Tucker Carlson Shows He’s Willing to Fully Embrace Violence Against Police in Service of His Preferred Leaders

Fox News’s top-rated opinion host, Tucker Carlson, gave a full-throated, deeply misleading endorsement of the storming of Brazil’s parliament and other federal buildings over the weekend.

Carlson’s Monday night monologue began with a long-winded rant alleging “media outlets suppress” international news, which is why most Americans “have no idea” what is going on globally.

Before getting to Brazil and pro-Jair Bolsonaro rioters, whipped up by baseless claims of election fraud, Carlson claimed, as he often does, that the American public is being lied to about what is really going on in Ukraine and that Mexico’s “Civil War” is about to spill over into the U.S.

He then took a detour in Paris, where he claimed the very well-covered ‘Yellow Vest’ protests are being hidden from the American people and are actually about climate policy – ignoring union busting and pension reform efforts – before getting to Brazil and declaring the presidential election there to be clearly “rigged.”

Carlson offered zero evidence, as there is none, that the Brazilian electoral system which swept Bolsonaro into power in 2019 and has since been under his control is somehow corrupted.

The only evidence used to prop up Carlson’s claim the election was stolen is that the incoming president was, years ago, convicted of a crime. And, while certainly a strike against his record that voters should consider, that conviction was later annulled, allowing Lula to legally seek office again.

“Consider what is happening tonight in Brazil. So thanks to what was very clearly a rigged election, a convicted criminal called Lula da Silva is now the president of the most important country in South America,” Carlson said.

He added:

Millions of people in Brazil understand exactly what happened. They know that their democracy has been hijacked, possibly forever. But there’s not much they can do about that. Lula may be a criminal, in fact, he is. But he has the full support of both the Biden administration and the Chinese government. So yesterday, in frustration, a group of Brazilian protesters swarmed their legislature. Watch.

Carlson then showed a clip, which included the crowd of right-wing Bolsonaro supporters pulling a police officer off his horse and beating him. Footage also showed the crowd throwing rocks at law enforcement.

Carlson, offering zero condemnation of the violence directed at police, then said:

Now, you may actually have seen some of that video in the United States over the last couple of days. And you saw it because it has political uses. What’s happened in Brazil is being likened to January 6th. And of course, populist leaders in this country are being blamed for it. Oh, it was Trump and Steve Bannon who did it. That’s not true.

Of course, Bannon’s fingerprints are all over what happened in Brazil. In late November, Bannon advised Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, on how to handle the election loss – which Bolsonaro has never publicly conceded. While president, Donald Trump counted Bolsonaro as one of his closest allies and even labeled him the “Trump of Tropics” and later enthusiastically endorsed his failed reelection bid.

Carlson, who has repeatedly played down the violence on Jan. 6, knows that Bolsonaro’s links to Trump and Bannon run deep and included crafting shared strategies and ideology, which he goes on to tell his audience – in his own way.

“But even if it were true, it would be just the tail end of the story, would be the result of something that happened before,” Carlson said, concluding:

So the obvious question is, why are protesters in Brazil so angry? Well, they’re angry because the new Lula government has eliminated their most basic civil liberties. Lula is working to turn Brazil into a Chinese-style dictatorship, and he’s doing it very quickly with maximum aggression. Now our media doesn’t want to talk about that. They refuse to. Why? Well, for reasons that should make you very nervous.

Lula, whether you agree with his politics or not, was actually one of the leaders who led the pro-democracy movement that ended military rule in Brazil in the 1980s. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, was a military officer serving the dictatorship, and as president reinstated military commorations of the military coup.

While Carlson certainly could rip into Lula over his left-wing economic agenda, past corruption scandals, and efforts to save the rainforest – legitimate policy and character disagreements – claiming Lula is working to turn Brazil into a “dictatorship” is just blatantly false and spin used to justify the violence.

Just like his take on the protests in Paris, Carlson relies on his ability to rewrite the facts on the ground for his audience and spin a narrative to justify images that would undoubtedly alarm them otherwise. Carlson claims international news is “suppressed” and “controlled,” but in reality, foreign atrocities are one of the few things most Americans will almost always agree on.

Images of famine in Yemen, rockets hitting apartment buildings in Kyiv, or soldiers ousting a democratically elected leader usually elicit the same response, even if the details surrounding any given event are complicated and reasonable people may disagree on policy. The issue with engaging news audiences with foreign policy and international news coverage is that it’s complicated, which is exactly why Carlson often uses it in his spin, because through conspiracy theories and misleading his audience, he can simplify it and weaponize it for his purposes.

Like Bannon, who praised the rioters who stormed Brazil’s parliament as “freedom fighters,” Carlson has now shown us all exactly how far he is willing to go to see the leaders he wants in power: rewrite history, spin conspiracies, and openly support violence.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.