Tucker Carlson on Tuesday claimed that the Biden administration “hates” the type of Americans who die from opioid overdoses.
Carlson was discussing on his Fox News show a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services grant program that aims to reduce substance abuse in underserved communities. One of the several harm reduction activities the program outlines is safe smoking kits, which led Carlson to assert that “Joe Biden is giving out free crack pipes to Black people” and then that the president doesn’t care about opioid use.
“Joe Biden understands how essential narcotics are to the future of his party,” Carlson claimed as a picture of Biden appeared on screen with the caption, ‘Let them have crack pipes.’”
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Carlson then suggested that the president was turning a blind eye to the opioid crisis, since its victims are mostly white.
“We aren’t doing anything about that,” Carlson asserted, citing a CDC report finding that drug overdose deaths in the U.S. topped 100,000 from April 2020 to April 2021. Carlson mistakenly claimed that these were all opioid-related; in fact about 75,000 of them were.
“Those 100,000 Americans weren’t from officially marginalized groups,” the Fox News host continued, though in fact many of them were from marginalized groups. “Their deaths had nothing to do with the equity agenda. In fact, their deaths may have helped the equity agenda by changing the demographics of the country in a way that benefits the Democratic Party. So as far as the Biden Administration is concerned, it’s not a bad trend.”
The grant document, issued by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, references Biden’s executive order 13985, titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” As noted by fact-checking website Snopes, the “racial equity” element of the grant program is not the ultimate goal, but rather an area of focus while pursuing the broader mission of reducing substance abuse.
Still, Carlson took issue with this, reminiscent of how he mocked Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for pointing out racial inequities in highway designs and transportation systems.
“Sure, a lot of people died from opioids in Joe Biden’s first year,” Carlson continued, imagining a perverse pros and cons list about the opioid crisis from the Biden administration’s supposed perspective.
“On the other hand, these are exactly the kind of people the administration hates anyway. So with equity in mind, the White House plans to continue allowing as much fentanyl as possible to come into this country through Mexico.”
