Fox News host Tucker Carlson continued his relentless attacks on social justice movement Black Lives Matter on Wednesday night, likening the protests over police brutality to coronavirus while describing the city where George Floyd was killed as “our Wuhan.”
Carlson led off his top-rated Fox News primetime program by referencing COVID-19, a disease that has currently killed roughly 130,000 Americans, in an effort to draw a comparison to the recent push for racial justice kicked off by Floyd’s late-May death.
“We spent an awful lot of time this spring talking about viruses and how they spread,” he proclaimed. “One person infects another person who infects a third who then has contact with a larger group of people and infects 20 more, each of whom, and you know how it works. It's exponential. Pretty soon, individuals thousands of miles from the source of the outbreaks start getting sick.”
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Pivoting to the BLM movement, the conservative host asserted that “craziness spreads very much the same way,” adding that a “single lunatic can pass a debilitating case of it to millions of others with just one appearance on MSNBC” or via Twitter.
“Hysteria is the most communicable disease known to man,” Carlson declared. “And we're now living through a pandemic of it.”
“On Memorial Day weekend, a man called George Floyd died in police custody in Minnesota,” he continued. “That's where this outbreak first began. Minneapolis was our Wuhan. The first cases appeared a little over a month ago.”
After comparing Minneapolis to the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus at the heart of a worldwide pandemic originated, Carlson then complained about recent attempts to take down statues of Christopher Columbus.
“Christopher Columbus was not a Minneapolis police officer, Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator who died more than 500 years ago,” he huffed. “Columbus probably never even heard of George Floyd. He almost certainly didn't mistreat him personally. So why are people attacking Columbus' statute?”
“Questions are not permitted during hysteria epidemics,” the Fox star added. “Logic of any kind seems to dramatically increase the severity of the symptoms. A patient may appear to be recovering from hysteria, speaking in nearly complete sentences, bathing independently on occasion.”
From there, Carlson pivoted to an attack on GOP Sens. James Lankford and Ron Johnson for proposing a bill that would remove Columbus Day as a federal holiday and replace it with Juneteenth, claiming they were caving to the liberal mob and that more American holidays would be soon on the chopping block.
