Tucker Carlson slammed Fox News for apologizing and ousting the producer responsible for running a headline that seemingly called President Joe Biden a “wannabe dictator” the day former President Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court.
Shortly after Trump’s first appearance in federal court on Tuesday, Fox News ran an all-caps chyron that read, “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”
On Wednesday, the cable news network issued a statement that said the “chyron was taken down immediately and was addressed.”
“Those words were up for less than 30 seconds, but the effect was immediate,” Carlson said, adding, “inside Fox, the women who run the network panicked.” Carlson noted the producer who put the chyron on the screen, a tenured employee who “was considered one of the most capable people in the building,” resigned less than 24 hours after the controversy.
Carlson then used the remainder of the fourth episode of his Twitter show to compare Biden’s acts to that of a “wannabe dictator.”
“Of course, Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator. Just because he’s trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed, doesn’t mean he has a totalitarian impulse. Come on. That’s absurd,” Carlson joked. “It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title ‘wannabe dictator.’”
Carlson then said wannabe dictators “enrich themselves and their families, their tribe, even as the countries they govern grow steadily poorer and more desperate.”
“They take kickbacks from businesses and from other dictators. They use the official functions of their government to funnel cash to themselves. They don’t bother to hide the fruits of this,” Carlson added. “They live in garish mansions, with big lawns far from the teeming cities, even as their own citizens languish in growing poverty in some cases, literally living in tents on the street.
“People can’t gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator if they try that they’ll be arrested by his state security services, even years after the fact,” Carlson said before playing a clip of law enforcement arresting Ashli Babbit’s mother while protesting in Washington, DC.
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