It was prime time on Thursday night when Tucker Carlson told his Fox News audience that an “endless chain of migrant caravans” is making America “dirtier.”
This was not Carlson’s first effort at spewing xenophobic vitriol out of the television screen. Just last week, he was whining incoherently about how Americans “can’t afford to have children, but rather than fix their problems or even think about them, we’re all like, ‘We’ll just import new children’.”
So it’s hard to say if there was anything all that special about his latest Tucker Carlson Tonight tirade, which went like this:
“We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.
Immigration is a form of atonement. Previous leaders of our country committed sins ― we must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans. That’s the argument they make.”
But it unsettled the people at Pacific Life, an insurance company that’s been advertising on Tucker Carlson Tonight for a little over a year. An ad for Pacific Life ran just after Carlson’s segment about immigration, and now Pacific Life has announced it will be pulling its ads from Carlson’s show for a few weeks while it “reevaluates” its “relationship with his program.”
“As a company, we strongly disagree with Mr. Carlson’s statements,” Pacific Life’s statement reads. “Our customer base and our workforce reflect the diversity of our great nation, something we take great pride in.”
A message from Pacific Life: pic.twitter.com/bDq9hzia53
— Pacific Life (@pacificlife) December 14, 2018
Fox issued a statement in response to Pacific Life’s decision to yank its ads from Carlson’s show:
It is a shame that left-wing advocacy groups, under the guise of being supposed ‘media watchdogs,’ weaponize social media against companies in an effort to stifle free speech. We continue to stand by and work with our advertisers through these unfortunate and unnecessary distractions.
Carlson’s Fox colleague Laura Ingraham recently faced advertising boycotts of her own. Her corporate sponsors were not thrilled when she referred to migrant detention centers for children who’d been forcibly separated from their parents at the border as “essentially summer camps.” And after she trashed survivors of the Parkland shooting — highlights included accusing David Hogg of using “Stalinist” tactics to advocate for gun control reform — over a dozen advertisers split from her show.