A left-wing organization with a history of violent threats gathered outside Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson’s home Wednesday night, with a self-admitted mission of instilling “fear” in his family.
Smash Racism DC, an Antifa-affiliate group that previously confronted Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife in a restaurant and threatened that Republicans “are not safe,” posted videos on social media of their gathering outside the conservative commentator’s Washington, D.C. home, Fox reports.
“Each night you remind us that we are not safe. Tonight, we remind you that you are not safe either,” the group claimed in the since-deleted posts. It also posted his home address as well as the addresses of his brother and Neil Patel, with whom Carlson co-founded the Daily Caller.
BREAKING:
A mob has gathered outside Tucker Carlson’s home demanding his family leave DC because he is a “racist scumbag.”
“Every night you spread fear into homes — we remind you that you are not safe either”
Tucker has 4 children.
The Left is sick.https://t.co/rXs8pUmhxu pic.twitter.com/1R9O9UcTYM
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 8, 2018
“Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night,” the mob chanted. “Racist scumbag, leave town.”
The group also chanted, “No borders! No walls! No USA at all!” and tweeted that Carlson “cannot hide from the people you hurt with your rhetoric, your lies, and your hate,” the Daily Caller adds.
Carlson was at his Fox office at the time, but his wife Susie was home.
“She had been in the kitchen alone getting ready to go to dinner and she heard pounding on the front door and screaming,” Carlson explained to the Washington Post. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door.” Assuming the attack to be a home invasion, she locked herself in a pantry and called the police, who arrived minutes later.
“It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat,” he continued. “They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation…They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.”
“Here’s the problem, I have four children,” the host told Fox, explaining that confronting him is nothing new but targeting his family crosses a line. “I never thought twice about leaving them home alone, but this is the reaction because this group doesn’t like my TV show.”
The mob “eventually scattered,” Fox reports, and it’s unknown if any arrests were made. Carlson says he intends to find out exactly who was responsible for the event, and to “fight back.”
Twitter subsequently suspended Smash Racism DC’s Twitter account, presumably for violating the platform’s “abusive behavior” policy. The group’s most recent Facebook post, dated November 3, vows that “soon the ruling class will wish for the days when we merely ruined their dinners.”
The incident is the latest in an increasingly-frequent series of violent words and actions by left-wing figures and groups.
The protests against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh saw irate screaming, near-constant attempts to shout down committee hearings, and even attempts to break into the Supreme Court building while the new Justice took his oath of office. Protesters also chased down multiple GOP lawmakers passing through Reagan National Airport, and harassed and assaulted Republicans in the halls of Senate office buildings.
Several prominent Democrats, including former Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Maxine Waters, and Sen. Cory Booker have also encouraged their followers to personally confront Republicans. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declared Democrats shouldn’t be “civil” with the GOP until retaking Congress, and Sen. Mazie Hirono refused to say protesters shouldn’t follow Republicans to their homes or restaurants.
While media figures on both sides have expressed sympathy for Carlson’s family, Voxco-founder Matthew Yglesias defended the harassers’ rationale, if not their strategic wisdom.
I agree that this is probably not tactically sound but if your instinct is to empathize with the fear of the Carlson family rather than with the fear of his victims then you should take a moment to reflect on why that is.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 8, 2018
I met a woman who didn’t leave the house for months because she was afraid of being picked up by ICE and never seeing her US citizen kids and husband again.
What sense was there in terrorizing her family?
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 8, 2018
I honestly cannot empathize with Tucker Carlson’s wife at all — I agree that protesting at her house was tactically unwise and shouldn’t be done — but I am utterly unable to identify with her plight on any level. https://t.co/1YRAY8DuWC
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 8, 2018
Amid widespread condemnation of his remarks, Yglesias concluded by agreeing it was “good advice” to not “publicly speak when you’re upset,” and he was “gonna try to take it and stop tweeting for a bit.”
