Let's Pump the Brakes on This Tucker Carlson Thing

Last night, a group of anti-racist, antifascist activists protested at the Washington, D.C. home of Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ foremost propagator of stories about white genocide and the dangers of non-white immigration.

There are conflicting accounts about what happened. Carlson told the Washington Post that the protesters cracked his door; protesters denied that and sent a photo to journalist Alex Rubinstein as evidence.

In any event, being a right-wing media personality apparently gets you special treatment: a D.C. police spokesperson told the Washington Post that Carlson’s block would be “under special attention” for “as long as needed,” and today, police said they were investigating the incident as a hate crime because of “anti-political bias.”

Carlson, for all of his hemming and hawing about the “elites”—despite the fact that he’s a multi-millionaire cable news host—sure seems to be enjoying the privileges of an elite. Do you know how hard it is to get the cops to investigate actual hate crimes as hate crimes? It took a week for the feds to confirm that they were investigating a possible hate crime in the Kroger shooting in Kentucky last month, in which a white suspect allegedly killed two black people and told a bystander that “whites don’t shoot whites.”

Carlson, apropos of nothing, thought it was extremely funny when someone sent George Soros a pipe bomb and is a huge skeptic about hate crimes. From a Teen Vogue report on a Carlson interview with Caitlyn Jenner (emphasis mine):

Jenner then listed the issues the trans community faces outside of high taxes and too many regulations, specifically, higher suicide rates and higher murder rates, which are considered hate crimes, within the trans community. Here, Carlson brought up an interesting point: what if hate crimes are unfair, as a concept?

“I wonder if it’s enough to just prosecute someone for murder,” he pondered. “Put yourself in the position of someone else. If someone you loved were killed and the murderer received a lesser sentence because they weren’t a member of the trans community, you’d say, well that’s kind of unfair. I mean, we’re all Americans.”

Anyway, like clockwork, a whole slew of media and media-adjacent people took this opportunity to defend Carlson’s right to go on television every weeknight and demonize entire groups of marginalized people without consequence:

Fox News—Fox News!—put out a statement calling for civility.

Notably, one of the few media figures who understood the contrast between how the media is approaching this incident with Carlson—as opposed to, say, the thousands of families who’ve been needlessly torn apart by ICE while Carlson cheerleads our fascist immigration regime—was Vox’s Matt Yglesias.

No one should physically harm Carlson, or his family, or even his door. But the idea that he should be free to peddle white fear on his sizable platform without ever being even mildly inconvenienced is one that isn’t grounded in reality. Actions have consequences. Words have consequences. If Carlson wants to eat dinner in peace, he should maybe just, I dunno, stop being a racist.