We’ll keep
this relatively brief, but Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is a political
commentator, wingnut influencer, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaccine promoter,
Media Matters 2022 Misinformer of the Year award winner, (sometimes)
Trump sycophant (and key advisor), firm fan of Alex Jones, propagandist and at least
arguably a fascist and white nationalist, famous from his (until recently) Fox News primetime show Tucker Carlson
Tonight. He is also the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller. His rise to wingnut prominence is
detailed here. He’s currently ditched by Fox, but we doubt
he’ll go away completely. Our description of him should also be read in light
of the possibility that his whole persona is merely an act.
Like many
contemporary wingnuts, Carlson used to be at least somewhat oriented toward
libertarianism, before moving into conspiracy theories, paranoia and martyr
complexes, the Decline of America, authoritarianism and faux anti-elitism (elites being everyone he
disagrees with, who then, by virtue of disagreeing with him, are united in aconspiracy – Carlson himself has by 2022 anet wealth of an estimated $420 million and his family is deeply politically connected – he’s a “millionaire funded bybillionaires”).
His target elite is of course the other elites.
Since facts tend to be stacked against him, Carlson is a supporter of
political violence to get things the way he wants them to be, and he has been
an outspoken supporter of the January 6 2021 riot.
It is
always worth remembering that Fox News, in 2020, defended itself in a
defamation lawsuit by arguing that Carlson cannot be trusted to provide
accurate information on his show, and that the court actually judged,
accordingly, that Carlson is not a credible source of news and is not “stating actual facts” on his show.
Misogyny
and homoerotic anti-gay nonsense
A firm
defender of G.O.D. gender roles, Carlson considers the idea of a
woman paying for meals “disgusting” and is very upset by the fact that women are allowed to serve in the military. His views on women and gender
roles, in his own words, are summarized here. He is also a consistent defender of Warren Jeffs.
His view of
men and masculinity is juicier, however. In general, Carlson defends the type
of macho ideal beloved by people like Putin, Orbán and Andrew Tate, and his style of macho idolizing
often turns weird, as expressed e.g. in the trailer for his … documentary?
… The End of Men, the premise of which was “the total collapse of
testosterone levels in American men”. The trailer became known as one of
the most strikingly homoerotic features on the internet, with hunky shirtless men
wrestling and doing ‘manly’ things, as well as for Carlson’s laughably idiotic ‘treatment’ suggestion for the (unproven) ‘problem’
of low testosterone, namely red light therapy: apparently the means to become a
High-Testosterone Manly-Man is “testicle tanning” using light woo (this one is particularly useful on the
connection between homoerotic woo and the fascist currents in Carlson’s
rightwing circles).
No fan of explicitly
gay people, Carlson’s has for instance expressed his dislike of California’s pro-LGBT
curriculum: “It’s all part of an effort to force kids to approve of
homosexuality.” He is also firmly opposed to gun safety, seatbelt laws and the “inelegant”
and “creepy” metric system.
Carlson
on race
Carlson has,
for a while, been one of the most significant promoters of white nationalist
rhetoric. Much of it is familiar stuff, such as claiming that California is becoming a third
world country because of Latin American
migrants or that Ilhan Omar is “living proof that the way we
practice immigration has become dangerous to this country”, but Carlson has
also promoted “The Great Replacement” theory (indeed, he has explicitly denied promoting it, explicitly promoted it by name, and then claimed that he has never heard of it while simultaneously accusing “the
left” of pushing it – all depending on what’s convenient at the moment). He
has for instance repeatedly claimed that Mexico has interfered in American
elections more successfully than Russia by “packing our electorate”; indeed, the Democratic party is in general “trying to replace the current
electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World”. “If
you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who
live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” said Carlson.
Meanwhile,
he has described white supremacy as a hoax and “a
conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power”.
Foreign
policy
Carlson is,
as mentioned, a huge fan of Putin, and he consistently defended Russia’s military actions at least
throughout early 2022 (“Why wouldn’t we be on Russia’s side?”) – but
also after: Even after February 2022, Carlson has been opposed to any sort of
assistance to Ukraine, and he has regurgitated Kremlin propaganda on numerous occasions and whined
that pundits and politicians who were demanding strong action against Russia
are “pathetic” “Twitter trolls” spewing “ad hominem”
attacks against Vladimir Putin. He has also concocted and promoted various
conspiracy theories about the war, e.g. that “Ukrainian interests
have pumped millions of lobbying dollars into Washington, D.C.” to “tell
us that Russia is bad” and the ridiculously silly delusion that the US is supporting
bioweapons labs in Ukraine based on rumors propagated without
evidence or any anchoring in reality by infamous Russian propaganda outlets and filtered through Russian bots on Qanon discussion sites. When retired U.S. Army Col.
