Fox News' Tucker Carlson Calls Corey Booker One of 'Whitest' Candidates on Debate Stage, Mocks Spanish Speaking

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has directed his ire at Democratic 2020 candidates who spoke Spanish during Wednesday night's first debate and called Senator Corey Booker, who is black, one of the "whitest" candidates.

Appearing in a county where more than half of the population speaks Spanish, several candidates on the debate stage Wednesday chose to occasionally switch between English and Spanish, including former Congressman Beto O'Rourke and Booker as well as Hispanic candidate Julián Castro.

But deviating from English was not to Carlson's liking.

Claiming that Democrats wanted to take Americans' guns and then their "stuff," Carson said that "the two whitest candidates on stage decided to repeat the point in stilted Spanish."

After airing a clip of O'Rourke and Booker speaking Spanish, Carlson could barely contain his laughter before adding: "Got that gringo? You can add the English language to the long and growing list of things the Democratic Party considers racist. How long before you're banned from speaking it. Think we're joking? Right. Better to learn Espanol if you want to talk to your grandkids. It's a brand new world."

There have never been any major calls for the speaking of English to be criminalized in the United States. It is not a new issue for Carlson, who has often railed against immigration, however.

Speaking on his highly rated nightly Fox News show last year, Carlson called the fact that English is not the official language in the United States "one of our core weaknesses."

"Is there a single country in the world you know of, that's bilingual or multilingual, that's not at war with itself?" Carlson went on. "There is no country that I'm aware of, on Earth, where you don't have an overwhelming majority of people united in a language, except those countries like Belgium, like Canada, that are driven by these cultural and linguistic differences.

"Why wouldn't you want your whole country to speak one language? Why is that bad? Isn't that the goal?" he concluded.

O'Rourke began the Spanish speaking on Wednesday night, prompting a look from Booker that subsequently went viral. Booker explained his reaction on CNN Thursday.

"I just knew he had laid a gauntlet down," Booker told CNN's Anderson Cooper while laughing. "And I was talking a little bit with [Julián] Castro. Both he and I knew, as people who can speak Spanish, that now we were gonna bring it as well."