Sometimes Tucker Carlson actually tells the truth. It doesn’t appear to be on purpose. These instances, few and far between, are more like slips of the tongue, him accidentally saying the quiet part loud. A few months ago the Fox News host admitted he lies, if he’s “really cornered or something.” (Incidentally, his multi-part series whitewashing Jan. 6 launched this week.) On Wednesday, Carlson host blurted out that, like most of the GOP, he doesn’t actually know what Critical Race Theory is, despite spending a year demonizing it to his millions of viewers.
"I have never figured out what critical race theory is, to be totally honest" – Tucker Carlson pic.twitter.com/43HpfCO1cg
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) November 4, 2021
For those not in the know, Critical Race Theory is a broad academic approach with roots in the 1970s. Generally speaking, it acknowledges that racism is deeply embedded in American society. It’s largely taught, if at all, in colleges, not K-12 schools. In the last few months, however, it’s become a tool for Republicans to scare white voters. Some believe it played a big part in scaring white voters, especially white women, in races in Virginia, which swung overwhelmingly GOP. (That “some” includes Tucker, but more on that in a sec.)
But perhaps Virginia voters were up in arms against something they didn’t understand. And maybe that’s because one of the people warning them against it doesn’t understanding it either. On his show, Tucker straight-up admitted he “never figured out what Critical Race Theory is,” even “after a year of talking about it.”
Undeterred by his own admitted ignorance, Tucker rattled off his own take on the theory he “never figured out.” He said it had something to do with how “some races are morally superior to other, that some are inherently sinful and some are inherently saintly.” That’s not what CRT teaches, but Carlson declared that it’s “amoral to teach” his made-up version of CRT because it’s “wrong.” He added, “That’s my view, and that’s most voters’ view.”
Carlson then praised Virginia’s Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin, who beat Democratic incumbent Terry McAuliffe, for making CRT a core part of his campaign. “Critical Race Theory, what our kids are taught,” Carlson said to guest and colleague Britt Hume. “He went right to the things that people talk about on social media, and he won on that.”
Later, before bringing on the conservative activist responsible for turning CRT into GOP triggering words, he took his definition of the academic approach — which, again, he admitted he doesn’t understand, and which even Hume admitted minutes earlier isn’t even taught in public schools — to a next-level. He compared those who teach it to Jim Jones, the cult leader who drove his flock to mass suicide — an interesting figure for Tucker to bring up, given his denunciation of vaccines and other COVID-preventing measures.
“This is not a semantic debate about what critical race theory means,” Tucker railed. “Schools are teaching students, your children, that some races are inherently superior to other races. That’s the definition of racism, that some children are born with the stain of sin, inherently. That’s Nazi stuff!”
Or perhaps it isn’t if you’re a professed lair who admitted, on national television, that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
(Via The Daily Beast)