below).
This is exactly the kind of behavior Carlson has explicitly urged his viewers to engage in, albeit for different reasons. On April 26, Carlson said, on his Fox News program:
CARLSON: So the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate, ask politely, but firmly, "Would you please take off your mask? Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable." We should do that and we should keep doing it until wearing a mask outside is roughly as socially accepted as lighting a Marlboro in an elevator. It's repulsive, don't do it around other people.
Tuckums may find face masks repulsive but other than his tender fee fees, wearing one hurts nobody else and is more likely to do good.
Even worse, during that same show, Carlson urged viewers to interfere in parents’ decisions about their children wearing face masks outside by telling them to report the parents to child protective services.
CARLSON: As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal. Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately. Contact Child Protective Services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you're looking at is abuse, it's child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it. If it's your own children being abused, then act accordingly.
Let's say your kid's school emailed you to announce that every day after lunch, your sixth grader was going to get punched in the face by a teacher. How would you respond to that? That's precisely how you should respond when they tell you that your kids have to wear masks on the soccer field. That is unacceptable, it is dangerous and we should act like it because it is.
But too few of us have responded like that. We have been shamefully passive in the face of all of this.
One Virginia man seemed to take Carlson’s admonition to heart and harassed parents of masked children on a playground, using very similar rhetoric.
Carlson has also repeatedly and deliberately sicced his viewers on journalists and caused threats of physical harm. In one case, someone reportedly tried to break into a journalist’s home about an hour after Carlson lied about him and urged viewers to dox him.
In case you have any doubts about Carlson's intent, a few hours after Dr. Anthony Fauci, a world-renowned expert on infectious diseases, announced that he gets death threats in the wake of Carson’s attacks on him, Carlson doubled down on the smears.
Let’s not forget that hate-mongering, confrontation-or-worse-provoking Carlson is the same guy Fox honcho Lachlan Murdoch has publicly admired.
So it’s not a huge surprise that Fox – the network that sanctioned Jesse Walters ambushing and berating people on the air – has suddenly decided that Dan Bailey was just so mean to Tuckums. After all, he’s such a snowflake that he turned a knock on his door during a small, peaceful protest outside his house into “Antifa broke my door” (without being able to provide any evidence of a broken door). Mediaite reported that the network issued the following statement:
“Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable — no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.”
I guess the Fox spokesperson just forgot to add that that only applies to conservatives being accosted.