On his Fox News show Friday evening, Tucker Carlson suggested that parents—specifically fathers—should inflict violence on their children’s teachers who don’t follow their states’ ban on discussing LGBTQIA issues.
Carlson spoke with terrible writer/awful Twitter presence/Senate candidate J.D. Vance about anti-gay and trans legislation targeting young people in America. Legislation like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and the copycat bills that have been popping up in other states, prohibit educators and other school officials from instructing and/or discussing issues of gender identity and sexual orientation to various extents, but as Carlson sees it, parents could be doing more to keep teachers from discussing these things themselves—namely, “thrashing.”
“I don’t understand where the men are,” Carlson said, scrunch-faced. “Like where are the dads? You know, some teacher’s pushing sex values on your third grader why don’t you go in and thrash the teacher? Like this is an agent of the government pushing someone else’s values on your kid about sex, like where’s the pushback?”
This is far from the first time Carlson has suggested violence to his viewers. He has said teachers who talk about gender identity should be “arrested” and “beaten up.” He told viewers they should call the police and child protective services when they see a child in public wearing a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic, calling masking for children “abuse.”
Carlson is unable, of course, to provide an example of a legitimate offense worthy of the “thrashing” he’s calling for. He grossly mischaracterized an Alabama bill banning gender-affirming care for trans youth as protecting against “castration”—he literally referred to “slicing off a child’s sex organs”—which is not a thing that is happening to young trans people, so there’s definitely no need to legislate its prohibition. He says that opponents of “Don’t Say Gay” legislation want to indoctrinate kids about “porn and oral sex and paganism,” when in reality, all of this just stems from an insistence that kids must be shielded at all costs from the knowledge that cisgender, heterosexual people are not the only people that exist in the world.
But to Carlson, acknowledging the existence of LGBTQIA people (let alone supporting LGBTQIA youth) is unacceptable, and entirely worthy of enacting physical violence against teachers—a totally normal thing for a man pretending to be a purveyor of news to say to his massive audience.
(featured image: screencap)
