Fox News banished him, and now a year and three months later, his independent podcast recently became the most listened to on Spotify.
As Fox News crushed last year’s July ratings to once again dominate the TV market, former Fox host Tucker Carlson has his own big wave he’s riding. Covering politics with a warped, far-right, anti-mainstream-media (and anti-Fox) slant not only put him ahead of erstwhile Spotify champion Joe Rogan for July but also made Carlson the belle of the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The appetite for right-wing rage and self-reinforcing opinions partly explains why resale front-row tickets to Carlson’s September show at Fort Worth’s largest, most popular venue, Dickies Arena, are closing in on $900 per.
One fact remains: Hate sells, especially if it’s couched in faux-intellectualism (see: Carlson, Rogan, O’Reilly, the entire National Review).
Carlson has been spewing bile and inciteful falsehoods for 20-plus years. One of the worst things to plop out of his mouth came in 2018, when on his Fox News show, he said immigrants are making America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
At least 20 companies pulled their ads as a result. Fox stood by him, and the right-wing propaganda network still neglected to can him in light of some of his other hot takes: that LGBTQ people are a “cancer on the country,” that white supremacy is a “hoax,” that the COVID-19 vaccine was “the single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history” (data says the vax saved 14.4 million lives), that “dead people” had voted for President Joe Biden (well, I’m dead on the inside — does that count?), and that the J6 insurrectionists were merely “sightseers.”
The last few recent times hate speech like Carlson’s took root, sound-minded Fort Worthians roundly, publicly rejected it. In June, a couple dozen locals marched outside a community meeting space where LUCA (Latinos United for Conservative Action) and other con groups were lying about the LGBTQ community (“State Sanctioned,” June 5), and last month, dozens more Fort Worthians protested outside the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, another public space where far-right extremists were welcomed, this time to peddle conspiracies and belch racist, sexist b.s. (“Crowd Counters Right-Wingers,” July 13). Pushback against hate speech is to be expected in the county Biden won in 2020 after it was carried by the former guy by nine points in the previous presidential election in 2016.
And though Carlson tries to come off as some kind of above-the-fray objective observer, he’s simply just a gold medal-caliber contortionist twisting his rhetoric into funny noodle shapes to keep from admitting he hates people of color and anyone else not white, rich, male, straight, and Christian. Basically, whoever’s unlike him deserves scorn — or worse.
Carlson’s past is his present and future: as a professional liar, divisive weirdo, and serial propagandist. In a 2020 slander lawsuit, Fox lawyers “defended” him in court by saying exaggeration was part of his m.o.
In the judge’s opinion informed by the Fox lawyers’ arguments, she wrote, “The ‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ ”
And the excuse worked. Carlson got off.
His vile campaign of mendacity continued on Fox until 2023, when the network finally fired him for reportedly “alienating large parts” of the company. More likely, the news giant sacrificed him as part of settling a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems. Carlson had spent months trashing the voting-machine maker over nonexistent voter fraud in the 2020 election. Fox ended up paying Dominion $787 million for the pleasure.
Carlson now peddles his “non-literal commentary” and hate on his podcast on his own network. He’s recently interviewed war criminal Vladimir Putin and bigoted white supremacist Elon Musk in addition to the disgraced, twice-impeached, adjudicated rapist who once occupied the White House (after losing the popular vote by 3 million).
At Dickies, Carlson will be joined by another perennial victim, Roseanne Barr, whose record of racist, bigoted statements is almost as deep and sordid as her comrade’s. With every spiteful utterance, Carlson and Barr put people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, and other minorities at risk of violence. Hate speech can lead to hate actions. The mass murderers in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Atlanta, Charleston, Jacksonville, the list goes on — all of their evil deeds were inspired by the kind of abhorrent, demonizing rhetoric that Tucker Carlson specializes in.
This soft-handed dandy does not represent free speech. His verbal gymnastics are hate speech, and hate speech has sometimes violent consequences.
This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
