“How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with guns decided they had to keep order like no one else would?”
Frege Carlson on his prime time television program.
On Wednesday, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was taken into custody just outside Wisconsin, in Antioch, Illinois, and charged with premeditated first-degree murder. The arrest came after two people were killed at night during Tuesday night’s protest, prompted by the shooting of Jacob Blake police.
Kenosha police chief Daniel Miskinis confirmed that a 17-year-old resident of Antioch was accused of a shooting incident and said the teenager “was involved in the use of firearms to determine what conflict there was.”
During his show on Wednesday, Carlson claimed that “the authorities responsible for the city are leaving it” and “refused to enforce the law.” Neither the Kenosha Police Department nor the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department could be reached early Thursday morning for comment. Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers could not be reached for comment Thursday morning.
The Fox News host said authorities had “stood back and watched Kenosha burn” the last few nights and asked, “Are we really surprised that looting and arson turned to murder?”
Asked about the comment from Carlson, a Fox News spokesman
pointed out in a tweet of Carlson in which he similarly criticized the Wisconsin authorities.
Carlson’s remark about 17-year-olds choosing to “maintain order” with firearms drew immediate criticism.
“Vigilant violence has always been one of my biggest concerns about the present moment,”
tweeted Blake Hounshell, the editor-in-chief of the political website Politico. “And here we have to apologize, rationalize a leading TV host – a man who had the ear of the president.”
“He just justified murder,”
added Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 project.
Max Boot, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post and CNN contributor,
twitter that Carlson was “inciting violence and calling for terrorism.”
Carlson is no stranger to being under fire and has been accused of making previously racist and inflammatory remarks about air.
In August 2019, for example, Carlson became overwhelmed with controversy and lost advertisers when he said that the very real problem of White supremacy in America was a “hoax”.
Most recently, Carlson saw more advertisers – including Disney and T-Mobile – flee his program in June after he said the Black Lives Matter movement “was not about Black Lives” and warned viewers to “remember that when they come for you” . ” (A Fox News spokesman later said Carlson was referring to Democratic leaders, not Protestants of Black Lives Matter, when he made the remarks.)
And earlier this summer, Carlson faced major controversy after CNN revealed that his now-former top writer had secretly spent years with racist and sexist comments in an online forum. At the time, the author – Blake Neff – did not respond to multiple requests for comment. However, he resigned from his position.
Carlson himself has backed down in the past against accusations of racism. He told The Atlantic in December 2019 that such accusations are “so far from the truth” that it “has no effect at all other than to call into my contempt for the people who say it” because he thinks “it is that dishonest? “
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