While covering the Friday night release of appalling body-cam footage that shows five Memphis cops fatally beating Tyre Nichols, Tucker Carlson suggested that those who speak out against police brutality have been hypocritically unconcerned about the death of Ashli Babbitt, the Trump supporter who was shot while attempting to breach the Speaker’s Lobby during the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Of course, the very same people who are weeping on television about police brutality applauded when one of Nancy Pelosi’s officers murdered an unarmed woman called Ashli Babbitt. Yes: murdered. That’s exactly what that was—far more clearly than anything you just saw on the videotape we played,” said the Fox News host, whose commentary has made Babbitt out to be a martyr. (The Capitol police officer who shot Babbitt was exonerated.) Carlson’s colleague Jesse Watters, meanwhile, claimed in the previous hour that he “didn’t see any death blows” in the footage, which at one point showed Nichols being punched in the head repeatedly.
