In April, Tucker Carlson urged his viewers to harass the parents of kids wearing masks in public. “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately,” he told his viewers, before also instructing them to repeatedly call Child Protective Services. “What you’re looking at is…child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”
But when Carlson was recently confronted at a sporting goods store, the Fox News host didn’t appear to appreciate a random person projecting their COVID-19 opinions onto him. An Instagram user named Dan Bailey shared a video Friday in which he can be seen approaching Carlson at a store in Montana to tell him, “You are the worst human being known to mankind. I want you to know that.” (Bailey, in the caption on Instagram, accused Carlson of causing COVID-19 deaths by spreading misinformation about vaccines.) In a passive-aggressive retort, Carlson told Bailey to “Settle down, son,” before walking away.
Throughout the government’s mass vaccination drive, Carlson has falsely suggested that the vaccine is ineffective and may even be causing the deaths of thousands of Americans. “It’s not [every day] you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it!” Bailey wrote in his caption. “This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation, he has supported extreme racism, he is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American.”
Fox News condemned the incident over the weekend. “Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement. “No public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.” Such opposition to ambushing is striking not only with respect to Carlson’s April comments, but also given that Bill O’Reilly, who previously had Carlson’s 8 p.m. time slot, dispatched producers like now host Jesse Watters to target critics and film them in public places, including a journalist who was on vacation.
Meanwhile, Meghan McCain, The View’s go-to conservative, wildly compared Bailey’s confrontation to the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball practice. “We’re living in a time when people like Steve Scalise are being shot and wounded to the point that you don’t know if he’s literally going to survive, and now he has to walk with a cane because there are people that just aren’t in control of themselves and aren’t in control of their mental health and they want to take out their aggression on public figures,” McCain said on Monday. “It is incredibly dangerous.”
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