This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host denounced as a white supremacist sympathiser by prominent liberals, is facing the ire of a new set of detractors: water conservationists.

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Potomac Conservancy, the leading clean water advocacy group in its region, has issued a blistering denunciation of remarks in which Carlson blamed immigrants for littering the Potomac River.

The group said the comment was not just factually incorrect, “it’s racist plain and simple”.

Carlson, who used to cut the figure of a thinking person’s conservative, replete with bow tie, has taken a dive into murkier swamps since the election of Donald Trump. He has used the squawk box of his wildly popular Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, to espouse increasingly ugly views, frequently about immigrants.

In 2018 he caused advertisers to flee when he said immigrants had made America “poorer and dirtier”. He has also been exposed for making virulently sexist and racist comments in his earlier radio career.

His baiting of the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar led her to dub him a “racist fool”.

The diatribe that got him in hot water with the water conservationists came in an interview with the Atlantic magazine that set out to understand how this once respected conservative intellectual could have ended up dwelling in the rhetorical mud.

When interviewer Elaina Plott asked him about last year’s contribution that immigrants were making America dirtier, he replied: “I hate litter.”

He said he had observed over 35 years fishing in the Potomac River that it had grown “dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants, who I’m sure are good people, but nobody in our country.”

Asked how he knew that, Carlson said: “Because I’m there. I watch it.”

Potomac Conservancy was left dumbfounded. In a long statement it pointed out Carlson’s many factual errors. The river has in reality became markedly cleaner in water quality in the past 10 years, improving from a dirty D to a decent B ranking.

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The cause of the river’s sorry history of dirty water – in Lyndon Johnson’s day it was so toxic parents kept their children away from it – was primarily agricultural and industrial pollution, not litter.

Though litter is a problem, with more than 20,000lb of it collected by the conservancy’s volunteers every year, its origins cannot be ethnically defined.

“In the last 15 years of hosting shoreline cleanups, we can say with confidence: litter comes in all forms from all communities and neighbourhoods in our region,” the group said, setting its words in bold for added emphasis.

It seems unlikely Carlson will listen to a humble bunch of clean water advocates. But their message to him could not be more direct: “These thinly veiled racist beliefs have no place in any serious public discourse.”