Fox News host Tucker Carlson went after rising Democratic star Stacey Abrams on Wednesday evening, painting her as a demagogue looking to marginalize white men.
Abrams, the former Georgia House Minority Leader who lost last year’s hotly contested gubernatorial race, delivered the Democratic Party’s response to President Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday evening.
Carlson dismissed her night speech as “not much,” and then took aim at Abrams for recently arguing in an essay that identity politics helps strengthen democracy—by embracing their identities, she argued, “Americans will become likely to grow as one.”
The Fox News primetime star, who has asserted before to widespread criticism that diversity is bad, claimed Abrams is selling “bitter division” and seeking to rally the “marginalized to unite against the dominant groups,” namely white people.
Carlson noted that “marginalized people,” according to Abrams, includes “women, Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.”
And so, he added, “The dominant are everyone who is left. So do the subtraction. That’s only one group. You know who they are and so does Stacey Abrams.”
“She said ‘these people,’ these unnamed people, are responsible for the suffering of everyone else,” he continued, before claiming she wants to “overthrow” those (white) people because “she uses the language of violence and war to describe what must come next.”
The Fox host then quoted Abrams as writing, “Politics is the most effective method of revolt,” and commented himself: “Revolt. People get hurt in revolts. That’s the nature of revolts. Stacey Abrams knows that. She wants one anyway—she doesn't hide it.”
Carlson later said Abrams is “inventing a common enemy that everyone can oppose,”and compared her to “Democrats in the Jim Crow south.”
He concluded: “These ‘dominant groups’... aren’t some foreign invader from a faraway land. They’re your countrymen.”