Whitewashing Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson at a meeting at the White House on January 9. Alex Brandon/AP

Last month, when The New York Times published a news article reporting on Tucker Carlson’s recent statements defending Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, and assailing former Rep. Mike Rogers, the GOP contender in that race, the paper described the former Fox host as an “influential far-right podcaster…known for his nativist rhetoric [who] once said immigrants were making the United States ‘poorer and dirtier.’” (Carlson had slammed Rogers as a “toady to Israel” and the “embodiment of the cruelty and stupidity of the national security state.”)

A few days later, NPR named Carlson a “Newsmaker”—that is, one of the “most influential people of our time”—and posted an hourlong interview with him conducted by host Steve Inskeep. At the start, Inskeep introduced Carlson as a commentator who “has commanded an audience for decades as a cable TV pundit, as a Fox News star, and then, after his firing, as the head of an independent network frequently broadcasting from this barn in Maine.” During the interview, Carlson argued that President Donald Trump should be removed from office for launching the war in Iran (“the most profoundly destructive thing any—any single decision a president has made in our history”) and for threatening to annihilate that country with nuclear weapons. He railed against Israel and its influence on US policy, denied he was antisemitic, and slammed Trump for being corrupt. (He also called the Trump–Russia scandal a “totally absurd plot to discredit Trump.”) At the end of their conversation, Inskeep said to Carlson, “You’re a thoughtful guy.”

In both The New York Times piece and the NPR interview—especially the latter—Carlson’s bigotry and conspiracy kookery were downplayed, and he was cast as a respectable political opinion influencer. The Times did note that Carlson has embraced conspiracy theories, been accused of antisemitism, and once “conducted a friendly interview” with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier. But even that does not capture the fullness of his extremism.

In recent years, Carlson has become a leading champion of right-wing racism and nuttery—a matter Inskeep avoided in the one-on-one. He has been a proponent of the “great replacement theory,” which claims nefarious elites are trying to replace white Americans with dark-skinned migrants. (Some ultra-right adherents of this notion assert Jews are responsible for this anti-white plot.) When he was a Fox host, Carlson supported the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, though he privately denigrated election denialists pushing that crap. He peddled the bonkers idea that the January 6 riot was a false flag operation orchestrated by the Deep State so it could round up Trump supporters, and he said the rioters were “right” to believe the election had been rigged.

There’s practically no limit to Carlson’s ideological thuggery. Two years ago, he hosted on his podcast Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist, who claimed that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the “chief villain of the Second World War” and that the Holocaust was merely the result of poor planning on the part of Hitler’s regime. The Nazis, Cooper said, “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners…They went in with no plan for that and just threw these people into camps.” Accidental concentration camps, right? That was why “millions of people ended up dead there.” Carlson disgustingly called Cooper “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

And Carlson has been an adoring fan of Vladimir Putin. Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he noted he would root for Russia over Ukraine in any war between the two nations, and, once Putin attacked Ukraine, he amplified Kremlin disinformation that claimed the United States had been operating biological weapons facilities within Ukraine.

Carlson was also sued by a booker and producer who alleged that she had been bullied and subjected to antisemitic remarks while working on his Fox show. Carlson maintained he had never met her. Fox settled the lawsuit for $12 million, according to the accuser’s lawyer. In 2022, on his Fox show, Carlson promoted the quackery of “testicle tanning.”

Yes, Carlson’s been a real thoughtful guy, bolstering Trump’s attempt to destroy our constitutional republic, providing a platform to Nazi apologists, and amplifying Russian disinformation.

Several weeks prior to the Times article and NPR interview, Carlson appeared on RT, the Russian state-controlled propaganda mill that also runs covert influence and disinformation operations. On that show, he proclaimed that diabolical forces within the US government were deploying “mass migration” to destroy “the English-speaking West” and trying to whip up a war with Russia because it was “the last big white Christian country on the planet.” That is, an evil Deep State wants to annihilate Russia because it’s white and Christian—and it was willing to risk global nuclear warfare to do so. He didn’t identify who in the United States was perpetrating this evil scheme. Could it be…the Jews?

While on this RT show, Carlson never once mentioned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Russia’s attacks on civilian targets, its alleged war crimes, or its kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children. Ukraine is “not a sovereign country fighting for its freedom,” he argued, just a “client state of NATO and the United States” that’s being used to wipe out Russia. That’s Putin’s BS line. And he praised Putin for practicing restraint in response to attacks on Russian soil. Carlson called Russia “a beautiful country, an amazing country, my favorite country I’ve ever visited.” There was no talk of Putin’s repressive ways or suppression of democracy. He’s all in on Putin.

Earlier this month, Carlson again got into Hitler trouble during an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, a far-right British politician. He questioned why Britain had entered World War II, and Rees-Mogg countered, “Otherwise, we’d be speaking German.” Carlson shot back: “Who cares? There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” Racism and Nazi apologia go nicely together.

Arguing with Rees-Mogg, Carlson declared that Hitler “repeatedly said, ‘I do not want to go to war with the UK’”—as though the Nazi dictator could have been taken at his word and there was no reason for the Brits to honor their alliance with Poland and declare war on Germany following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. (In 1934, Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Poland, vowing not to attack the country.) Rees-Mogg observed that Carlson was “verging on defending Hitler.” He added, “I think this is not really what you want to be doing.”

Carlson answered with snark: “Yeah, I guess I’m just a secret Nazi.”

