Virginia state Del. Tara Durant is an anti-abortion Republican whose political rise can be attributed in large part to a 2020 incident in which she claimed to have been “assaulted” by Black Lives Matter protesters. The claim made the Tucker Carlson white supremacy power hour, since this was back before Fox News cut ties with Carlson, and Durant thus became another martyr of conservatism, a hero who saw a Black People and lived—barely—to tell the tale and subsequently get elected to the House of Delegates.
Long story short, HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery was able to get hold of Durant’s original call to 911 from the night of the “assault,” and it looks like both Durant and Tucker were lying through their teeth about the whole affair. And the lies matter: Durant’s now running for the state Senate in a race that will likely determine whether Republicans gain control of the Legislature and implement a rigid new abortion ban in the state.
In her claim-to-fame story promoted nationwide by Carlson, Durant claimed that in June 2020, an “angry mob” of Black Lives Matter protesters surrounded her car, “assaulting” her and her 12-year-old daughter. But when she called 911,Durant said dispatchers refused to intervene—because the protesters had a permit to be there. As you can imagine, Tucker was in love with this story: A brave white woman narrowly escaped after being confronted by out-of-control rioters and the police refused to help, thus proving the government to be in league with the rioters. The implication throughout was that it is clearly time for patriotic Americans to buy guns and start shooting people, since the government refuses to shoot people themselves.
But the actual 911 call—which Carlson got access to and played only parts of during his promotion of the story—doesn’t back up Durant’s own story, and other witnesses tell a completely different version. What actually happened, according to a witness interviewed by Bendery, is that Durant came across a city-permitted, police-attended demonstration by Black Lives Matter protesters that briefly shut down a single intersection. Angered or confused by somebody else’s civil rights demonstration temporarily interfering with her planned driving route, Durant began inching her car forward in an attempt to push through the demonstrators. This led to demonstrators intentionally placing their bodies in front of her car in order to stop her and keep any pedestrians from getting hurt.
At about that point, a 13-year-old bystander thought it would be a fine time to attempt a cops-and-robbers style slide across the hood of Durant’s blocked car. He didn’t make it across, got yelled at by protesters, and was removed. Then protesters then moved aside to allow the panicking Durant to drive through.
What both Durant and Carlson omitted when Carlson played the 911 call Durant made from her car during all of this, is that Durant was only “surrounded” by protesters because she attempted to force her car through the crowd, and that during the 911 call she told the dispatcher that she “absolutely” was prepared to run demonstrators over with her car, requiring the dispatcher to talk her out of contemplated acts of vehicular manslaughter.
Oh, and the cherry on top of this racist sundae: Durant falsely charged a local civil rights activist in the assault, only to have the case tossed when the activist proved she wasn’t even at that protest.
Rather than a valiant fight through a rioting crowd that inspired Durant to pursue a new career in politics, it looks like the actual sequence of events was that a white Virginia woman found her car blocked by a city-sanctioned temporary protest, attempted to drive through it anyway because her drivin’ rights were more important than somebody else’s peaceful civil rights demonstration, made an absolute damn scene, told a dispatcher she was going to solve things by murdering people, and capped it all off by identifying the wrong Black perpetrators because We Can All Guess Why.
And it is very curious that Tucker Carlson and his producers somehow got exclusive access to the 911 tape, only to edit out Durant’s threat to run over demonstrators before airing it on Fox News. Go. Figure.
Bendery’s full story is even weirder than that, so go there for the full gory details. But it certainly looks like Virginia state Senate candidate Tara Durant based her entire entry into politics on an accusation that she was “assaulted” by Black protesters when, if anything, it appears that she was the one threatening violence and it was the protesters who successfully deescalated the situation.
Again: Go figure.
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