Fox News host Tucker Carlson Tuesday night falsely claimed that President Joe Biden called white Republican men “more dangerous than ISIS.”
During his speech commemorating and bringing attention to the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, President Biden, in Tulsa, said, “folks, we can’t — we must not give hate a safe harbor. ”
“As I said in my address to the joint session of Congress: According to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al Qaeda — white supremacists. That’s not me; that’s the intelligence community under both Trump and under my administration.”
Here’s what Tucker Carlson, who has been repeatedly called a white supremacist and endorser of white supremacist rhetoric, said last night.
“You’re not surprised. It’s always the same people, isn’t it? ‘Those white Republican men’ – the very ones that just today Joe Biden warned us are more dangerous than ISIS. These are the people have been beating up elderly Asian women in our cities, you’ve seen that plague unfold. These the ones who don’t believe in science who have no decency, they’re the problem.”
Media Matters put together this video that proves how Carlson lied:
President Biden didn’t call white Republican men “more dangerous than ISIS,” nor did he suggest all white Republican men are white supremacists. He said “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” and that fact, as he noted, came from the U.S. Intelligence Community.
Tucker Carlson did what he does almost nightly: try to give white nationalists and white supremacists cover.
But this time it backfired.
Not all Republicans are white nationalists or white supremacists, but the fact is that most white nationalists and white supremacists are white Republicans, and most are white conservative men.
Carlson Tuesday night just shined a spotlight on that ugly fact.
During his inaugural address, President Joe Biden told the American people, “A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.”
A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.
And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.
To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words.
It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy:
Unity.
Unity.
Remember how Republicans were outraged?
Some headlines from that and the following day:
“Why Are Conservatives So Angry Biden Denounced White Supremacy?”
“Rand Paul Says Joe Biden’s Speech Was ‘Innuendo Calling Us White Supremacists’”
“Biden’s targeting of racist extremism is being portrayed as an attack on the right itself”
Less than two months ago House Republicans were “basically starting a white supremacist caucus,” as Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin put it. They were forming an “America First Caucus” to preserve “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”
In 2019 John Nichols at The Nation wrote: “White Nationalism Is a Republican Crisis.”
That same year Carol Anderson at The Guardian wrote, “Republicans’ white supremacist problem is a threat to America.”
Tucker Carlson can pretend Biden called white Republican men “more dangerous than ISIS,” and his followers will of course believe him, but the fact is, many of them are white nationalists and white supremacists, and there’s no hiding from that – or from just how dangerous to America that hate truly is.