Fox News host Tucker Carlson went on yet another unhinged racist tirade in a newly published interview with a publication called Outkick, insisting that “unrestrained mass immigration” is enacting “a huge strain on the natural world” through means like “pollution.”
‘Unrestrained mass immigration has also put a huge strain on the natural world, just the amount of pollution and litter and destruction that’s generated by the movement of hundreds of thousands of people, unrestrained, across the border. That’s not a small thing to me. But you never hear that. I’ve never heard anybody mention that. And it’s so awful.’
Tucker Carlson’s quotes in this story are absolutely deranged https://t.co/skouEz8L06
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2021
For starters, “unrestrained mass immigration” to the United States does not exist. The claim consistently pushed by Republicans that Democrats are after “open borders” is a lie. In fact, migrants arriving at the southern border are under plenty of restrictions, and those who arrive are largely taken into custody and processed. The idea that there’s some kind of free-for-all is fictional. No matter how much immigration does unfold, the idea that immigrants are somehow personally responsible for “pollution and litter and destruction”as Carlson apparently understands it is just not based in any meaningful reality but the racial identity and place of origin of the people in question. In other words, it’s racism.
The southern border barriers that Trump was obsessed with constructing while in office have posed a repeated and well-documented actual danger to the natural environment — where’s Carlson’s outrage over that? As summarized by Scientific American earlier this year in a discussion of impacts from wall construction, “data… reveal a picture of ecosystems interrupted: blocked migration corridors for species, including jaguars and ocelots; fragmented habitat; and eroded and flood-damaged washes and rivers.” The Trump administration was “blasting in these crazy places that are just totally impassable by people but are really important habitat,” University of Arizona biologist and ecologist Aaron Flesch told the publication.
Carlson is continuing on in his ignorance. In his conversation with Outkick, the Fox host referred to mainstream journalists as “cringing animals not worthy of respect,” which is brazenly violence-tinged rhetoric. Characterizing journalists as subhuman leads right into real-world expressions of violence like the rioting at the U.S. Capitol in January, where members of the mob used a cord from a reporting crew’s camera equipment to fashion a noose on a tree. Carlson is spreading rhetoric that leads into this violence while maintaining a national television profile.
They made a noose from the camera cord and hung it from a tree. pic.twitter.com/M9KC7odLAm
— Paul McLeod (@pdmcleod) January 6, 2021
