While the rest of us have been focused on whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted one or more women and/or lied under oath, Tucker Carlson has been on the prowl for excuses to demonize Kavanaugh opponents as dangerously violent, anti-white racists.

It’s no surprise that white nationalists’ hero Carlson would use the Kavanaugh confirmation debate not to focus on whether or not he should get the job but to engage in the Tucker Carlson Tonight show's trademark activity, incendiary race baiting on behalf of white people - while host Carlson pretends he’s on the side of tolerance.

CARLSON: It’s about punishing everyone who looks like Brett Kavanaugh. … You might wonder what in the world this story, the Kavanaugh story has to do with race. Seemingly nothing. Everyone in it is the same color. But you’d be too literal if you have concluded that. You’d be missing the point. Democrats aren’t looking for justice here, they want a revolution. For 60 years they have been telling us that it is immoral to judge people by their skin color and they were right about that, absolutely right. They put up a monument to Martin Luther King on the National Mall just in case we forgot. And yet, suddenly, without notifying the rest of us, they have changed the rules. Anyone who doesn’t judge others on the basis of skin color is - wait for it now - a bigot. Refuse to commit racism? You’re a racist.

Later in the show, Carlson made his shout out to white supremacists louder and more incendiary. Once again, he did so by claiming there is no racial angle to the Kavanaugh controversy – as Carlson seemed to look for excuses to make Kavanaugh about race.

First, Carlson played a clip of April Ryan and Bill Maher talking about how Kavanaugh and his defenders took part in “a pageant” of white privilege. Then “not about race” Carlson used that and more to fan the flames of racial divisiveness with overtly violent suggestions:

CARLSON: [Maher] didn’t explain exactly what that means or how it works. Former Bush Campaign Strategist and ABC News Political Analyst, Matthew Dowd went further than that. He published an op-ed demanding that, “White male Christians vacate their positions of power for other people.” He’s not doing that himself. But he did not notably advocate for genocide.

A Georgetown professor called Christine Fair did do that. She recently tweeted this. “Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: We castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.” Georgetown has issued a statement defending Fair. Of course, they have.

As vile as Fair’s tweet was, she was clearly not calling for genocide. Yet while there's no reason to defend it, there's also no reason to take one's eye off the bigger picture here: Carlson's dishonest, violence-fused race baiting. Sadly, Democrat Marjorie Clifton, who joined the show immediately after this ploy, failed to address any of it.

Instead, Clifton allowed Carlson to badger her about Maher's, Ryan's and Fair’s comments and she engaged in the charade that Carlson wanted to debate the subject – as opposed to using it for his malevolent, inflammatory political theater. The clip below, from Media Matters, does not include her appearance, but this excerpt, along with the rest of her milquetoast responses to Carlson's naked aggression, can be seen in the Fox News transcript:

CARLSON: And I think if you were looking at this from the perspective that Martin Luther King told us to look at the world through, you would say that that’s wrong, right? Or would you not?

CLIFTON: Well what I’m—what I’m going to tell you is that the workforce was largely built by white Christian men. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just the reality.

And when we look at issues of fairness like we look at issues of fairness in this case, in this trial was about who is being represented and how are we hearing it, how are we understanding it. And businesses are seeing this that when they think diversity –

In the first place, whatever the point Clifton is trying to make here, it did nothing to make the case against Kavanaugh. But more importantly, she should have had the smarts and the guts to call out Carlson for outrageously pretending to be on the side of Martin Luther King. Instead, she gave him a pass and allowed him to keep her on defense.

Watch the Carlson behavior Clifton did not confront below, from the October 1, 2018 Tucker Carlson Tonight: