As TV talking heads go, Tucker Carlson was, even before the Media Matters recordings aired, less a respectable polemicist than an exhausting archetype. His persona has long been the “debate guy.” You know the one: He’s the dude in college who liked to play devil’s advocate by defending unpopular or terrible ideas on the grounds that real philosophical inquiry demands it. But it’s actually a game to be won to him, and he takes obvious pleasure—even pride—in keeping a cool head while watching people with genuine investments get “irrationally” worked up. And he acted the part. Most of Carlson’s signature moves—the blinky open-mouthed listening, his gently patronizing “now hold on,” the chuckles at his guests’ frustration when he interrupts, the borrowed dignity with which he furrows his brows—are gestural shortcuts for reasonableness. And they’re part of a Carlsonian tool set that’s frankly pretty derivative: Carlson yells like a younger Bill O’Reilly and spars like a slower Jon Stewart, all while carefully insisting he’s “not defending” everything from Trump to Christopher Columbus to the Daily Stormer.
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The “debate-guy” persona is a fraud, but Carlson’s strategy of projecting it has mostly worked. At the heart of his success is a strategic refusal to commit to any one identity, even within the same show. He bills himself as the devil’s advocate, the just-for-the-sake-of-argument dude with no real investment in an argument’s outcome. At other times he acts like a moralizing truth teller. These identities should theoretically be at odds. That they aren’t, and that both are in any case obviously fictions, has not seemed to matter to his viewers. How did the guy who called Elena Kagan ugly and child rape a “lifestyle” successfully bill himself a defender of American families? Why has this shabby schtick worked?
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… His modus operandi is to inflame his viewers to howling heights of anger while excoriating sincerity of any kind as “preening” and insisting that nothing he says really matters. “There’s this illusion, and it’s created by the people who live here, that everything is meaningful, everything important,” Carlson told GQ. “It’s not.” This is less a humble admission of irrelevance than a deflection of responsibility, and it’s a strategy he shares with much of the far right, which has spent the past two years insisting that the things the president says and tweets don’t actually matter (except, of course, when they do).
But Carlson does have one unique gift, and it’s the remarkable sleight of hand with which he transitions from a sputtering Daffy to a rascally Bugs without letting his viewers notice the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. His sincerity (like his outrage) is a game, so he whizzes from one affect to another, and the effect is confusing enough that viewers start to see actual hate speech as coextensive with dickish jokes. So what if he says immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier.” So what if he called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” years ago—or alluded two months ago to “some obscure Middle Eastern hellhole our leaders claim we should be policing forever.” ...
Carlson is basically a rich huckster, and America loves few things more than the jolly rule bender who winks while he cheats. This figure is all over the place in American culture, from Frank Abagnale to Saul Goodman to crooked televangelists to, of course, our current president—talking people into bad decisions via confusion and charisma, bombast and speed. The huckster can turn on a dime to be surprising, funny, aggressive, demanding. He’ll tap into wells of fear and fellow feeling, find a way to earn your trust, make you feel he’s on your side, and then the con is on. Now that he’s facing criticism and losing advertisers, Carlson issued a statement: “We will never bow to the leftist mob’s attempts to silence us,” he said, the millionaire posing as an embattled Everyman. Only a practiced grifter could capably reframe his real selfish and grasping message—“my problems are yours”—into a martyr’s “your problems are mine.”
For many media types, the conventional-wisdom read on Carlson has long been that he was once a good reporter, has an interesting mind and a knack for performance, and might not actually believe what he says. The bigotry and fear mongering could just be a spectacle for ratings. After all, this is a guy who, in 2009, urged conservatives to be more careful with facts and suggested that the right-wing media should aspire to the standards of the New York Times. That this has earned him some plausible deniability—causing many to regard him more as a polemical clown whose actual ideology is hard to divine rather than a bona fide white supremacist—is a testament to just how available this grift has historically been to men predisposed to exploit it (Loofbourow 1-3).
What He’s Said
[April 2019] Tucker said Wednesday the Democratic Party’s “love” of abortion is to ensure that “women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers.”
The Fox News host … turned up his rhetoric against abortion-rights supporters as he commented on Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams’ remarks about abortion and women in the workplace.
“This is about business, it’s about making sure that women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers,” … (Dicker 1).
On Jan. 2, [2019] a searing Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News resonated across every corner of the conservative movement.
“The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity,” Carlson told his audience. “Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people.”
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“Our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.”
Carlson, who is in a ratings race with both his Fox colleague Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, argued that many conservatives have scant understanding of the adversity faced by members of the working and lower middle class in America:
“The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy. Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible.”
Carlson pointed specifically to problems faced by rural white America, the crucial base of Republican voters: “Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic.” How, Carlson asked, “did this happen?”
