The Fox News host also falsely claimed that George Floyd died of a drug overdose.
On Wednesday night, Tucker Carlson bizarrely tied the Capitol riots and George Floyd‘s death together to suggest that Democrats were using the incidents to change the “old order” of America.
The Fox News host was more of a conspiracy theorist on his Tucker Carlson Tonight show, where he claimed that “Democratic partisans” used Floyd’s death for their own liberal agenda, and were now doing it again with the Capitol riots that occurred on January 6.
This all began with Tucker suggesting that Democrats and the media purposely lied about Officer Brian Sicknick’s death to push an agenda. Initial reports said that Sicknick died after he was hit with a fire extinguisher; investigators now believe his death could’ve been the result of a reaction to a chemical irritant.
“Streams of politicians, the same people months before had told us that cops were racist by definition, the same people praised Brian Sicknick as a hero,” he said. “They had finally found a police officer who served their political uses. Kamala Harris and her husband, for example, arrived to pay their respects, and as they did, they said not one thing about defunding police. But, in fact, the story they told was a lie. From beginning to end.”
From there, Carlson suggests that the FBI, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Capitol Police were responsible for the insurrection and not Donald Trump, saying:
The feds likely had paid informers in the ranks of the protesters. One of the rioters, we learned this yesterday, was a former FBI employee. Was he still on the FBI payroll? He wouldn’t be the first. So if the authorities knew that violence might be coming to the Capitol, where was the necessary security? It wasn’t there.
And this is where the host proceeds to bring Floyd into his convoluted theory.
“The question is why would they lie about this?” Carlson asked. “For an answer think back to last spring. Beginning on Memorial Day, BLM and their sponsors in corporate America completely changed this country. They changed this country more in five months than it had changed in the previous 50 years.”
“How did they do that? They used the sad death of a man called George Floyd to up-end our society,” he continued. “Months later, we learned that the story they told us about George Floyd’s death was an utter lie.”
During this, Carlson also said that Floyd died of a fentanyl drug overdose, paraphrasing the Hennepin County medical examiner’s autopsy where they noted that drugs were found in his system. This, as well as arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease, were listed as “significant conditions” in his death, but the autopsy ultimately concluded Floyd died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.”
An independent autopsy conducted by Floyd’s family concluded that he died by “asphyxiation from sustained pressure” from Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck.
Despite this, and the fact that there was video footage showing Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, Carlson continues to run with the idea that Floyd died of a drug overdose.
“But by that point, the facts didn’t matter. It was too late,” he said. “Cities had been destroyed, along with the fabric of this country itself. Scores of people had been killed.”
“Democratic partisans used a carefully concocted myth, a lie, to bum-rush America into overturning the old order and handing them much more power,” Carlson continued. “It worked flawlessly. So why wouldn’t they do it again?”
The Fox News host has since received backlash, primarily for saying Floyd died of a drug overdose.