Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host with the highest-rated show on cable television, has a white supremacy problem: Racism, bigotry, homophobia and misogyny just seem to follow him wherever he goes.
The latest news concerns Blake Neff, a top writer on Carlson's show, who resigned after CNN's Oliver Darcy discovered a series of shockingly racist posts Neff made on AutoAdmit, a message board ostensibly for future and current law students, but which has long been a hotbed of racism, sexism and alleged defamation.
Neff left his own disgustingly racist commentary on the site, and also engaged in threads started by other users that began with racial slurs, including the n-word (or, to use the term in the thread, "a JET BLACK congo n****er" -- though the word was not censored on the forum -- to which Neff replied with a derisive comment about Asians).
According to the CNN report, Neff also spent five years maintaining "a lengthy thread in which he has derided a woman and posted information about her dating life that has invited other users to mock her and invade her privacy." CNN also found overlap between some of what Neff posted on the forum and what appeared on Carlson's show.
This isn't Carlson's first run-in with a frothing racist. Carlson was one of the founders of the website The Daily Caller, which launched in 2010 and has published a whole host of white nationalists, or in the words of some, "civic nationalists," then gone through the motions of half-apologizing when they're found out, only to start the cycle again.
Among the people published by the Daily Caller was Peter Brimelow, a founder and editor of the racist VDARE website, a clearinghouse of white nationalist and anti-immigrant writing. (Brimelow has sued The New York Times over labeling him an "open white nationalist;" he prefers the term "civic nationalist.')
Brimelow's views weren't a secret when the Caller published him; he included those very views in his Daily Caller column, which argued that "the U.S. was to be a nation-state, the political expression of a particular (white, British) people, as in Europe." Brimelow quoted Univision's Jorge Ramos (from, ironically, an appearance on Carlson's Fox show), who said, "This is our country. It is yours, it is mine and it is ours. ... Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, Whites, it is our country."
Brimelow retorted that Ramos's claim of a shared nation "would have been ... news to the Founding Fathers."
Others hired and published by the Caller were somewhat stealthier, insofar as they at least tried to obscure their beliefs, or their formal ties to white nationalist groups. But the list of them remains absurdly, shamefully long.
This is not a coincidence. And it all happened while Carlson still co-owned the Daily Caller site (he announced that he sold his stake in June this year).
"Tucker Carlson Tonight" hasn't been much better than the website Carlson co-founded when it comes to bigotry of all kinds. He has invited well-known bigots to appear on his show, helping to normalize their views.
Carlson often voices a soft-pedaled version of the racist vitriol white nationalists spew. He's made revolting comments about people of color, racial diversity and women, including saying that immigrants make America "poorer and dirtier and more divided."
When Univision's Ramos, who is Mexican-American, has gone on Carlson's show, Carlson has used the opportunity to call the groups of migrants coming to the United States an "invasion," to tell Ramos he was "whiter than I am" and to complain about "the Mexican citizen lecturing me about what kind of country America is."
Between 2006 and 2011, Carlson notoriously made several appearances on a radio show where he called women the c-word, said they were "extremely primitive, they're basic," and opined that child marriage wasn't as a serious as other forms of child rape because "the rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to take care of the person."
He compared Michael Vick, a former NFL quarterback convicted for dogfighting, to Warren Jeffs, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints leader serving a life sentence for child sex assault, and said that if he made the laws, abusing animals would be a more serious crime than raping children (or, as Carlson put it, "Michael Vick would have been executed, and Warren Jeffs would be out on the street").
Despite all this history, Carlson has had the nerve to claim that white supremacy is a hoax, a "conspiracy theory," and "not a real problem."
He also defended Neff, who resigned after his racist posts became public. While Carlson said this week that he did not "endorse" Neff's language and that Neff "fell short" of the show's standards, he expressed more anger at those he called "ghouls" who were "beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man."
Decrying Neff's critics as self-righteous, Carlson told his viewing audience that "We are all human. When we pretend we are holy, we are lying. When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it."
It's an interesting twist of responsibility to claim that a young man has been destroyed: Neff posted the repulsive comments all by himself and destroyed his own career; no one did it to him. And while we are all indeed human and flawed, most of us do not, in fact, post racist diatribes on the internet for fun.
Yet again, Carlson, his bosses, and his fans are trying to write this off as a bad apple problem, even while they decry those who would point out the badness of the apple in question. But this is a clear pattern, now a decade long, of forward-facing racism, misogyny and bigotry from Tucker Carlson and his platforms.
After making so many hateful comments, and after employing, publishing and platforming so many unabashed racists, it simply defies reason to claim that employing yet another racist like Neff was a deviation or an error.
Quite the contrary. It's a strategy. Conservatism did not discover racism from Donald Trump, but Trumpism has so hollowed out the bottom of public decency that racists seem to feel newly emboldened. Trumpism has made it less embarrassing for those conservatives who are motivated by racial animus to be honest about their inclinations, and it has given them cover to share the full range of their beliefs.
Trump's own victimization complex, and that of his followers, also has a mirror image in conservative media: The real victims, in this telling, aren't those who are on the receiving end of racial discrimination or hate, but rather those who are called racist or deplorable—when they are racist and deplorable.
Trump ran, and will run again, on white grievance politics, appealing to a base that is overwhelmingly white. Carlson speaks to the same audience, and fuels the same racist beliefs and delusions of persecution. He's just savvy enough to do it under the guise of respectable conservatism. Occasionally, that mask slips.
This is one of those times. And Carlson's response is telling. Instead of being outraged at Neff's posts, Carlson gently distances himself from them, while still sympathizing: Neff has paid "a very heavy price" for his actions. The real enemies, in Carlson's view, are those who exposed Neff -- the people who connected Neff to his own words are spoken about more harshly than Neff or his words themselves.
This prejudice, and the attempt to shift blame from racists to those who would hold them accountable, is a revealing moment. It shows us just how swiftly bigotry (and the crocodile tears shed when that bigotry is unearthed) has been normalized in the Republican Party, on Fox News and by Carlson in particular.
This is not an aberration. It's the beating heart of Trumpism. And it's increasingly the face of American conservatism.
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