Hours after Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson was reappointed to his seat in the state legislature following his expulsion by Republicans over his role in a peaceful gun control protest, staunch Second Amendment supporter Tucker Carlson launched a wildly bigoted broadside at the young Black lawmaker, implying that among other things, he speaks like a “sharecropper.”
The Fox News host began by describing Pearson as someone who helped “facilitate an insurrection in the Tennessee State House”—a ridiculous sentiment, yet one that was also echoed by the state’s Republican house speaker, Cameron Sexton.
“Back in 2016, Justin Pearson was an earnest young student at Bowdoin, the whitest college in the whitest state in America—a place that costs $60,000 a year for no obvious reason. A rich kid school,” said Carlson, who then played a seven-year-old video of Pearson explaining his campaign for student government president.
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“I want to bring together different voices, dissenting voices, voices that may be more liberal or more conservative,” Pearson says in the video, “in order that we can reach a point of… the radical middle where conversation and dialogue happens, and growth happens.”
The Fox host proceeded to mock him because his “crypto-white” speaking voice happened to be different from his cadence in a recent clip he found online. So different, Carlson said, “If you closed your eyes, you could easily imagine [it] coming from a suburban orthodontist.”
“Justin Pearson wasn’t white—that’s probably how he got into Bowdoin in the first place—but he did a fantastic impression of it,” the Fox host continued. “That was the old Justin Pearson before his transition.”
According to Carlson, this “transition” was from a “crypto-white kid into the modern incarnation of Martin Luther King, Jr. himself”
“Justin Pearson has a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, everyone will do exactly what he wants or else face indictment by the Department of Justice,” Carlson continued to mock after playing part of a speech Pearson gave to colleagues in Nashville last Thursday.
“You’ve got to ask yourself: as long as we’re mimicking civil rights leaders who died nearly 60 years ago, why not some variety? You never see politicians transition into, say, Malcolm X. Why is that? Maybe because Malcolm X didn’t talk like a sharecropper. He spoke dignified standard English. He wasn’t running a shakedown racket to fleece guilty white liberals.”
