Fox News host Tucker Carlson said the majority of media coverage revolving around the death of Breonna Taylor has engaged in false messaging to push a political narrative before the upcoming election.
Taylor was killed in a drug raid of her home by police in Louisville, Kentucky. A grand jury decided to indict former Louisville Detective Brett Hankison on three counts of reckless endangerment Wednesday but declined to charge the two other officers involved in the high-profile incident.
Taylor’s death has continued to be the focus of social justice protests and movements calling for an end to racial discrimination and police brutality. However, Carlson disputed that race was a factor in Taylor’s death during his nightly show.
“Her death is sad. It’s a tragedy, but it wasn’t an act of racism,” Carlson said. “There’s no evidence for that, and if there was, we would admit it. But [the media] don’t care. All they care about is getting people to believe that this dystopia they describe is real. Why? It’s an election year. If enough property burns, if enough public streets are impassible, in the end, people may decide, ‘I’ll vote for Joe Biden to make it stop.'”
Carlson also backed Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is the first black person to hold the post, in his defense of the grand jury decision. Cameron also condemned violent protesting as a method to try to get just results.
“If we simply act on emotion or outrage, there is no justice,” Cameron said. “Mob justice is not justice. Justice sought by violence is not justice. It just becomes revenge.”
Carlson defended Cameron after an anchor on CNN called his words “politically loaded language.”
“Mob justice is not justice. That used to be the most obvious possible observation, particularly coming from someone in the South, which, for a long time, had a problem with mob justice,” he said. “You probably thought we all agreed that was bad. You probably heard the attorney general of Kentucky say that and think, that sounds sensible to me. But over at CNN, they were enraged. CNN knows that mob justice isn’t just worth having, in fact, it’s the substance of the Democratic platform in 2020. So they attacked him for saying [that].”
The TV host also disputed other media reports discussing systemic racism, suggesting facts don’t back up that narrative.
“It’s all such a lie. It’s a lie, it’s a demonstrable lie,” Carlson said. “The statistics don’t back it up, the experience of your life, no matter what color you are, doesn’t back it up, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of people every year move here, who are black, to the United States, is living refutation of what they just said. Nothing about that is true, and they know it’s not true.”