Douglas MacGregor, a delusional fringe wingnut, falsely said, on Carlson’s
show, that Putin’s government “rests on the foundation of Orthodox
Christianity” and that “we should celebrate that, not try to destroy it,”
Carlson responded: “Maybe that’s one of the reasons we are trying to destroy
it?”
When Putin
declared two regions of Ukraine to be “independent states” and
authorized Russian forces to be deployed to the region as “peacekeepers”,
Carlson rushed to his defense, with an impressive array of whataboutism tactics (“we got a lot of
killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”) and why does Ukraine have “a
God-given right to territorial integrity” when we have “Hondurans
invading Texas”?) and pointing out Putin’s positive character traits: “Has
Putin ever called me a racist? ... Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept
me indoors for two years?” Carlson’s pro-Russia propaganda has been widely broadcast and circulated in Russia.
Carlson’s
bromances are not Putin-exclusive, though, but encompasses Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as well. An advocate for Orbán’s
“STOP Soros” act, Carlson even made a documentary,
Hungary vs. Soros, where he depicted Hungary as a traditional
conservative Christian paradise threatened by, well, George Soros, as well as promoting relatively overt racism. The documentary was widely circulated in Hungary. Carlson has also praised the Chinese government as “virtuous”
for intervening in its citizens’ private lives and placing restrictions on
gaming and celebrity culture and argued that the Biden administration should do
the same because, apparently, freedom – government overreach is
overreach only when Carlson doesn’t get to decide how such overreach is
employed.
By contrast
to the Russian, Hungarian or Chinese governments, Carlson has accused other
countries’ leaderships of authoritarianism; according to Carlson “there’s no
more fearful despot in the world”, one that is more dictatorial, than Canadian
prime minister Justin Trudeau, and in February 2022 he suggested that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “a
dictator who’s friends with everyone in Washington.”
January
6 riots
A vocal
defender of the January 6 riot (he got Ted Cruz to apologize for calling it a “terrorist
attack”), Carlson has repeatedly asserted (falsely) that “there’s no evidence that white
supremacists were responsible for what happened on January 6.”. He has also
promoted (based largely on the ideas of Darren Beattie of Revolver News) the conspiracy theory that the Capitol storming was a “false
flag” FBI operation intended to “suppress political
dissent” and that unindicted co-conspirators in rioters’ indictments were government agents, saying that “FBI operatives were organizing
the attack on the Capitol on January 6, according to government documents”.
In October
2021, many of the conspiracy theories were collected in the three-part overtly
fascist series Patriot Purge,
produced by Carlson and co-written with pizzagate conspiracy theorist Scooter Downey, which for instance suggested that
the January 6 attack was a government false flag operation to implicate the
rightwing. Carlson stated on-air that the government had “launched a new war”
on American citizens and characterized his own series as “rock-solid
factually”. Needless to mention, the claims in the series have no connections to facts, and even rightwing commentators
decried the series as “a collection of incoherent
conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive
imagery, and damning omissions” (though at least Fox itself ultimately bowed, however).
And not
only is Carlson an ardent promoter of stop-the-steal misinformation (he has
actually, in connection with idiot Kari Lake’s election fraud accusations in Arizona, put the stop-the-steal activist
relationship with evidence rather succinctly: the only proof there isn’t
election fraud in Arizona is if the Republican wins), he has also tried to
question the Watergate scandal – how could it be, wondered Carlson, that Nixon won the 1972 election by
the “biggest margin ever” (false, of course) and then “within a year
he was disgraced, and six months later he was gone.” That, thinks Carlson,
is something “no one can still explain even to this day”. Because if he
doesn’t want to grasp basic facts, then no one can grasp them – which,
by the way, is also his go-to strategy when it comes to climate change:
Climate
change denialism
One of
Carlson’s most recognizable features is his trademark uncomprehending
expression when he e.g. fails to understand basic science and, because of his
failure to understand, plumps for the denialist position, as he does e.g. on
global warming. The Carlson incomprehending look is also his main
strategy for undermining the scientific evidence e.g. when confronted with
basic facts – yes, it’s the argument from incredulity on steroids: prideful ignorance,
and it works.
Covid misinformation (but of course)
Usually an
opponent of face masks, which he does not understand, Carlson has claimed that
mask mandates is the equivalent to living in North Korea. The point of the comparison was somewhat unclear, as Carlson was adamant that he
didn’t mind authoritarianism, something he promptly emphasized by suggesting
that parents who have their children
wear face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic were actually committing child
abuse, and urging his viewers to call the police on such parents because parents’ choice
applies only when parents choose what Carlson tells them to choose. Carlson’s
opposition to facemasks is not particularly consistent, however, as it keeps changing depending on what Democrats are
saying about the subject – indeed, Carlson’s judgment of the severity of
Covid-19 has been rather inconsistent, depending mostly on what his allies and enemies, respectively, are saying at any moment.
Carlson has
otherwise promoted a vast array of silly conspiracy theories about COVID,
including variants of the lab leak theory (China has “blood on its hands”)
(yes, it’s still a conspiracy theory, especially in the variants promoted by Carlson) and – of course – accusing Anthony Fauci of contributing to the creation of the virus or, citing e.g. conspiracy
theorist Nicolas Wade’s evidence-free speculations, even
of being “the guy who created Covid”. And he has, of course, touted the
imaginary benefits of the anti-parasite medication ivermectin as a possible COVID-19 treatment;
which it most certainly is not.
Carlson has
frequently invited (and parroted the claims of) Covid-denialists and
conspiracy theorists, including Alex Berenson, onto his show to spout misinformation; Carlson even offered to fund Berenson’s lawsuit against Twitter
after the latter had correctly banned his account for Covid-19 misinformation.
Anti-vaccine
propaganda
Carlson’s
descent into regular promotion of anti-vaccine propaganda started – of course –
with JAQing off about the COVID-19 vaccine, suggesting that “maybe it doesn’t work” and
displaying a total misunderstanding of the public health guidelines
for fully vaccinated people in the process (“If vaccines work, why are
vaccinated people still banned from living normal lives? […] So maybe it
doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that. […] What’s the other
potential explanation? We can’t think of one” – the key phrase being of
course ‘can’t think of one’), as well as cherry picking data, distorting and misrepresenting studies, and demonstrating that he does
not understand the concepts of causality or control groups – yes, Carlson tried to fear-monger using the fact that
some people coincidentally died within a month after receiving the vaccine,
which is of course expected when millions of people get the vaccine, and he did
of course not consider comparing that group to people who weren’t vaccinated. Meanwhile,
businesses requiring people be vaccinated were “medical Jim Crow” and vaccine
mandates in the U.S. Armed Forces are designed to oust “the sincere Christians in the
ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone
else who doesn't love Joe Biden”.
He has also
claimed that the COVID vaccine gave us “the
single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history” (based on
figures dreamt up in various antivaccine blog posts) and compared vaccine requirements to Nazi and
Imperial Japanese Army medical experimentation because he, as already
demonstrated and like antivaxxers in general, doesn’t understand what an
experiment is or what it means to be experimental, which is of course the confusion
that lies at the core of the antivaxx rambling murderlustful wet dream about a Nuremberg
2 (Carlson’s guest about the latter was
the absolutely rabidly insane antivaccine conspiracy theorist
Robert Malone). And to give you the full flavor of Carlson’s
level of dishonesty, you can check out his attacks on CDC Advisory
Committee on Immunization practices here – or his stunningly dishonest reporting about an alleged “revelation” that
Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine phase 3 trials didn’t test its ability to block
transmission: a “cover-up”, according to Carlson. Hopefully we don’t
need to explain to readers here how laughably idiotic that take is. More
recently, he has latched onto the antivaccine “#DiedSuddenly” campaign, which – as antivaxxers have
always done – tries to blame any death or illness experienced by anyone (such
as Damar Hamlin) on zeh vaccine, with no
evidence or plausibility whatosever
And
Carlson’s antivaccine views are not limited to the COVID-19 vaccines, but expands
to vaccines in general; Carlson has for instance promoted the work of anti-vaccine leader
Robert Kennedy, jr., including the latter’s book The
Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and
Public Health (Children's Health Defense).
And yes, he
has, like any good anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, invoked the VAERS database, deliberately misunderstanding how
it works.
There’s a
decent Tucker Carlson resource here.
Diagnosis:
Lots of people think, incredible as that may sound, that he has some good points, and just assume that his claims
about reality actually have anything to do with reality. Some among his
audience also thinks he is pretty smart; and in fact: that may very well be the
case – Carlson is a post-truther and a bullshitter, and he really just doesn’t
care about whether his claims are correct or not as long as they serve the
narrative he wants to tell. But that is on its own enough to make him a loon –
one of the most influential and dangerous not only in the US but in the world
today.
Hat-tip:
rationalwiki
