Tucker Carlson went on an overtly racist tirade against Tennessee state legislators Wednesday night, suggesting Democratic Rep. Justin Pearson said he was like a “sharecropper” and got into college just because he was Black.
Pearson was one of two black lawmakers recently expelled from the state legislature by the GOP supermajority for joining protesters chanting in the House chamber in support of gun control after a school shooting that left six dead in Nashville last month. Pearson was reinstated by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners in Memphis, and state Rep. Justin Jones was reinstated by Nashville’s Metro Council.
In a Fox News segment attacking Pearson and other Democrats for what he called “imitating civil rights leaders,” Carlson said Pearson had changed his stance over the years from a “crypto white boy” to a “modern incarnation of Martin Luther King Jr.” self.”
“Pearson has been in the news recently for helping to facilitate an insurrection at the Tennessee State House,” Carlson said.
He played a video recorded by Pearson in 2016 during his campaign for student body president at Bowdoin College. In Carlson’s estimation, in the video, Pearson was trying to act like a white man.
“Justin Pearson is not white. Of course, that’s why we went to Bowdoin,” he said, referring to the private liberal arts college in Maine. “But he made a very good impression… It was the old Justin Pearson, before the ‘transition’.”
“You have to ask yourself, as long as we’re emulating a civil rights leader who died almost 60 years ago, why isn’t there diversity?” Carlson added after showing a video of Pearson speaking passionately on the House floor last week ahead of the vote to expel him.
“You never see a transition politician to say, Malcolm X. Why? Maybe because Malcolm X doesn’t talk like a sharecropper. He speaks standard polite English,” Carlson said.
It’s not unusual for Carlson to make racist comments and embrace white supremacy talking points on his show, one of the most-watched cable news programs in the country. He has repeatedly promoted the “great replacement” racist conspiracy theory, which claims that white American Christians are being deliberately replaced by immigrants, people of color and non-Christians. Once, on a radio show in 2008, he called people from Iraq “semiliterate primitive monkeys.”
Carlson’s full comments about Pearson can be seen below.