He may not be a secret Nazi. But he’s an overt racist, conspiracy monger, Hitler defender, Putin supporter, and far-right extremist. Because he has an audience and influence on the right, the media ought to pay attention to him and his comments. But they also should remember that viewership does not equal legitimacy. He poses as a thoughtful fellow, but he slings false, bigoted, and dangerous swill. Journalists who do not characterize and contextualize Carlson accurately aid and abet his malignant agenda.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Trump cutting a diesel oil deal with Putin, an indicted war criminal and dictator, and kneecapping Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a democratic ally, is a major win for the Russian leader in his decadelong shadow war against the United States and the West that I chronicle in my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. In fact, it’s something of a culmination of the operation and establishes a pathway for Trump to become the Putin BFF he has longed to be. Trump is now on Putin’s side and selling out Zelenskyy—affirming the tale told in the book. Sometimes I hate being prescient.

I was on C-SPAN last week discussing the book. You can see how I dealt with questions from Trump cultists:

Kramer/Fauci. Speaking of C-SPAN, I have long praised it as a national treasure, and I thoroughly enjoy appearing on it, as I just did—even though that means taking abuse from angry or misinformed callers. But I certainly don’t seek my entertainment fare from the public affairs network. So when a relative suggested we see Kramer/Fauci, a play now being staged at the St. Ann’s Warehouse theater in Brooklyn, I was not that eager.

Kramer/Fauci is something of a C-SPAN reenactment, a verbatim presentation of a face-off that occurred on the network in 1993 between Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Larry Kramer, the playwright, novelist, and AIDS activist who led ACT UP, the advocacy group that mounted protests to demand government action to address the AIDS crisis.

Yes, verbatim. The script is from this three-decade-old broadcast, with actors playing the two discussants and the moderator, as well as a fourth who asks the questions from the viewers who phoned in that day. Seems perhaps dull. That’s what I expected. But I was wrong.

The staging is kinetic, with Kramer and Fauci moving about the sparse set, not consigned to the studio chairs that in reality held them down. This allows Thomas Jay Ryan, as the ever-gesticulating Kramer, to more fully vent the combustible frustration the activist felt as he assailed the Clinton administration for not doing more to combat AIDS. Fauci, played coolly and sympathetically by Will Brill, is, naturally, more buttoned-down, constrained by his responsibilities as a government official and as a scientist. (Sound familiar?) His movements, no surprise, are more deliberate and precise. His statements are carefully constructed. Kramer exclaims, pleads, and curses. He refers to Fauci as a good person and his “friend,” but he cannot avoid turning Fauci into the target for his exasperation, expressing his disappointment that Fauci, as he sees it, has become a defender of an incompetent and slow-moving government bureaucracy.

The two men, by this point, have developed a complicated relationship. Each clearly holds a deep respect for the other. But Kramer assails Fauci for fronting for a government he believes is not taking sufficient action, and Fauci calmly contends that the administration is toiling hard to meet the moment and, without rancor, challenges some of the accusations Kramer freely hurls. This is a fascinating battle between reason (Fauci) and passion (Kramer). When the scientist refers to the AIDS emergency as an “epidemic,” the dramatist is irate that he does not use the word “plague,” which in Kramer’s mind would convey greater “urgency.”

Daniel Fish, the director, has successfully transformed this on-air clash into thought-provoking drama that maintains a sense of suspense throughout the performance. Who’s going to come out on top in this debate? Will the friendship they proclaim for each other be blown apart? Of course, they’re both right in their own ways, though it seems to me that Fish leans a bit more in Kramer’s direction. There’s one major and odd choice Fish made that I didn’t understand and found distracting, which I won’t spoil here. But he has concocted a captivating study of two characters and their relationship that now resonates long after that hour of television slipped into the C-SPAN archives.

Undone. I’m tempted to tell you to watch Undone, an animated series that premiered on Amazon Prime Video in 2019, and leave it at that because this marvelous show is tough to describe.

It’s been called an “adult animated psychological comedy drama.” But that doesn’t capture the complexity and nuance of the show created by Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who both worked on BoJack Horseman. The two-season series, which examines the nature of time and reality, aptly employs a process called rotoscoping, in which live-action footage is transformed into animation. Actors, including Bob Odenkirk (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul), were filmed performing their parts and then turned into realistic-looking animated versions of themselves.

The series follows the post–car crash journey of Alma Winograd-Diaz (Rosa Salazar), a thirtysomething Mexican American childcare worker in San Antonio, into shamanism, during which she interacts with her father, Jacob Winograd (Odenkirk), who died 20 years earlier under suspicious circumstances. Or is this a descent into schizophrenia? Under her deceased father’s guidance, Alma learns to bend reality and travel through time, as he seeks her help to solve the mystery of his death.

Simultaneously, Alma, who is going through an identity crisis and bored to hell with her life, has to deal with an overbearing (and disappointed) mother, a younger sister about to marry, and a well-meaning and attentive boyfriend who desires the sort of conventional life that she views as lethal. While contending with all this reality, she is apparently being trained by the spirit (ghost?) of her dead father, who as a professor studied alternative consciousness and the possibility of messing with time, to develop her supposed transcendental powers. Yet to her living loved ones, she’s becoming undone and requires medical help. Just take your pills, they tell her.

The show’s timeline is constantly shifting, as Alma zips between past and present, and we’re left to wonder if this is all in her head or truly…out there. The performances are strong, the writing stronger. Undone, though, never received the notice it deserves. It’s a buried treasure, hidden deep within the ever-expanding vault of Amazon Prime Video. It’s worth digging up.