Tucker Carlson Responds to Child Detention Scandal With a Racist and Hypocritical Tirade

Listen up, my fellow working class Americans. White nationalist millionaire Tucker Carlson has something to say about this child detention business. All of of those people who got duped into caring about wailing children suffering from the barbaric cruelty of the Trump administration and who somehow resist the urge to giddily suck down the White House’s horseshit milkshake on an hourly basis? According to Carlson, a millionaire, they’re the ruling class, they don’t care about you, and they’re ruining the country. Your country.

“This is one of those moments that tells you everything about our ruling class,” sneered Carlson during a segment on Monday about the Trump administration’s family separation policy. “They care far more about foreigners than their own people.”

Carlson has always been an American elite himself, even before he became a wealthy television commentator ginning up fake bullshit for people who have no problems to be mad about. The Fox host came from a family that was steeped in both money and power; he was born to a television anchor father who later became a banker and then the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles. Carlson’s stepmother is an heiress to the Swanson frozen food fortune. If that wasn’t enough proof, the name of Carlson’s equally awful brother is fucking Buckley.

To prove that this “ruling class” he’s railing against is actually leftist, Carlson carefully constructed his own little alternate reality (sensing a theme here) where the the primary goal of feminism is putting the children of married, heterosexual parents in cages, and then got mad about those hypothetical kids in cages while ridiculing the plight of the real kids in cages. Then, Carlson shed some crocodile tears for children whose American-born parents are in prison.

“It’s not just illegal immigrants who are separated from their children,” said Carlson, who reportedly signed a two-book, $9 million deal with Simon and Schuster last year. “The majority of American citizens in prison have minor kids they’ve left behind.”

“Their families have been separated by force by our justice system because they committed a crime,” added Carlson, who bought a $3.9 million home in a D.C. neighborhood he gushed “looks exactly like it did in 1955″ in an interview with the American Conservative earlier this year. “So in that way, these kids are just like the kids you’ve been watching on television today. The difference is of course they’re Americans, so no one is spending $35,000 a year a piece to make sure they’re okay.”

There’s a kernel of truth here. There should be more reporting about the families of those impacted by our horribly punitive criminal justice system! But Carlson doesn’t actually care about these families either, outside of their convenient use as a cudgel against the rights and well-being of undocumented children. Here’s Carlson last year while describing his brilliant solution to solve prison overcrowding in California, per Media Matters:

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): The primary role of the state is to protect the law abiding from the law breaking. So, the first job of the prisons is not to make the prisoners better, it’s to protect the rest of us from the prisoners, and it’s not doing that. But I actually have a solution to California prison overcrowding and I’m sure you would agree with it. A huge percentage of California inmates are foreign nationals, they’re from Mexico and Central America. Why not deport them?

Later in last night’s segment, the man who thinks wearing a bowtie is an act of valor expressed disbelief that anyone could really be gutted by the sights and sounds and stories of the last few weeks, especially if they aren’t parents themselves.

“A lot of people yelling at you on TV don’t even have children,” said Carlson, who quite literally yells at people on TV for a multi-million dollar living. “So don’t for a second let them take the moral high ground. Their goal is to change your country forever. And they’re succeeding, by the way,” Carlson added, before diving into one of his patented rants about Demographic Changes that his fascist cheering section loves.

This country should be changed forever, because it is unmistakably cruel and getting crueler by the day, and because it treats all people—the people who are born here and the people who come here in search of a better life and the people who do not even live here—as collateral damage in the service of ensuring that rich dickheads like Tucker Carlson (and even richer, bigger dickheads than himself) can keep flipping million-dollar houses in posh neighborhoods.

Carlson’s television persona lives and dies on the notion that he and his viewers are all being victimized by the loony left together. It’s why he’s been forced to stick to this script even in the Trump era, when the hard right is at its most dominant point nationally since before the Great Depression. It is complete and utter bullshit, as is Carlson’s play at everyman populism. If America’s ruling class does not include Tucker Carlson, then there is no American ruling class.

And unlike the cabal of elite Marxists which live in his head, the actual ruling class (of which everyone from faux-populist talking heads like Carlson and Rush Limbaugh to white supremacist culture warriors like Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer are all card-carrying members) does not give a shit about anyone in the working class. It only values self-preservation—something that a guy who called bullshit on this shtick years before he ever adopted it himself should have quite a bit of familiarity with.