Many call on Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson for defending teen charged in Kenosha killings
We might roll our eyes at just about everything Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson says, like when he asks what Cardi B's "WAP" is "doing to our kids," but last night he went too far, even for his very, very low standards. When talking about Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old white supremacist who shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, WI (where unarmed Black man Jacob Blake was shot by police seven times in the back) and injured a third, Tucker said:
Are we really surprised this looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? Everyone can see what was happening in Kenosha. It was getting crazier by the hour.
Tucker was not only immediately met with backlash on social media for justifying murder, but there have been calls by high-profile celebrities, political journalists, and a few politicians to finally get him fired from Fox News.
Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, said, "If they don't take action after this, every one of Fox News's executives, directors, and advertisers is complicit in Tucker Carlson's racist, murderous rants."
"He just justified murder," wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Billy Eichner, John Cusack, Insecure's Natasha Rothwell, Wyatt Cenac, Julie Klausner, Mia Farrow, Ike Barinholtz, Craig Mazin, Richard Marx, W. Kamau Bell, and many others have either explicitly called to get Tucker fired and/or ridiculed his comments:
Meanwhile, Donald Trump's son is defending Tucker:
The equally terrible Ann Coulter tweeted to her 2.2 million followers that she wants Rittenhouse as her president. She since deleted it, but not before the tweet got at least 4,000 likes.
"Asked about Carlson's remark, a Fox News spokesperson pointed to a tweet from Carlson in which he leveled similar criticism against the Wisconsin authorities," CNN reported. Otherwise, neither Fox News nor Tucker has publicly responded to the backlash.