On Thursday night, Fox host Tucker Carlson raged against President Joe Biden’s newly unveiled infrastructure package, the American Jobs Plan, in a rant which appeared tailored to two very specific audiences: those who deny the scientific and experiential evidence that our planet is dangerously warming, and those who deny the historic and present reality of inequity and racial injustice. 

To help him make the case for the former, Carlson invited climate denier and Fox regular Marc Morano to spew wild claims against the Green New Deal and attacks on climate advocates. And in an appeal to the latter, Carlson mocked Biden’s infrastructure plan as “a mashup of intersectional theory from Wesleyan and some kind of South African-style spoils system.” 

In reality, Biden’s plan calls for modest investment in America’s infrastructure including roads and bridges, but also water infrastructure, broadband, and clean energy, which is intended to create a more equitable and sustainable economy. It is lauded by both labor leaders and economists, who predict it will create 2.3 million jobs by 2024, injecting $5.7 trillion into the economy and raising per capita income by $2,400. And the proposal already has support from the majority of the American people -- but that is not who Carlson appears to be talking to.

Carlson suggests measure to address historic inequities and environmental injustices in Biden’s plan are reparations

Carlson’s monologue on the infrastructure plan, running approximately 15 minutes, cited the climate and equity elements of Biden’s plan to claim that it is not actually about infrastructure at all -- which is core to the right-wing medias’ attack on the plan and an already well-worn narrative on Fox News.

“First and most obviously, is this really about infrastructure -- bridges, roads, airports, things we can actually use -- or is it yet another weird climate scheme-slash-power grab-slash-race-based redistribution plan,” the Fox host asked. “What exactly is this?”

Carlson’s answer excluded any mention of the biggest ticket items in the package -- such as the $621 billion for transportation infrastructure and resilience, including the repair and construction of roads, bridges, investments in public transit and rail service, as well as improvement to ports, waterways, and airports -- and instead focused heavily on elements of the plan intended to redress historic inequities and environmental injustices:

Carlson’s nearly indecipherable, ahistorical rant making light of “a racist highway” belies his reputation as conservative intellectual. Zoning decisions such as highway placement are integrally tied to issues of environmental justice, as the Urban Institute found:

But Carlson wouldn’t need to read a study to understand how systemic racism harms disadvantaged people; he could ask New Orleanians who have lived under the Claiborne Expressway for decades and remember how vibrant their community was before “The Monster” was built. After construction began on the highway in the 1960s, the once-thriving Tremé community, which was one of the centers of Black cultural and commercial life, was divided and destroyed.

Carlson later included a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that somehow the infrastructure plan is part of a larger scheme to enrich Democratic operatives -- who he described as “looting the country” like “their supporters in Minneapolis last summer,” adding a racist attack on Black Lives Matter protesters to his unhinged rant:

Carlson mocks climate science, climate resilience efforts, and the Green New Deal

Carlson pivoted from his rant against racial equity to attacking the Green New Deal and climate change.

First, Carlson played a statement by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who said, “In the United States, transportation is the leading contributor to climate change, contributing to a pattern of extreme weather events which takes a severe toll on our infrastructure. Every dollar we spend rebuilding from a climate-driven disaster is a dollar we could've spent building a more competitive, modern, and resilient transportation system that produces significantly lower emissions.”

Carlson mocked Buttigieg for using the “infrastructure bill to end hurricanes” and suggested that he could not speak on the climate because “not even climate experts understand the climate.” They do.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last year alone, the U.S. experienced 22 extreme weather and climate-related disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each – costing the nation a combined $95 billion in damages. Biden’s plan notes, “In Louisiana, Hurricane Laura caused $19 billion of damage, resulting in broken water systems and a severely damaged electrical grid that impeded a quick recovery.” The plan, as Buttigieg's statement suggests, would invest in making such infrastructure more “resilient in the face of increasingly severe floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other risks.”

Carlson’s segment leading up to his interview with climate denier Marc Morano included jabs at electric vehicles, suggestions that Biden’s motive for investing in clean energy is to grease the palms of his donors, mockery of climate resilience efforts, and a false claim that “none of the spending goes to our oil workers, those put out of business when Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. They can learn to code.” (In fact, the plan includes substantial funding to cap the more than 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the country and create hundreds of thousands of union jobs geared specifically to those in the fossil fuel industry -- as Forbes notes, this program has bipartisan support, and several Republican-led states have already “created programs to cap abandoned wells, putting laid-off oil and gas employees back to work.”)

For good measure, he also mocked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), one of the sponsors of the Green New Deal, before finally turning to his guest. Carlson opened the interview by asking Morano, “How much of this bill is geared not toward cleaning up the environment, which we could badly use, but toward this global warming theory that they have. How much of it is climate-based?

Interestingly, Morano pretty accurately characterized the plan and the Biden administration’s strategy on climate, with some notable exceptions:

Green New Deal architects and champions have called Biden’s plan the “closest we’ve come to a realization of the Green New Deal,” in spite of the plan's only modest path toward carbon reduction, because it integrates issues of equity and climate with infrastructure spending. But climate policy didn’t fail in 2009 because the American people didn’t want climate action, it failed because the fossil fuel industry helped write the bill’s “cap and trade” provisions and then voraciously opposed it -- and it was further hobbled by “conservative groups that portrayed it as an economy-killing tax and lawmakers terrified that it would become a bonanza for Wall Street traders and Enron-style manipulators.”

The Biden administration’s infrastructure plan is  extremely  popular with the American public. A Data for Progress poll found that 69% of voters support the overall plan, while specific provisions of the plan, such as repairing drinking water systems (85%), creating energy sector jobs (79%), and modernizing the electric grid (72%), enjoy overwhelming support. But Carlson’s segment was not aimed at the broad swath of Americans who support the plan's climate and environmental goals.

As the rest of the segment and Carlson’s hysterical interview with Morano demonstrated, the toxic mix of weak, straw-man arguments, conspiracy theories, and fearmongering about how the climate crisis is a manufactured scheme to transfer power and wealth to liberal elites was aimed at an increasingly small sliver of people who deny the science of climate change, the consequences of continued inaction, and the benefits of climate solutions -- with a heavy splash of Carlson’s trademark white nationalism thrown in for his right-wing extremist fans.