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W. Kamau Bell to Fox News' Tucker Carlson: 'I Can Imagine How You Feel Right Now'

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W. Kamau Bell speaks to a crowd of counterprotesters in Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park on Aug. 27, 2017, after far-right supporters were chased out of the park by masked anti-fascist demonstrators. (Bert Johnson/KQED)

Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house was vandalized this week and antifa protesters chanted outside his home in Washington, D.C.

Media figures rushed to condemn the Wednesday night act. And Carlson also got “sympathy” from an unlikely figure: W. Kamau Bell. The Bay Area comedian tweeted to Carlson, “I can imagine how you feel right now.”

The show of sympathy was barbed. Bell, a CNN host and Bay Area comedian, said he received threats after Carlson aired a segment about him last year. The comedian said that after the segment ran, he also had to “take major steps to protect [his] family.”

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Last year, the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” segment showed a clip of Bell  speaking at a No Hate in the Bay rally in Berkeley on Aug. 27, 2017. On Fox’s YouTube channel, the segment is titled “Kamau Bell supports antifa, therefore peddles hate.”

“You remember the event, it’s the one where mobs in black masks attacked people they thought might have voted for Donald Trump,” the conservative talk-show host said in the segment, which ran in late August 2017. He added that Bell offered his encouragement.

In a series of tweets Thursday, Bell brought up the Tucker Carlson segment in which he was featured.

“I’m not in Antifa,” Bell tweeted to Carlson. “No reasonable person thinks I peddle hate. But you told your audience those things.”

In the Fox News segment that aired, Bell tells the crowd, “Bye Nazis, bye.”

Bell spoke at a counterprotest to last year’s “No to Marxism in America” rally. It was expected to attract white supremacist and nationalist groups. In the end, only a few far-right supporters showed up.

Reporter Bert Johnson shot the video of Bell while on assignment for KQED. Fox asked to use his video via Twitter and Johnson said no. But Fox used it anyway.

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