Tucker Carlson found himself in a pretty kettle of fish after he was confronted by a customer at a fly fishing store.
The customer, Dan Bailey, posted a video to Instagram on Friday that showed him confronting the Fox News personality, whom he termed as “the worst human being.”
“You are the worst human being known to man. I want you to know that,” Bailey said to Carlson in the video. “What you have done to this state, to the United States, to everything else in this world. I don’t care that your daughter’s here. What you have done to everybody else in this world….”
“Settle down, son,” Carlson, who was laughing throughout Bailey’s comments, responded.
“‘Son?’ Don’t call me son,” Bailey replied before the end of the video.
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Bailey called Carlson an “a******” in the caption of the video posted to Instagram.
“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,” he wrote, adding the hashtags “#stayoutofmontana” and “#trumplost,” among others.
Fox News called Bailey’s actions “inexcusable.”
“Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable — no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view,” a spokesperson for Fox News wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner.
The fly fishing store, Dan Bailey’s Outdoor Company, said that Bailey “has no affiliation with our business, other than he shares the same name as our founder, who passed away in 1982.”
“To be clear, we treat every customer equally and respectfully,” the store added. “Our staff was professional and cordial to Mr. Carlson, as we are with all of our customers.”
Carlson, who has been at the network since 2009, has attracted praise from the Right and criticism from the Left for many of his recent remarks, particularly those regarding COVID-19. On June 2, the prime-time host made headlines for calling for a criminal investigation into Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attracted controversy for some of his comments about the virus.
“Are Peter Daszak and Tony Fauci under criminal investigation?” Carlson asked in his opening monologue. “We can only hope they are. They certainly deserve it. At this point, we can’t say for sure. We do know that Fauci hasn’t simply lied about the origins of COVID, pretending to know things he could not know. He has also lied about vaccines in key ways.”
After unearthed emails from Fauci (some of them between him and Peter Daszak, a key member of the World Health Organization-China joint study team) revealed the top U.S. public health experts were working behind the scenes to downplay the possibility that the coronavirus was developed in a lab, many Republicans made similar calls for an investigation. This culminated with Sen. Rand Paul sending a criminal referral to the Department of Justice on Wednesday that said Fauci lied about gain-of-function research funding.
Many Democrats have continued to stand by Fauci, with President Joe Biden insisting that he remained “very confident” in his chief medical adviser amid the fallout in early June.
Carlson has also made headlines since his June 28 claim that the National Security Agency was “spying” on him, leaking his team’s communications in an effort to take his show off the air.
The NSA released a rare public statement on June 29 saying Carlson was “never” a target of the agency and denied a plot to get Carlson’s show taken off the air, but the agency did not preclude the possibility that any communications were incidentally collected or Carlson’s name was being unmasked by some official within the Biden administration.
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On Friday, it was reported that Carlson’s name was “unmasked,” which is when the names of U.S. citizens that are mentioned but covered up in final intelligence reports about the surveillance of foreigners are revealed upon the request of authorized officials. Carlson’s communications, which were said to be about scheduling an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, were not a target of the NSA, which the agency has already stated, and they were not incidentally collected through the process of spying on a foreign target.
“For the NSA to unmask Tucker Carlson or any journalist attempting to secure a newsworthy interview is entirely unacceptable and raises serious questions about their activities as well as their original denial, which was wildly misleading,” a Fox News spokesperson told the Record.
