During Friday’s broadcast of “Newsroom,” CNN anchor Brianna Keilar slammed Fox News host Tucker Carlson for his criticisms of her use of the word “insurrection” while describing the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
“The attack on the nation’s Capitol was a deadly uprising. It was a violent riot, and it was an insurrection. It was sedition. It was incited by the president calling his supporters to action. … So, let’s call it what it is, something that some people are having a harder time with than others, like this guy on planet Fox,” Keilar said.
Keilar then played a clip where Carlson said, “It wasn’t insurrection. It was a political protest that got completely out of control […] But it was not an insurrection.”
“So, it’s interesting that when the crowd, in this case, is full of almost entirely white Trump-supporting rioters, Fox’s Tucker Carlson described it as a ‘political protest that got…out of control,’ especially when this is how he described Black Lives Matter protests and looting this past summer after the death of George Floyd,” Keilar said before airing clips of Carlson ranting about the BLM protests.
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In the clips, Carlson said, “BLM and Antifa, crazed ideologues, grifters, criminals, anti-social thugs with no stake in society, nothing better to do than hurt people and destroy things.” And “These are not protests. This is not about George Floyd. It’s not about systemic racism, whatever that is. America is not a racist country.”
Keilar responded with a blistering takedown:
“When Tucker Carlson was arguing against the tearing down of confederate statues, he said ‘the country is a sum total of its history, good and bad. eliminating the past leaves us unable to say who we are.’ Here he’s trying to eliminate the present, and he is spoon-feeding it to millions of hungry viewers who tune into his show.”
“Healthy societies do not destroy their own histories,” Keilar quoted Carlson as having said. “But what he didn’t cop to,” she concluded, “is that he is part of the illness. A propagandist. A liar. A parasite.”
Watch the clip below, via CNN.
Brianna Keilar just stuffed Tucker Carlson in a locker… pic.twitter.com/h6w4Qr8Cjh
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) January 8, 2021
