Tucker Carlson Guest Believes ‘Virtually All’ Hate Crimes Are Hoaxes (If You Ignore the Ones That Aren’t)

Tucker Carlson Guest Believes ‘Virtually All’ Hate Crimes Are Hoaxes (If You Ignore the Ones That Aren’t)

Conservative media has latched onto this Jussie Smollett story like a lamprey on a lake trout.

Tuesday night was Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s turn to figure out how to discredit hate crimes in general because Smollett may have faked one. To do this, he brought on Wilfred Reilly, a college professor and author of a new book titled Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War. Bet you can guess the subject matter.

It took Reilly literally 20 seconds to put his foot in his mouth:


“What we find is that virtually all of the high-profile widely reported hate crimes over the past two to three years have been hoaxes.”


Virtually all? Was the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre a hoax? Charlottesville? The three Muslim students murdered in North Carolina in 2015? The Indian immigrant gunned down in a Kansas bar in 2017 by a white man suspicious of his immigration status? The two men stabbed to death in Portland when they tried to stop a bigot from harassing two Muslim women? The Mother Emmanuel Church massacre in South Carolina?

Even Carlson seemed surprised, so Reilly clarified he was talking about “very, very many of the best-publicized incidents.” Guess he forgot about the ones I just mentioned, which were so poorly publicized I thought of them off the top of my head. Reilly has a different definition of “virtually all” and “best-publicized” than I do.

Watch the video at the top of the page.

Gary Legum

Gary Legum has written about politics and culture for Independent Journal Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Wonkette, AlterNet and McSweeney's, among others. He currently lives in his native state of Virginia.

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