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Fox News host Tucker Carlson went on a racist rant targeting Democratic Rep. Justin Pearson, one of the two Black Tennesee lawmakers who were expelled from the state legislature over a gun violence protest, the HuffPost reports.
Pearson and his colleague Justin Jones were ousted from the Tennessee House last week after leading a gun violence protest on the chamber floor in the wake of the Nashville school shooting. Jones was reinstated to the state legislature on Monday (April 10) following a vote by the Nashville Metro Council. Pearson's reappointment followed on Wednesday (April 12) by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners.
In a Fox News segment, Carlson mocked Pearson and other Democrats for "mimicking civil rights leaders" in the wake of the gun violence protest.
He further attacked Pearson for changing his demeanor over the years from "crypto white kid" to “the “modern incarnation of Martin Luther King Jr. himself.”
“Pearson has been in the news recently for helping to facilitate an insurrection at the Tennessee State House,” Carlson said.
The Fox News host went on to play a 2016 clip of Pearson campaigning for student body president at Bowdoin College. Carlson claimed Pearson was trying to act white.
“Justin Pearson wasn’t white. That’s probably how we got into Bowdoin in the first place,” he said. “But he did a fantastic impression of it .... That was the old Justin Pearson, before his ‘transition.’”
“You got to ask yourself, as long as we’re mimicking civil rights leaders who died almost 60 years ago, why not some variety?” Carlson added. “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."
Watch the full video of Carlson's tirade against Pearson below.
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