Analysis
Tucker Carlson on Wednesday falsely claimed that George Floyd was not killed by police.
The controversial Fox News host, who has been permanently discredited by the network’s own lawyers, threw himself down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories Wednesday night, starting with the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.
Carlson insisted that House Democrats were repeatedly lying in their testimonies of what happened on Jan. 6 when pro-Trump rioters infiltrated the Capitol. “There’s no question about that,” he said.
But then he pivoted to a deeper conspiracy theory that centers around Black Lives Matter.
“BLM and their sponsors in corporate America completely changed this country,” Carlson said. “They changed this country more in five months than it had changed in the previous 50 years.”
At that point, he claimed that the death of George Floyd, which was the catalyst for the protests against police brutality and racism throughout last summer, was “sad” but a false narrative used to promote an agenda.
“There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy showed that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose—fentanyl,” Tucker said. “But by that point, facts didn’t matter. It was too late.”
In actuality, Floyd’s death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, who specifically listed trauma related to former officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. A second autopsy came to the same conclusion.
Floyd did have drugs in his system at the time, and Carlson is not the first person to try to claim that as his “real” cause of death. However, neither of the medical professionals who reviewed the facts came to that conclusion.
Carlson’s lies about Floyd’s death prompted direct criticisms of Carlson and his program as well as a renewed outcry to boycott the remaining sponsors of his program.
Ultimately, Carlson seems to be trying to establish a pattern of Democrats telling enormous lies to enact sweeping changes throughout the U.S. It’s a fascinating claim on the heels of Trump spreading baseless claims of voter fraud and a stolen election that ultimately led to the insurrection attempt that brought on the conversation.
Fox’s lawyers have argued that nothing Carlson says can be taken as “actual facts” and that his program is purely based around “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.”
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