Fox News host Tucker Carlson on his Monday night program said that in 20 years, every fifth grader in the U.S. will believe “9/11 was committed by white supremacists.”
Carlson’s remarks came in the context of what he described as “propaganda” from liberals lambasting President Trump for inciting violence.
“I swear in 20 years, every fifth grader will believe 9/11 was committed by white supremacists,” Carlson said on his show. “Totally true. You watch. You heard it here first. They’re the real threat, we need to fear and suppress them.”
Democrats have accused Trump of inciting violence against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of the first two Muslim congresswomen, by sharing an edited video on Twitter that featured images of the 9/11 terrorist attack with Omar’s comments spliced in between.
Trump issued the tweet after a new controversy surrounding remarks Omar made at an event in March sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Los Angeles. Conservatives saw her remarks as underplaying the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Omar, misstating when CAIR was started, said “CAIR was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
Carlson on Monday played a clip of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) criticizing Trump’s rhetoric toward Omar.
“Since 9/11, we’ve had terrorist attacks in this country, the majority of them have been right-wing extremists,” Booker said in an interview with CBS. “And the majority of those have been white supremacist attacks, from a synagogue in Pittsburgh to a church in South Carolina.”
“These are white supremacist groups that use language — as we saw as far away as New Zealand — use our president’s language almost as if a license for these attacks,” the senator added.
Booker appeared to be referencing a manifesto purportedly written by the suspect in the New Zealand mosque shootings that called Trump “a symbol of renewed white identity and purpose.”
Carlson condemned Booker and other “demagogues on the left” for speaking out against the “epidemic of hate crimes.”
“But they’re lying, there is no epidemic of hate crimes,” Carlson claimed, pointing to data from California detailing how only 65 people in the country’s most populated state were convicted of hate crimes in 2017.
That data does show an increase in hate crime events.
California’s annual hate crime report detailed a 17.4 percent increase in hate crime events in 2017, rising from from 931 reported in 2016 to 1,093 in 2017.
FBI data released last year found that hate crimes increased in the U.S. for the third year in a row in 2017, rising 17 percent from the previous year. Law enforcement officials reported 7,175 hate crime incidents in 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016.
2017 saw the largest single-year increase in hate crimes in 2001, according to the FBI, when a terrorist attack on U.S. soil resulted in a significant spike in anti-Muslim crimes.
An analysis from The Washington Post last month found that counties where President Trump hosted a campaign rally in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes compared to similar counties that did not host one.
Omar said in a Sunday statement that she has experienced an increase in death threats after the president’s tweet, including many directly referring or replying to Trump’s video.
“Violent crimes and other acts of hate by right-wing extremists and white nationalists are on the rise in this country and around the world,” Omar said. “We can no longer ignore that they are being encouraged by the occupant of the highest office in the land.”
Story cited here.