“You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they’re not. They don’t have to be interested. It’s easier to import foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping behind.”
Despite this failing of conservatism, Carlson contended that only the Republican Party can lead the country back to salvation:
“There’s no option at this point. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” (Edsall 1-2).
[ September 2020] Fox News host Tucker Carlson equates climate change to racism saying only liberals believe they exist.
On Friday, while anchoring a segment on the wildfires affecting the West Coast, Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed Democratic politicians for turning the massive devastation into a political opportunity.
“Climate change they said caused these fires, they didn’t explain how exactly that happened… but they just kept saying it,” the host said during Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“At the hands of Democratic politicians climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can’t see it but rest assured it’s everywhere and it’s deadly and like systemic racism, it’s your fault.”
He continued, saying “The American middle class did it. They caused climate change. They ate too many hamburgers. They drove too many SUVs. They had too many children” (Dibia 1).
[October 2021] In a week in which he broadcast nightly from Budapest, the American talk show host Tucker Carlson posed for pictures with and interviewed Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and took a helicopter to inspect a Hungarian border fence designed to keep out migrants.
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For Mr. Carlson, the Hungary trip was an opportunity to put Mr. Orban, whom he admires, on the map for his viewers back home, a conservative audience that may be open to the sort of illiberalism promoted by the Hungarian leader. On Wednesday’s show, Mr. Carlson praised Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”
Mr. Carlson’s Fox News program espouses some hard-right views, especially on immigration, where he and Mr. Orban share common ground. The host has held up Hungary’s hard-line policy on rejecting asylum seekers as a model for an American immigration system that he believes is too lenient and has weakened the power of native-born citizens, an argument that Mr. Carlson’s critics say overlaps with white supremacist ideology (Novak and Grynbaum 1).
[January 2022] The film opens with soaring music, footage of white children laughing and playing, beautiful vistas of classical European architecture. Fifteen seconds in, the music turns dark. We see images of dark-skinned youth, chaos, and blood. Then there’s a foreboding black-and-white shot of a man in profile, hunched at a desk, the curvature of his nose prominent in silhouette.
He’s the one responsible for all of this, the brown assault on white tranquility. Europe, we are told, is this predator’s “main hunting area.”
This is the beginning of Tucker Carlson’s new “documentary” for Fox Nation, the right-wing media giant’s streaming service. It is titled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, and it purports to tell the story of how a plucky little democracy in Central Europe has carved out a conservative model in the face of a relentless assault by the forces of global liberalism personified by George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier.
The story is a lie. Hungary is nominally a democracy but it has made a turn toward authoritarianism in the last decade; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has painted Soros as a scapegoat whose allegedly nefarious influence justifies Orbán’s anti-democratic moves. The documentary amplifies this propaganda, treating the Jewish philanthropist as the spider at the center of a global web of conspiracy.
“It’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson & Fox invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media,” writes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (an anti-hate group). “There’s no excuse for this kind of fearmongering, especially in light of intensifying anti-Semitism.”
Neither anti-immigrant demagoguery nor whitewashing Hungary’s descent into autocracy is new for Carlson. What’s striking about the report — part of a series dubbed “Tucker Carlson Originals” — is how it uses conspiratorial, bigoted ideas previously consigned to the far-right fringe to make the explicit case that the American government should emulate an authoritarian regime.
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“In 2015, Soros got to play a role in transforming the continent of Europe,” Carlson intones. “Soros lobbied European leaders directly to get them to open their borders to impoverished people from around the world, and they did.” He points to “leaked documents” showing a $600,000 investment in pro-refugee public advocacy by an unspecified Soros-backed organization as evidence. (It is evidence — that Soros invests in pro-refugee public advocacy.)
It’s the imagery that gives away the game. Soros, shown repeatedly in stark black-and-white, is painted as that most hoary of villains — the Jewish financier pulling the strings attached to the world’s leaders.
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But one thing we keep learning and re-learning about America is that there is a real constituency for this sort of thing. And that is something worth worrying about (Beauchamp 1-3, 7).
Fox News host Tucker Carlson celebrated the firing of hawkish White House national security advisor John Bolton on his show Tuesday night, having reportedly urged the president to remove him.
Carlson hailed the firing as "great news for America."
"Especially for the large number of young people who would have been killed in pointless wars if Bolton had stayed on the job," he said.
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During his show, Carlson went on to attack the hawkish former adviser, who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush, calling him "a man of the left."
"If you're wondering why so many progressives are mourning Bolton's firing tonight, it's because Bolton himself fundamentally was a man of the left," said Carlson.
"There was not a human problem John Bolton wasn't totally convinced could be solved with the brute force of government. That's an assumption of the left, not the right.
"Don't let the mustache fool you. John Bolton was one of the most progressive people in the Trump administration."
