Tucker Carlson slammed Fox News for apologizing and ousting the producer responsible for running a headline that seemingly called President Joe Biden a “wannabe dictator” the day former President Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court.
Shortly after Trump’s first appearance in federal court on Tuesday, Fox News ran an all-caps chyron that read, “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”
On Wednesday, the cable news network issued a statement that said the “chyron was taken down immediately and was addressed.”
“Those words were up for less than 30 seconds, but the effect was immediate,” Carlson said, adding, “inside Fox, the women who run the network panicked.” Carlson noted the producer who put the chyron on the screen, a tenured employee who “was considered one of the most capable people in the building,” resigned less than 24 hours after the controversy.
Carlson then used the remainder of the fourth episode of his Twitter show to compare Biden’s acts to that of a “wannabe dictator.”
“Of course, Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator. Just because he’s trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed, doesn’t mean he has a totalitarian impulse. Come on. That’s absurd,” Carlson joked. “It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title ‘wannabe dictator.’”
Carlson then said wannabe dictators “enrich themselves and their families, their tribe, even as the countries they govern grow steadily poorer and more desperate.”
“They take kickbacks from businesses and from other dictators. They use the official functions of their government to funnel cash to themselves. They don’t bother to hide the fruits of this,” Carlson added. “They live in garish mansions, with big lawns far from the teeming cities, even as their own citizens languish in growing poverty in some cases, literally living in tents on the street.”
“People can’t gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator if they try that they’ll be arrested by his state security services, even years after the fact,” Carlson said before playing a clip of law enforcement arresting Ashli Babbit’s mother while protesting in Washington, DC.
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“And by the way, it’s not just public protests that would be banned in a dictatorship, you wouldn’t be allowed to complain from your own home,” Carlson said. “Unauthorized opinions expressed on the internet would be censored. Go too far, press too deep, tell too much truth, and they’ll just erase your opinions. They have no choice really.”
“Those who support the regime can keep their weapons and use them freely, including on public transportation. That’s a core civil right for them,” Carlson continued. “But for those who dissent from the program, self-defense is an unaffordable privilege. Turn in your guns, Mr. Mrs. peaceful opposition, you’re a danger to society, and we know who you are.”
“Dictators build cults of personality around themselves, and they use those cults to deny the glaringly obvious,” he said.
“If Joe Biden ever developed some profound physical or medical problem that was obvious to everybody. Journalists would say something. This is not North Korea. We don’t have state media here,” Carlson joked. “If Joe Biden was say, incapable of completing a full sentence or mistook his sister for his wife, or suddenly started falling down in public for no reason, the New York Times would report on that and then get to the bottom of what was actually happening.”
Carlson also criticized Biden for claiming “ownership” of American children in a recent video uploaded to Twitter to honor LGBTQ Americans.
“These are our kids. These are our neighbors, not somebody else’s kids. They’re all our kids,” Biden said in the video. “And our children are the kite strings that hold our national ambitions aloft.”
“See, Joe Biden isn’t saying your children belong to him like a dictator would. He says something very different from that. He’s saying America’s children are ‘our children,’ not his alone. Ours,” Carlson said. “You share your children with Joe Biden evenly right down the middle with alternating weekends. You’ve got joint custody with Joe Biden, and you can thank heaven that you do.”
“A nation is like a family. Every family has a head, a father. That’s Joe Biden, our nation’s father, and this, ladies and gentlemen, is now his fatherland. Just don’t call it a dictatorship, or we’ll have to issue a statement disavowing you,” he concluded.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.