On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson welcomed back someone he’s had on the show before — Florida right wing political operative Jamie Michell, founder of “Gays Against Groomers.”
During her appearance, Michell blamed the victims of the Colorado Springs massacre for their murders and all but incited further violence against trans people and their supporters.
Since Monday, Carlson has has used his Fox News platform to talk about Saturday’s mass shooting at the LGBTQ venue Club Q in Colorado Springs, in which a gunman killed five people and wounded at least 25 more before being subdued by club-goers. Police have not yet publicly identified the suspect, a highly unusual move, but public documents show he will likely be charged with hate crimes.
This shooting comes after years of right-wing activists normalizing anti-trans and anti-gay bigotry to an alarming degree, which has paved the way for hateful laws being passed in Texas and Florida, just for two recent examples. And experts say a spike in such rhetoric preceded the shootings this weekend; Sunday also happened to be the annual Trans Day of Remembrance.
Michell is just one of the dozens of such people promoting that rhetoric, and her specific niche is that she says she is herself gay, hence the name of her group. So she was on Carlson’s show to talk about the Colorado Springs shooting – but really, she used her time to complain about trans teenagers receiving gender-affirming medical care.
During her appearance, she literally laid blame for the massacre in Colorado Springs on the victims.
“It shouldn’t have to be said, but what is anti-LBGTQ that these people need to understand, and what is putting our community in great danger, it, you know, claiming that all of us support this and just associating all of us with this. You know, saying that ‘groomer’ is an anti-LGBTQ slur,” Michell said. “That is doing irreparable damage to us as a whole, and it’s putting a really large target on our backs. And unfortunately, the tragedy that happened in Colorado Springs the other night, you know, it was expected, predictable. We all within Gays Against Groomers saw this coming from a mile away, and sadly I don’t think it’s gonna stop until we end this evil agenda.”
Watch the clip from the interview in the video above.
Gays Against Groomers, it should be noted, has a documented history of targeted harassment campaigns against trans people and trans allies — to the point that in September, Venmo and parent company Paypal banned them for violating rules against “activities that promote hate, violence, or discriminatory intolerance.”
In addition, Michell identifies as Jewish and denies any affiliation with Nazism. But she has a long, documented history of association with white supremacist ideas. She is known to follow several openly white supremacists on Twitter, she has promoted the work of white supremacist Vincent James Foxx and she has openly called for political violence, among other things.
Old accounts owned by Michell on YouTube and Flickr contained explicit Nazi imagery, something Michell blames, variously, either on an ex-boyfriend or on being hacked, though she has never actually identified who her ex was. Read more about all that here.
Whatever her beliefs, Carlson’s show has been documented to be a haven for white supremacist propaganda, to the point that the New York Times has called it “the most racist show in the history of cable news.“