After weeks of grueling, emotional testimony, a jury on Tuesday found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all three charges in the murder of George Floyd, an all-too-rare showing of accountability to which the nation reacted with palpable, if fleeting, relief. The case against Chauvin was particularly damning given the killing was captured in broad daylight on a 17-year-old bystander’s cell phone, without which the former officer may have gotten off. Yet despite the indisputable evidence, as well as testimony from fellow police officers who decried Chauvin’s use of force, Fox News host Tucker Carlson had a different message for viewers, as he argued Tuesday’s conviction “was never in doubt” following “nearly a year of burning and looting and murder by BLM” to achieve the guilty verdict. “Everyone understood perfectly well the consequences of an acquittal in this case,” Carlson said, arguing the jurors “spoke for many in this country” by coming to the decision “please don’t hurt us.”
After questioning whether Chauvin received “a fair punishment” or is “guilty of the specific crimes for which he was just convicted,” Carlson proceeded to undermine the entire justice system—one that has long excused cops for violence against Black people—telling viewers to ask: “Can we trust the way this decision was made?”The comments came the same day a GOP-led resolution to censure Rep. Maxine Waters was tabled in the House, an effort spearheaded by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy following comments Waters made about the forthcoming verdict at a rally in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota over the weekend. Republicans who excused former President Donald Trump’s role in the deadly Capitol attack distorted Waters’ call for activists to “get more confrontational” in the case of an acquittal, claiming the California Democrat was inciting violence and threatening the jury. “After Maxine Waters threats could there have been any other verdict?” Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted on Tuesday, as she claimed “BLM has now proven itself to be the most powerful domestic terrorists organization in our country.”
Greene also said Tuesday that Washington D.C. was “completely dead tonight” because people were “scared to go out because of fear of riots,” a claim numerous journalists shot down. “Given that this statement has no connection to reality of DC tonight, this is a member of Congress who was either a) lying about what was going on or b) hallucinating to see things that weren’t there,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere.
Carlson, meanwhile, declared in Tuesday night’s segment that “no mob has the right to destroy our cities” and “no politician or media figure has the right to intimidate a jury.”
Other corners of Fox News also made headlines with reactions to Tuesday’s decision, including Jeanine Pirro’s somewhat surprising embrace of it. “Clearly the verdict is supported by the facts” and “will be upheld on appeal,” the Fox News host, a former judge, said on The Five, deeming the moment a sign that “the American justice system works.” But rather than a sign of progress, Slate’s Christina Cauterucci notes Pirro celebrating the outcome speaks more broadly to the way “conservatives are already spinning Chauvin’s victory for their own ideology,” seizing on the rare moment of accountability as “proof that the system as it exists is not broken at all, that those advocating for systemic change are ginning up support for a radical agenda by manufacturing outrage over nothing.”
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