Tucker Carlson Blames Buffalo Shooting on Black People and Democrats, Insists the GOP Are the Real Victims

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | May 17, 2022 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | May 17, 2022 |

In the wake of a racist massacre in Buffalo on Saturday that was linked to the white replacement theory that Tucker Carlson has repeatedly promoted on his show, I predicted yesterday that on his Monday night show, Carlson would somehow make himself the victim. That he would blame mental illness for the massacre, and ultimately blame the senseless deaths of 10 people on the Democrats and accuse them of using the shooting to silence Carlson and his viewers.

It’s exactly what he did. Exactly. He is so predictable.

Carlson spent the first minute of his broadcast reminding viewers that there were a number of mass shootings over the weekend that we didn’t focus on. The suggestion was that the Buffalo shooting only mattered to the media because the victims were Black, and this was not about gun violence, it was about race politics. He then spent the next two minutes talking about how “crazy” the gunman was, that he identified with no political party, and that was just a sick person. In other words, he’s following the Republican formula in how to respond to mass shootings in America.

Then he pivoted to suggest that Carlson and Trumpism are the real victims. He suggested that “professional Democrats” were quick to blame Republicans so that they could use it as a pretext to silence the right. Then he trotted out a number of clips from the Sunday news shows where various Democrats and liberals talked about the need to moderate social media and “restrict and limit hate speech.” Every single clip specifically singled out “hate speech,” which is not protected by the First Amendment. Carlson then reiterated that Democrats are trying to prevent his viewers from expressing their political views. Basically, Tucker Carlson is telling his viewers that Joe Biden is trying to stop them from expressing hate speech. It’s like he’s telling on himself.

Tucker Carlson makes himself the victim amid Buffalo shooting: "What is hate speech? Well, it's speech that our leaders hate. So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That's what they're telling you."

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) May 17, 2022

Joe Biden recently said that the modern Republican party is an “existential threat to Democracy,” he said, Here’s where Tucker Carlson earns his paycheck: He looks into the camera and he says to his viewers that “you” are the “existential threat,” that Joe Biden is talking about “you.”

“This threat that Joe Biden is talking about is you. He’s talking about his fellow Americans. No President has ever spoken like this. Ever.”

Then he goes on another screed against race politics, and he suggests that because people of color — in trying to achieve something approximating to equality in this country — have made it about race, they are to blame for the white supremacist views of the GOP. He’s literally victim-blaming. “If you were to make identity politics mandatory in your country, as they have, how can you be surprised when it leads, as it inevitably will, to white identity politics. You can’t be surprised. You did it. And it was always going to happen … race politics is a sin.”

Afterward, he spends two minutes talking about race politics in Rwanda, and how it led to genocide, implying the same thing would happen here in an effort to scare his viewers into thinking that people of color are going to commit genocide on white people.

He ends, I sh*t you not, by echoing Martin Luther King, Jr. and racist cops in the same thought. “All lives matter, period,” he said, imploring the country to “return to the American way of life,” where he is “judged by the content of my character, not by the color of my skin.”

JFC.

tl;dr: All mass shootings matter! The gunman is sick. The Democrats are trying to silence our hate speech, and Black people are responsible for white supremacy because they made white people mad by advocating for themselves, which is a sin.

All race politics is bad, no matter what flavor it is. It's poison. It subsumes the individual into the group. It dehumanizes people. It elevates appearance over initiative and decency, and all the other God-given qualities that make people unique yet morally equal to each other. pic.twitter.com/go7TpLheQY

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 17, 2022