Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night lashed out at a guest who corrected his pronunciation of Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-Calif.) name after she was named presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s running mate.
Richard Goodstein, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Hillary Clinton, appeared on Carlson’s show and offered up advice for the Fox News host and his colleagues.
“Her name is pronounced ‘Comma’ — like the punctuation mark — ‘la,’” Goodstein said. “Seriously, I’ve heard every sort of bastardization of that. That’s how it is. ‘Comma-la.’”
“OK,” Carlson said with a knitted brow. “So what?”
“I think out of respect for somebody who’s going to be on the national ticket,” Goldstein responded. “Pronouncing her name right is actually kind of a bare minimum.”
“So I’m disrespecting her by mispronouncing her name unintentionally? So it begins,” Carlson said with a grin before mispronouncing the senator’s first name two more times. “You’re not allowed to criticize ‘Ka-MAL-a’ or ‘KAM-a-la’ or whatever it is—”
“No, no, no. It’s not ‘whatever,’” Goodstein fired back.
“Look, I unintentionally mispronounced her name,” Carlson said, before claiming that Harris is not “immune from criticism.”
“On this show,” he added, “nobody in power is immune from criticism. Our political leaders must be held to account — that’s our job.”
The clip of the exchange went viral on Twitter, garnering more than 1.3 million views, with Carlson’s critics promptly weighing in.
Screenwriter and television producer Warren Leight wrote: “Refusing to pronounce Kamala’s name correctly when you’re a broadcast « journalist » is racist. But we already knew that about Tucker.”
Touré, host of “the “Touré Show” podcast, wrote in a series of tweets that as a professional in broadcasting, Carlson is required to pronounce people’s names correctly.
Charlotte Clymer, a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, noted that Harris’s name has been in the news for several years.
“Tucker Carlson’s brain saw a woman of color and had to make the name difficult. That’s what happened,” she wrote.
Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), a former GOP presidential candidate, wrote that Carlson is “really, really angry” that Harris was selected as the vice presidential pick and “really, really scared to death of her.”
Biden on Tuesday ended months of speculation and announced Harris, one of his former presidential primary opponents, as his vice presidential pick.
Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, would be the first woman and the first person of color to be vice president if Biden is elected.
She is currently the only Black female senator and previously served as attorney general of California.
During her Senate campaign in 2016, Harris released a video of children pronouncing her name correctly.