Stephen A. Smith Goes After Tucker Carlson Over Derek Chauvin Response

On ESPN, Smith prefaced his comments with some context, noting he has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, knows “the Mark Levins and Sean Hannitys of the world,” and is a fan of Fox News show The Five and host Neil Cavuto.

“Tucker Carlson is an entirely different matter altogether,” Smith said. “I’m not going to engage in name-calling or anything like that, that would be inappropriate and unnecessary and unfair to him. But what I will say, when you literally intimate that the jury found Derek Chauvin guilty because they were afraid essentially of riots taking place and things of that nature, you just wonder sometimes if this is the kind of thing that leads to the divisiveness that we’re talking about.”

“The video is there, for all of us to see,” Smith said, noting the bipartisan outrage that met the graphic footage of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck until he stopped breathing.

Smith dismissed Carlson’s comments as flying in the face of that video evidence.

“These are the kind of things that make people shake,” Smith said. “Because you realize that in the face of such obvious, flagrant evidence, conspicuous evidence, there’s still going to be somebody that opens the subject to debate, when there are certain things that are simply not debatable. We saw what Derek Chauvin did! Saw it! The world saw it!”

“And yet he goes on national television last night and says that,” he said. “That’s a problem. I’m not going to disrespect him, I’m just saying that’s a damn problem.”