Fox News host Tucker Carlson upgraded his dogwhistle to a full on air horn during his Wednesday night broadcast when he went on a racist rant comparing the speech of a Black Tennessee lawmaker who was expelled from the statehouse for protesting gun violence to that of a "sharecropper."
Democratic state Congressman Justin Pearson was one of two Black lawmakers expelled from the state legislature by the Republican supermajority for their participation in a protest inside the House chambers supporting gun control measures after a school shooting in the state left six people — including three nine-year-old children — dead.
Both lawmakers have since been reinstated by their representative bodies.
Mr Carlson commented on the situation Wednesday night on his show, accusing Mr Pearson and other Democrats of "mimicking civil rights leaders," and presenting themselves as the "modern incarnation of Martin Luther King Jr himself."
The Fox News host — who has frequently downplayed the severity of the Capitol riot — said the protest at the Tennessee statehouse was done in hopes to "facilitate an insurrection."
He then suggested Mr Pearson only got into college because he was Black, saying because he "wasn't white" that it was "probably how he got into Bowdoin in the first place."
Mr Carlson then asked why there wasn't more "variety" in the mimicry he accused Democratic politicians of undertaking and questioned why none of them affected the voice of civil rights leader Malcolm X.
“You never see politicians transitioning to say, Malcolm X. Why is that? Maybe because Malcolm X didn’t talk like a sharecropper. He spoke dignified standard English,” he said, implying that Mr Pearson and other Democrats did not.
Wednesday's rant was far from the first time Mr Carlson has injected racial invective into his commentary.
He has previously endorsed the "great replacement" theory that alleges progressives are trying to "replace" white, Christian, Americans with immigrants and devotees to other faiths to secure power over the country. In 2020, he said that Democrats and Black Lives Matters demonstrators were "coming" for his audience with the aim of installing "woke militias" to undermine the police and steal power in the US.
Mr Carlson called Iraqis "semiliterate primitive monkeys" during a 2008 radio show, said immigration made the US "dirtier," and called white supremacy a "hoax" intended to divide the country days after a mass shooter in El Paso who referenced a "Hispanic invasion" in his manifesto killed 23 people at a Wal-Mart.
