In response to the Highland Park, Illinois mass shooting that left seven dead and dozens wounded, Tucker Carlson offered up a ridiculous explanation for what’s driving mass shootings in the US: women “lecturing” about men’s “privilege” and weed.
The Fox host introduced the controversial take during his Tuesday night programme by first pulling up a picture of 21-year-old Robert Crimo, the suspected shooter in Monday’s massacre, and said he wouldn’t “sell a gun to that guy”.
“Look at Robert ‘Bobby’ Crimo,” said Mr Carlson. “Would you sell a gun to that guy? Does he seem like a nutcase? Of course he does.”
Earlier in the day, authorities announced that Mr Crimo had been charged with seven counts of first-degree murder, with more charges expected to follow in the coming days. If convicted, he will face life in prison without the possibility of parole, said Illinois state attorney Eric Reinhart.
The host then asked his viewers why the accused gunman didn’t raise any alarms prior to the Independence Day shooting, despite the fact that the host noted during the same segment how police were called to the 21-year-old’s home twice in 2019 over his threats to harm himself and kill his family.
“Maybe he didn’t stand out,” the host began. “Maybe because there are a lot of young men in America who suddenly look and act a lot like this guy.”
Mr Carlson then went on to offer several factors that he perceived as being the driving force behind Mr Crimo’s alleged actions and many other “angry” young men who find themselves at the centre of mass shootings in the US, including social media, video games, porn and drugs, more specifically latching on the “government-endorsed weed” as being a significant contributor.
“They are high on government-endorsed weed, ‘smoke some more, it’s good for you’” Mr Carlson said.
He also claimed, without providing any hard figures or statistics, that Mr Crimo, like so many young men, are “numbed by the endless psychotropic drugs that are handed out at every school in the country by crackpots posing as counsellors”.
But the moment that seems to have struck a chord with the Twitterverse was when the far-right commentator delivered a line that suggested that women, more specifically their so-called insistence to remind their male counterparts about “privilege”, were causing young men to go “nuts”.
“They’re angry. They know that their lives will not be better than their parents’. They’ll be worse. That’s all but guaranteed,” he said. “And yet the authorities in their lives - mostly women – never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege. ‘You’re male, you’re privileged!’”
The remarks, which quickly drew the ire of online commenters, went further to nearly defend the so-called “angry”, predominantly male mass shooters, after he said: “Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that. So, a lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised?”
Backlash to Mr Carlson’s Tuesday night comments were swift in condemning the far-right agitator, with some highlighting how Conservative pundits such as Mr Tucker will find a way to blame gun violence on nearly everything under the sun, except guns.
“98% of mass shootings are committed by men, but Tucker Carlson still found a way to blame women. You can’t make this s**t up,” tweeted user @TheScottCharles, while another listed all the things the Fox host was willing to blame for mass shootings - “marijuana, SSRIs, social media, porn, video games, school counselors, women (seriously)” - and all the things the pundit wouldn’t note, including guns or the accused shooter.
Others were more succinct in taking jabs at Mr Carlson’s take – “Hard to overstate how much these people hate women” – while another user poignantly pointed out how she was thankful that Mr Carlson and his Fox News colleague, Laura Ingraham, who similarly pinned marijuana as a cause behind mass shootings, would not be the ones tasked with telling the 2-year-old boy, Aiden, who was left orphaned by the Independence Day shooting why his parents, were no longer alive.
“We are quite fortunate that Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson will NOT be the ones to explain to two-year old Aiden that he lost his parents because of marijuana use and overbearing women.”
