Tucker Carlson launched a dangerous attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar last night for no other reason than to advance his white nationalist, anti-immigrant agenda at her expense.
Apropos of nothing in the news, Carlson took time out at the end of his show to mount his attack on Omar for not being grateful enough to America. It’s more than hypocritical for anyone on Fox to complain about anyone else not loving the country enough, given that Fox’s whole business model is devoted to profiting off hate and divisiveness.
Yet liberals like Aaron Maté and Ethan Bearman are willing to go on Fox (as they did last night) without confronting its poisonous propaganda. But I digress.
Carlson’s screed against Omar was framed as part of the Democratic 2020 agenda, even though she has nothing to do with the presidential campaign (transcript via Fox News, with my emphases added):
CARLSON: The Democratic candidates for President are on the road this week telling voters that the United States is an awful country. "America's institutions are built on white supremacy," squeaked Beto O'Rourke in an event yesterday.
Of all the lies these people tell -- and there are many -- this is the most absurd. In fact, the United States is the kindest, most open-minded place on the planet. The U.S. has done more for other people and received less in return than any nation in history by far.
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When Omar was six, she and her parents and their six siblings fled a worsening Civil War and wound up in a refugee camp in Kenya. They spent four years there until America offered the family asylum here and let them settle in Minneapolis.
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Omar, meanwhile, grew up free in the world's richest country with all the bounty that that implies.
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Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful. Not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever.
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Omar isn't disappointed in America, she's enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress.
Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.
Maybe that's our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren't self-confident enough to make them assimilate so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that. Maybe we're importing people from places whose values are simply in antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It's not sustainable.
No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that with predictable results.
So be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She's a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us we better change our immigration system immediately. Or else.
Omar is a regular scapegoat on Fox News. The network won’t just civilly disagree with her views, it smears her as an enemy of America. Host Jeanine Pirro was suspended for two weeks after saying that Omar’s hijab is an indication she hates the U.S. - yet never apologized; host Brian Kilmeade cherry-picked some comments by Omar to suggest that she sided with the (Muslim) 9/11 terrorists. “You have to wonder if she's an American first,” Kilmeade “mused.”
But leave it to Carlson to overtly (and baselessly) accuse Omar of being a threat – and to fear monger that millions just like her are poised to come into the country if we don’t crack down on immigration. Besides the fact that Carlson’s demonization of dissent is anti-American in and of itself, there’s the fact that he is endangering Omar with this kind of talk.
In April, The Washington Post reported that cybersecurity expert Chad Loder found hundreds of direct death threats against Omar on Twitter, alone, after Trump amplified the bogus 9/11 attack on her with a tweeted video juxtaposing Omar with footage of the World Trade Center towers falling.
Loder called Trump’s tweet “stochastic terrorism,” which The Post defined as “a phenomenon in which a prominent person or group stirs up hatred against a target, potentially causing someone else to carry out a violent act against them.”
Carlson’s stochastic terrorism is even worse. The fact that Fox News is sanctioning it – and promoting the harangue by including it in its selection of videos from last night’s show - is beyond unconscionable.
Watch the stochastic terrorism below, from the July 10, 2019 Tucker Carlson Tonight, via Media Matters.
And in the event that one of the deplorables takes action against Omar, as one did against George Tiller, Carlson would be fine with it. Like O’Reilly, he’ll never apologize for instigating violence against someone he hates this much. As far as Carlson is concerned, Omar deserves it.
This is yet another moment that Carlson will not be able to walk back, and which Fox News should be held responsible for airing for the rest of its existence. So after the Pence White House is hopefully shown the door, provided the swing state Dems show up next November, when partisans like Carlson try to play the card of “Well, I guess everyone just went a little crazy there. Let’s let bygones be bygones and just move forward.”, the rest of us can say “NO. You endorsed and emboldened hatred. You don’t get a pass. Live with your shame.”
Joy Phillip • 8 hours ago
I see where he’s coming from, but he’s wrong. She doesn’t hate America. She hates what America has become by the extreme polarization of Congress, a rapist president, corruption in every segment of the government (and not ever disguised anymore), and the loss of the dream of what AMERICA COULD BE. That’s what she hates, not the America she emigrated to, that she became a citizen of, that sheltered her 10 years ago.