'Dangerous racist': Tucker Carlson lambasted for saying BLM movement and Democrats are 'coming for you' with 'woke militia'

Mr Carlson claims Democrats want partisan police forces

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has come under fire for once again spreading racist, misleading information to his audience.

In his latest act of doomsaying on Monday night, Mr Carlson claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement — along with their Democratic party enablers — were planning to eliminate the police and replace departments with a "woke militia." He then theorised the Democrats would use these militias to secure power across the country.

Later in the segment, Mr Carlson said that the current protests and demand for substantive societal reform are not about "black lives" and that the left would "come for you" rather than use power to fix society.

"This may be a lot of things, this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about Black lives. And remember that when they come for you — and at this rate, they will," Mr Carlson said.

If Mr Carlson's frightening descriptions of an ideologically homogeneous force of armed individuals stalking around cities enforcing their will on the public sounds familiar, it's because what he described is essentially the modern police. In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police — the nation's largest police union — endorsed President Donald Trump, and also in 2016, trade publication Police Magazine conducted an informal poll of nearly 60,000 readers, and found that 84 per cent of the 3,000 respondents planned to vote for Mr Trump that year.

This exercise in projection was all but confirmed by Mr Carlson himself over the course of his segment.

"Democrats hate the police because they don't control the police," he said. "Imagine if the Black Lives Matter rioters had weapons and immunity from prosecution. That's what they're talking about: partisan law enforcement."

Of course, Mr Carlson failed to provide any substantive evidence for his assertions that a coalition of Democrats and the largely decentralised Black Lives Matter movement were working in tandem to establish an intersectional gestapo.

In reality, opinions on police reform amongst non-conservatives range between calls for the total abolition of law enforcement to those who simply think more training and education mixed with expansive background checks is all that's necessary to fix the nation's policing issues.

Between those poles, many activists and a growing number of politicians at all levels of power have rallied behind calls to "defund the police". Supporters of that option want police budgets slashed and the funds redistributed to public services that address the underlying issues that lead to criminal activity, like poverty, housing and educational opportunity.

Rather than calling for the dissolution of the police, defunding the police leaves law enforcement intact, but forces governments to address issues of poverty, mental health and drug use without the catch-all option of arresting and locking people up.

Of course, nuance and good faith discussion are in short supply among Fox News' rogues gallery of pundits and talking heads.

Response to Mr Carlson's fear mongering came swift online, where celebrities, journalists and commentators fired broadsides at the longtime pundit.

The fury of "the mob" has been a recent bugaboo for Mr Carlson on his shows. Earlier on in the protest, Mr Carlson told his viewers that the country's leaders had sided with "agents of chaos" and that the "game was rigged" to prevent Americans from voicing their dissent against the mob — in this instance, people at the George Floyd protests.

In another segment from 3 June, Mr Carlson weaved together a narrative suggesting the media and Democrats were using racial strife to retake power in the country and that the demands of groups like Black Lives Matter will never be satiated.

Since the segment was made, a small but growing call for companies to pull their advertising from Mr Carlson's show has been spreading through social media.