Tucker Carlson on Tuesday groaned about “what’s happened” in South Africa over the last 29 years—an apparent reference to the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela to the country’s presidency in 1994.
Carlson began his show Tuesday by criticizing recent U.S. legislation introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) designed to counter “white supremacy”—by having certain types of hate speech be subject to criminal charges. Carlson cited the fact that the bill addresses only hate speech targeting non-whites to make the claim that it is a “direct attack on the Bill of Rights.”
“We shouldn’t be surprised by this, however, because it’s consistent with what [President] Biden has promised…since the day he got into office,” the Fox host griped, before turning his eye to how this law would erode the rule of law across Western nations.
“And the promise was that race-blind justice, which is the entire foundation of the rule of law in the West—has been for centuries—is done,” Carlson said. The “new model,” he claimed, is South Africa—“a country we never talk about because no one wants to admit what’s happened there over the past 29 years.”
The time period Carlson cites matches up exactly with the official end of the South Africa’s program of racial segregation, called apartheid, which came in 1994 after years of negotiations.
Despite his claim that mainstream commentators have ignored the efficacy of South Africa’s post-apartheid system of government, Tuesday wasn’t the first time Carlson has honed in on the African nation on Fox airwaves.
In 2018, he delivered a segment about a proposed land expropriation plan, saying it amounted to the government stealing from white farmers “because they are the wrong skin color.”
But experts told The Daily Beast afterwards that Carlson’s depiction of the proposal, which drew the attention of then-President Donald Trump, was not in line with reality.