Tucker Carlson did a monologue on his Tuesday night Fox News show about Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, that was incredibly, unbelievably racist even by his high standards.
In a segment about a recent Washington Post profile of Omar, Carlson argued that Omar is proof that his (very bigoted!) fears about what unassimilated immigrants will do to America are correct.
“Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country,” Carlson said. “Some of the 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.”
Tucker Carlson: a man famous for trying really hard to help immigrants.
Carlson went on to speculate that maybe people like Omar come from cultures so different from our own that letting them immigrate at all is too dangerous.
“Or maybe the problem is deeper than that. Maybe we’re importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours,” he went on. “This cannot continue. It’s not sustainable. No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results.”
Wait, so our country is destined to fail if we “import” large numbers of people who might hate us? It’s a good thing we’ve never done that before, then!
Carlson concluded by calling Omar a “living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately. Or else.”
That concludes the Fox News white supremacist variety hour tonight!
Omar, for her part, took things in stride.
In all seriousness, this is extremely dangerous garbage that Carlson is spewing. Claiming, based on some vague idea that Omar “hates America,” that certain types of immigrants shouldn’t be allowed into the country or they will undermine it from within, is pure white nationalism.
Of course, it’s hardly the first time that Carlson has made such toxic claims about immigrants. It’s not even the first time he’s attacked Omar in this way. Back in December, he said immigrants make our country “poorer, dirtier, and more divided,” eliciting a backlash that lost him many of his advertisers.
But even if it isn’t surprising, it’s still deeply concerning when you consider how many people watch his show and take his opinions seriously. Omar has already received serious death threats, and our current president has banned people from many Muslim-majority nations from even entering the country. Carlson isn’t a racist outlier. He represents a very real constituency in our country, one that sees immigrants and people of color as subhuman.