Amid growing fears of a coronavirus outbreak and U.S. financial markets hitting a record drop on Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson turned to a conservative columnist best known for taking creepy photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) as his expert on the crisis on Thursday night.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that Carlson’s guest, Washington Examiner columnist Eddie Scarry, used his primetime cable news appearance to talk about the “Commie cough” and to claim that Chinese people eating skunks are responsible for the rise of the virus.
In kicking off his Fox News program, Carlson argued that it is liberals’ “attitude” towards diversity that has “left us vulnerable to the coronavirus” before welcoming on Scarry to enlighten viewers on the health crisis horrors caused by political correctness.
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“You spent a lot of time thinking about this mindset,” the Fox News host asked Scarry. “Here we are facing what could become a pandemic. Thousands have died. Yet a certain segment of well-educated America is more concerned that people might say insensitive things. Explain the mindset.”
Scarry, who is hawking a new book that argues rape victims and trans people are the most privileged in American society, went on to praise Carlson for his monologue before saying the left cares “more about ideology” than what’s happening with the virus.
“It turns out most people in America, even the Chinese, don’t want the Commie cough but all we’re hearing about who is the privileged and who is the victim,” Scarry asserted. “In this case it’s supposed to be — the victims are everyone else who is spreading this disease, where it’s coming from, coming from China obviously. But we’re the privileged so we’re just supposed to accept it, we’re just supposed to be okay with what’s going on.”
Carlson, meanwhile, told Scarry that “everything” he said “is true,” further asking him if he is surprised to see this attitude from liberals even when “facing a question of life and death.” Scarry took that opportunity to bemoan Democrats calling on Americans to not “perpetuate racist stereotypes” amid coronavirus fears.
“We’re worried about the racial implications of blaming this on anybody,” the right-wing provocateur stated. “Well, no, I’m sorry. If it turns out, which I did read this time in The New York Times no less, this may have come from eating skunks in China. Maybe we should consider the idea that, all right, either food or something or somebody should not be coming from China.”
The Daily Beast was unable to find any reference in The New York Times to the disease being linked to Chinese people eating skunks. It would appear, however, that Scarry likely got his information from a fellow Examiner columnist’s piece that cited a former Trump official’s tweet claiming civet cats in China are skunks. (The Times’ Maggie Haberman tweeted on Thursday that a top U.S. health official said the disease jumped from bats to civet cats, which are eaten by Chinese at feasts.)
Scarry’s primetime appearance appears to mark his first major return to the limelight after he sparked backlash and gained a reputation as a “creep” in Nov. 2018 after tweeting out a surreptitiously shot photo of Ocasio-Cortez. Scarry was moved from his position as media reporter to commentary by the Examiner. The paper claimed at the time that the move had been in the works prior to the infamous tweet.
