FUCKER CARLSON, FASCIST “FOX NEWS”
AND THE BROADCAST OF WHITE SUPREMACY

by Bob Avakian

June 8, 2020 | revcom.us

 

In the midst of the outpouring of outrage over the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd, Fucker Tucker Carlson uses the platform provided him by the fascist network calling itself “Fox News” to mock those protesting and deny the truth that there is a widespread and systematic reign of terror against Black people in this country, which amounts to an ongoing genocide. Carlson might as well wear a Ku Klux Klan hooded sheet when he does his broadcasts. It is easy to imagine Carlson, during slavery days, oozing admiration for the slave owners sitting on their verandas drinking mint juleps and smirking while their slaves were being whipped. We can also easily imagine him, during the days of Jim Crow segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror, racing to be part of the leering crowds cheering while a Black man was lynched. And today he engages in sleazy attempts to downplay and justify the continuing murders of Black people by police.

He claims that statistics show that, out of the hundreds of Black people killed by police each year, most were armed. But the fact is that, time after time, police murder unarmed Black people—on the street and even in their own homes! As for the killing of “armed” people, we know that police often claim that someone they murdered “had a gun” when they did not (and what honest and informed person doesn’t know about police often planting a weapon after they have shot someone?). Plus, simply the fact that someone has a weapon does not in itself justify killing them—often people who have had a weapon are shot in the back while running away from police. Still, even if it were “only” 100 Black people who were killed each year by police in completely unjustified circumstances, that would amount to one thousand every decade. And even this understated count brings out the reality that:

since the 1960s, more Black people have been killed by police than all those who were lynched during the whole time of Jim Crow segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror. And almost never are the police held accountable for this: almost never are they even indicted and tried; and when they are put on trial, very rarely are they convicted and sentenced in accordance with the severity of the crime—murder—they have actually committed.¹

As I have spoken to before, it is a bitter truth—and a damning testament to the actual nature of the system in this country—that every Black male growing up in the South during Jim Crow had a reasonable fear of being lynched.² The number who were actually lynched amounted to “only” about 5,000 (!)—but the reality that any Black person could be lynched at any time for any reason (or for no reason at all) instilled an ever-present terror in Black people as a whole.

And today the reality is this:

with hundreds of Black people (and other oppressed people) murdered by police every year, and Black people as a whole subjected to systematic terror through things like “stop and frisk,” it is equally true that all young Black males (and this is increasingly true of females as well) are forced to go through life in this country with the constant fear of being subjected to harassment, brutality and even outright murder by the police.³

This is why Black parents have to hold “the conversation” with their sons especially, giving them instruction that they hope will keep them from being murdered by police. This is why, when someone like George Floyd is viciously murdered by police, so many Black people—even among the more bourgeois—cry out: “That could have been me!” In the twisted mind of Tucker Carlson all these Black people must be ignorant and hysterical—when in reality they are responding to a very real and ongoing horror.

Add to this the fact that through the workings of this system—which enslaved Black people for centuries, then brutally exploited them for generations after the Civil War, and continues to systematically discriminate against them in every part of life—there are now millions of Black people who are incarcerated or otherwise in the grip of the system of criminal injustice (which also systematically discriminates against Black people) and you have what, yes, amounts to an ongoing genocide.

Tucker Carlson should be sentenced to be Black in America. If he survived for a week, there would be no end to his wailing and whining about how he can’t believe that he is being so relentlessly subjected to unfair, unjust, cruel and vicious treatment.

 

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1. Lynching, Murder By Police—Damn This Whole System! We Don’t Have To Live This Way! This article by Bob Avakian is available at revcom.us. [back]

2. This refers to a 2003 speech by Bob Avakian: Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About. The film of this speech is available in BA’s Collected Works at revcom.us. [back]

3. Lynching, Murder By Police—Damn This Whole System! We Don’t Have To Live This Way! [back]