Carlson’s TV tirade against Duckworth a reality check

Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s televised tirades against Sen. Tammy Duckworth conveyed a very specific message to Trump voters:

The America you wish to retain, the one without protesting Black and Latino people, the one where you can keep right on pretending that the

Civil War wasn’t about slavery, where everyone’s ancestors arrived “the right way,” that land must be fought for.

Carlson used his popular Fox News cable show to strike at Illinois’s Duckworth for merely saying that it’s worth discussing whether monuments to George Washington and other founding fathers should continue standing. And that implicit message was crafted for the closeted and openly xenophobic alike.

Duckworth’s stance is fair given the growing awareness that the nation’s first president was a slaveholder. Yet Duckworth’s thoughtfulness, willingness to hear all sides, is seen as akin to treason by Carlson.

“There are many of us here who do like this country,” said Carlson. The accompanying screen blasted this message in a graphic: “We have to fight to preserve our nation & heritage.”

It got worse from there. Carlson verbally attacked the Thai-American senator, a possible vice presidential pick for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Carlson insisted that Duckworth, a double amputee after a devastating attack on the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting in Iraq, isn’t patriotic.

This matters not to prove that Carlson is a crude cad, that should be obvious. But rather, a more pertinent and very pressing point.

For all the heady attention to Black Lives Matter’s efforts to realign policing with broader needs of communities, a huge part of America is anything but ready to move on to a more equitable and unified nation.

Carlson knows this. He knows that for plenty of Americans, voters who will be showing up at the polls or requesting a mail-in ballot, his words strike as truth. People are tuned in to his highly rated show. And he wants to ensure that they vote in the primaries in August and the general election in November.

There are few issues that can be tapped more readily than immigration for political gain. It’s a ringer.

And in going after Duckworth, berating her over a period of several days, Carlson unleashed them all. He’s the canary in the coal mine for what’s ahead.

To Trump Republicans who have insisted, against all evidence, that the president is really a friend to immigrants, wake up.

The Trump administration followed Carlson’s actions with its own stunts. In the same week, it announced a plot to rescind the visas of foreign students due to COVID-19 because many of them will not be attending in-person classes, but studying online.

Immigrants, whether pummeled by cable news hosts, or from the president’s Twitter feed, will be used this election season to stir anti-immigrant emotion. Duckworth’s recent bout with bigotry shows how ugly it will get.

Duckworth’s mother is Thai of Chinese descent. And her father is U.S. born, with deep generational ties to the nation. Through her father’s side, Duckworth is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

And yet, to Carlson and the voters that he’s serving as a Pied Piper for, that’s not enough. It will never be enough. Duckworth is to be regarded as an outsider, not a true American, someone he can make out to be feared and lambasted.