He went on to accuse Bolton of promoting "Obama loyalists" within the National Security Council (Porter 1-2).
In addition to being a critic of GOP hawkishness, [July 2017] Carlson is also an apologist for Donald Trump on the Russia scandal. On Tuesday, before his showdown [interview] with Ralph Peters, he called the furor over Donald Trump Jr.’s willingness to accept anti-Clinton information from the Russian government a “new level of hysteria.” Trump Jr., he insisted, had merely been “gossiping with foreigners.” If that “now qualifies as treason … you ought to think about that before you allow an exchange student to live in your house.”
Carlson’s attempts to dismiss the Trump-Russia scandal aren’t just absurd. (Helping a foreign government subvert an American election isn’t merely “gossiping with foreigners.”) They also undermine his perspective on foreign policy. In his interview with Peters, Carlson said it’s “hard to see why” Putin is “a threat to us.” He told [Max] Boot that “the idea that Russia is in the top five” threats to America “is absurd.”
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When it comes to Russia, America’s overriding interest lies in ensuring that Putin doesn’t threaten our democracy. By comparison, Syria is an afterthought. Carlson’s argument about the need for priorities is important. But his defense of Trump wildly distorts his understanding of what those priorities should be. The number one goal in American foreign policy today should be to deter Russia from attacking America’s next election. …
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Tucker Carlson can be a provocative, necessary voice on foreign policy. Or he can be an apologist for Donald Trump. He can’t be both (Beinart 1-2).
[January 2022] Republicans running in high-profile primary races aren't racing to defend Ukraine against a possible Russian invasion. They're settling on a different line of attack: Blame Biden, not Putin.
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Carlson has had a profound effect on how Republican candidates talk about the Russia-Ukraine issue, according to GOP operatives working on primary races.
GOP offices have been fielding numerous calls from voters echoing arguments they heard on Carlson's 8 p.m. ET show. Carlson has been telling his viewers there is no reason why the U.S. should help Ukraine fight Russia.
Even Democratic offices have been fielding these calls from Carlson's viewers. Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) tweeted that he got "calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we're not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia's 'reasonable' positions."
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Carlson has noticed the changes in how Republicans talk about Russia specifically and foreign intervention in general, but he thinks the party isn't changing fast enough.
"I just want to go on the record and say I could care less if they call me a pawn of Putin," Carlson told Axios. "It's too stupid. I don't speak Russian. I've never been to Russia. I'm not that interested in Russia. All I care about is the fortunes of the United States because I have four children who live here."
"I really hope that Republican primary voters are ruthless about this," Carlson told Axios, and vote out any Republican "who believes Ukraine's borders are more important than our borders" (Swan and Solender 1-3).
Works cited:
Beauchamp, Zack. “Why Tucker Carlson’s Special on Hungary and Soros Matters.” Vox, January 29, 2022. Net. https://www.vox.com/22904444/tucker-carlson-hungary-soros-fox-nation-documentary-special
Beinart, Peter. “Tucker Carlson Is Doing Something Extraordinary.” The Atlantic, July 13, 2017. Net. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/tucker-carlson-is-doing-something-extraordinary/533586/
Dibia, Emeka. “Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Says Only Liberals Believe Climate Change and Systemic Racism Are Real.” Yahoo, September 13, 2020. Net. https://www.yahoo.com/now/fox-news-host-tucker-carlson-221000211.html
Dicker, Ron. “Tucker Carlson: Abortion Ensures 'Women Can Be Obedient Workers'.” Huff Post, April 18, 2019. Net. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucker-carlson-abortion_n_5cb83f39e4b096f7d2dc6f43
Edsall, Thomas B. “What Does Tucker Carlson Know That the Republican Party Doesn’t?” New York Times, February 6, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/tucker-carlson-republicans-democrats.html
Loofbourow, Lili. “Tucker Carlson and the ‘Debate Guy’ Racket.” Slate, March 22, 2009. Net. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/tucker-carlson-comments-debate-outrage-fox-news.html
Novak, Benjamin and Grynbaum, Michael M. “Conservative Fellow Travelers: Tucker Carlson Drops In on Viktor Orban.” New York Times, updated October 4, 2021. Net. https://ghostarchive.org/archive/74UNj
Porter, Tom. “ Tucker Carlson Took a Victory Lap over John Bolton's Ousting, after Reports He Lobbied Trump To Fire Him.” Business Insider, September 11, 2009. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-hails-trump-john-bolton-firing-great-for-america-2019-9
Swan, Jonathan and Solender, Andrew. “Tucker Carlson-Fueled Republicans Drop Tough-On-Russia Stance.” Axios, January 27, 2022. Net. https://www.axios.com/tucker-carlson-fueled-republicans-drop-tough-on-russia-stance-7311d46f-49fc-47b5-af46-f365c4e7809d.html
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