During his show on Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ticked off examples of what he said racism looked like, decrying the likes of Harvard, BuzzFeed and slavery reparations campaigners as racist.
Carlson is himself under pressure over racism allegations that resulted in major sponsors suspending their commercial relationship with the show after Carlson, in a December segment on migration, said migrants made America "dirtier."
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"So the consensus is the racism is on the right, only conservatives can be racist. So that raises a few questions. What exactly is racism? What does it look like? How do you know if you are racist?" Carlson said on Tucker Carlson Tonight, adding he had a "handy checklist for you."
As Carlson spoke, headlines from various media stories appeared on the screen. The first was a story in The New York Times about the lawsuit against Harvard, accusing the elite university of discriminating against Asian-Americans in its admissions policies.
"A racist would support treating people differently based purely on their skin color. They'd hand out jobs and contracts and college admissions letters based on your DNA rather than anything that you had done," Carlson said.
Later in the segment, a BuzzFeed headline flashed: "37 Things White People Need to Stop Ruining in 2018." "They would ridicule people regularly on the basis of their skin color. Racism? Yeah," Carlson said.
And he also showed the headline to a story in The Seattle Times, which read: "America must atone with reparations for our legacy of slavery."
"They would also believe in race-based retribution, most ominously," Carlson said as the headline streamed across the screen.
"That means people of one race paying the price today for actions decades or centuries ago by people they may not have any relationship to at all other than a similar appearance. What would that be? Well, that would be the definition of racism, right?"
Among the approximately 20 advertisers that withdrew from Carlson's show after migration segment were retirement insurer Pacific Life, the vehicle manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover and pancake house IHop.
"Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this," he said in the segment.
"We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.
"Previous leaders of our country committed sins; we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans. That's the argument they make."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Shane Croucher is a Senior Editor based in London, UK. He oversees the My Turn team. He has previously overseen ... Read more
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