Tucker Carlson is no fan of President Joe Biden, but on Monday’s episode of his Fox News show, he was especially cross with the 46th president, falsely accusing Biden’s administration of purposefully allowing opioid addicts to die in order to benefit his electoral hopes.
“Now, Joe Biden is giving out free crack pipes to Black people,” Carlson began, misconstruing articles by several right-wing publications over the weekend that blatantly misrepresented a Biden administration to mitigate the drug epidemic nationwide.
After noting that more than 100,000 Americans died of opioid addiction last year, Carlson went on to suggest that Biden actually welcomed those deaths since many opioid addicts are white.
“Those 100,000 Americans weren’t from officially marginalized groups, their deaths had nothing to do with the equity agenda,” he said. “In fact, their deaths may have helped the equity agenda by changing the demographics of the country in a way that benefits the Democratic Party. So as far as the Biden administration is concerned, it’s not a bad trend. Sure, a lot of people died from opioids in Joe Biden’s first year. In fact, the total body count was the equivalent of significant American cities, the entire population, every man, woman, and child in say, South Bend or Roanoke, Virginia. On the other hand, these are exactly the kind of people the administration hates anyway. So with equity in mind, the White House plans to continue allowing as much fentanyl as possible to come into this country through Mexico.”
Suffice to say, FactCheck.org and other groups have debunked claims that the Biden administrations is “allowing as much fentanyl as possible to come into this country.”
And independent researchers have also debunked reports by right-wing outlets that the Biden administration plans to spend $30 million on crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia in order to, as the Free Beacon claimed, “advance racial equality.”
What is true is that the Biden administration’s Health and Human Services department is looking into grants to fund harm reduction programs intended to reduce the death rates suffered by drug addicts. This includes things like safe injection sites, needle exchanges, making overdose medication and testing kits for fentanyl available, and methods of sanitary ingestion. It also includes recovery and treatment options, medical care for wounds, and other necessities.
In other words, things that would reduce the spread of disease and also help prevent deaths. Read more about it here.
The program also seeks to help “underserved” communities hit particularly hard by the problem of addiction, which includes racial minorities. But it would also help out regions plagued by addiction that are majority white. And the point here is to reduce the rate of deaths by addicts, something that imprisoning them or letting them die has absolutely not solved. And again, the whole thing implying that Biden wants to distribute crack pipes for “racial equality” is simply made up and untrue.
But for whatever reason, Carlson didn’t acknowledge that. Instead he riffed off the blatantly incorrect reporting by right wing outlets to accuse Biden of criminal intent.
Watch the clip below: