Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash: Fox And Tucker, Get Your Knees Off Their Necks
June 9th 2020
Tucker Carlson - Caricature (DonkeyHotey)
By Thom Hartmann
Following the lead of Donald Trump, it’s increasingly appearing that the principal Republican electoral strategy this year is to try to frighten white people with threats of angry black people coming to get them. It’s as if Roger stone is still advising Trump, the way he advised Nixon back in the day.
In the small Oregon town of Klamath Falls last Sunday night, about 200 locals showed up downtown with guns, baseball bats, and whatever other weapons they could find around the house to fight off the busloads of black Antifa marauders who Jewish billionaire George Soros had paid to put on a bus in Portland and was sending their way.
Of course, George Soros had done no such thing and there were no busloads of black people. But the warnings were all over the Klamath Falls Facebook group, and, it turns out, similar Facebook groups for small towns all over America.
Literally, from coast to coast, last weekend white residents of small towns showed up in their downtown areas with guns, rifles, hammers, and axes prepared to do battle with busloads of black people being sent into their small white towns by George Soros.
Nobody’s sure whether these messages, which activated frightened white people across the nation, came from local Boogaloo and other white supremacist groups trying to gauge what might happen if they actually can kick off a second American Civil War, or whether they came from some foreign government trying to tear America apart.
But they worked.
In the tiny town of Falls, Washington, frightened white people brought out chainsaws and cut down trees to block the road leading to their town. In South Bend, Indiana police were overwhelmed by 911 calls from frightened white people wanting to know when the Antifa buses were arriving. And in rural Luzern county, Pennsylvania, the local neighborhood internet group warned people that busloads of black people were "organizing to riot and loot."
Similar stories played out from Danville, California to Jacksonville, Florida, as documented by NBC news.
Of course, it was all a fiction.
Reporters found that white people in these small towns often didn’t realize they’d been punked when the Antifa buses failed to arrive, but instead thought that they had successfully kept them away by their show of force.
Many pledge to keep showing up night after night with their guns and hammers, thinking they’re protecting their small towns.
The next day, on Monday night, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson took his swing at tearing America apart with a 25-minute rant arguing that “Black Lives Matter“ has now, essentially, taken over America and America’s news media.
“This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives,” Carlson gravely intoned. “Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.”
While Carlson didn’t say who the “they“ who “will come for you” were, or if they were black people being sent by George Soros, the philanthropist has appeared for years as the puppet-master bogeyman on Fox News, rightwing hate radio, and on anti-Semitic, racist or Republican websites and Facebook groups.
Here’s a message to white people across America: nobody’s coming to get you.
There are people whose skin is darker than yours who are tired of being discriminated against, beaten, harassed and, frequently, even murdered by people who look like you and me.
And, by and large, their response has been to simply ask that the violence and hate directed at them stop.
While Bill Barr, Donald Trump, and right wing groups like Freedomworks are doing what they can to stoke white fear and sometimes even hate, black people are simply asking to be treated like the human beings they are.
The electoral strategy of frightening white people worked well for Richard Nixon in 1968 with his “Southern strategy“ and for George HW Bush with his Willie Horton ads. It put them both in the White House.
But back then the only black faces on television were either bad guys in cop shows or buffoons in situation comedies. Many white people, having no contact in their lives with people of color, believed these stereotypes to be generally true. Such white people are over-represented among the elderly white population that watches Fox News and consumes rightwing hate radio.
Today, however, our media is more diverse and a young generation has grown up realizing that we are all, people of all races, in this life and this country together.
White America is changing, awakening, and realizing black people simply want the same thing white people do: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
No matter how many freaky anti-Antifa tweets Trump pushes out, or press conferences Bill Barr holds blaming anti-fascists and black people for America’s problems, this is no longer 1968 or 1992.
Hopefully, It’s not going to work. After more than 240 years, we may finally be witnessing the birth pains of a transition into a newer and better America.
History will tell if the final voice on this is that of hatemongers like Tucker Carlson, or if the simple demand of George Floyd’s eulogist, Reverend Al Sharpton, prevail.
Sharpton said, “What happened to George Floyd happens everywhere. It’s time to stand up and say, ‘Get your knee off our necks.’“
It’s damn well about time.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.