TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Critical race theory is not a new idea, despite what they tell you. In 1964, a third of Senate Democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act, and one of those who did was a man called Robert Byrd.
Byrd was a strident supporter of "equity," or as it was called at the time, Jim Crow. In 1944, at the height of the Second World War, Robert Byrd wrote a letter to Theodore Bilbo, a fellow Democrat who represented Mississippi in the Senate. Byrd was upset that the Roosevelt administration was giving federal jobs to people with the wrong skin color. Robert Byrd was the Tammy Duckworth of his day.
Quote: "I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side," Byrd wrote, amazingly -- "Rather, I should I die a thousand times, and see old glory trampled in the dirt, never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimens from the wilds," end quote.
That's real. Robert Byrd wrote that. At the time he did write it, Byrd was working as a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, which was very much the Yale University of the time, the source of so much poison in our society.