Tucker Carlson went on an openly racist diatribe against a Tennessee state legislator Wednesday night, suggesting that Democratic Representative Justin Pearson speaks like a “sharecropper” and only went to college because he’s black.
Pearson is one of two black lawmakers recently ousted from the state legislature by the GOP supermajority for joining protesters chanting in the House chamber in support of gun control following a school shooting that involved last month six people were killed in Nashville. Pearson was reinstated by the Memphis Shelby County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday, and State Representative Justin Jones was reinstated by the Nashville Metro Council on Monday.
In a Fox News segment attacking Pearson and other Democrats for what he called “impersonating civil rights leaders,” Carlson said Pearson had changed his behavior over the years from that of a “crypto white boy” to “the “modern incarnation of Martin Luther King Jr. himself.”
“Pearson has been in the news recently for helping facilitate an uprising at the Tennessee State House,” Carlson said.
He played a video that Pearson filmed in 2016 while campaigning for student body president at Bowdoin College. According to Carlson, Pearson tried to act like a white person in that video.
“Justin Pearson wasn’t white. That’s probably how we ended up with Bowdoin in the first place,” he said, referring to the private liberal arts school in Maine. “But he made a fantastic impression of it… That was the old Justin Pearson, before his ‘transition’.”
“You have to ask yourself, as long as we’re mimicking civil rights leaders who died nearly 60 years ago, why not have some variety?” Carlson added after showing video of Pearson speaking passionately on the House floor last week ahead of the vote to oust him.
“You never see politicians stepping over to say Malcolm X. How did that happen? Maybe because Malcolm X didn’t talk like a sharecropper. He spoke dignified standard English,” Carlson said.
It’s not uncommon for Carlson to make racial slurs and embrace white supremacist talking points on his show, one of the most watched cable news programs in the country. He has repeatedly promoted the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims that white Christian Americans are being deliberately replaced by immigrants, people of color, and non-Christians. Once, on a radio show in 2008, he called people from Iraq “semi-literate primitive apes.”
Carlson’s full comments on Pearson can be viewed below.
