Tucker Carlson, fake populist and real racist

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The most incisive comment ever made about Tucker Carlson was actually made about Bill OReilly, and the person who said it was Tucker Carlson, at the time a lesser cable television personality looking up to above the reigning giant of his domain.

OReilly’s success hinges on the perception that he really is who he claims to be, Carlson wrote. If he gets caught out of character, it’s over.

Asked to elaborate on this, Carlson mixed his condemnation with clear envy. Bill OReilly is really talented, he’s more talented than me, he has a lot more viewers, he’s a better communicator than me, but I think there’s a deep fallacy at the center of his schtick, and again, as I say, the schtick is built on the perception that he is the character he is playing, he explained. The conceit that made OReilly far more successful than Carlson at the time was that he’s Everyman. It is not right-wing; he is a populist. But Carlson was very clear that no one, especially not a prime-time television host, could authentically take on such a role. Nobody is that person, he said, especially not someone who makes a million dollars or several million dollars a year.

Carlson’s career defies parody and defies analysis because it has always been laid bare. Carlson inherited the faux-populist shtick used by OReilly and honed it into something like performance art. He fumed about them, plotting sinister plots against us in their opulent lairs. The Carlson version of the character was a camping, scenery-chewing artist who surpassed OReilly in every way.

The high-pitched screams and awkward facial expressions were the superficial expressions. The deepest and most sinister aspect of Carlson’s success was his realization that his audiences craved racist and nativist resentment in higher doses than his predecessor had been able to supply.

To be sure, it wasn’t just an act. In 2008, Carlson happily described Iraqis as primitive, semi-literate apes, and he liked to poke fun at the idea that diversity is our strength. But this aspect of his thinking opened up new possibilities for his career.

Last year, The New York Times combined behind-the-scenes reporting with in-depth textual analysis to describe the staggering levels of racism Carlson hurled at his audience. He revealed that Fox News, using minute-by-minute ratings analysis, found its embrace of white nationalist themes landed with viewers. He was quoting both former Fox News staffers (he’s going to dub white nationalism because the minutes show the public eating it) and current ones (Fox executives wanted to focus on the grievance, the things that would get people boiled They pick you up, black people pick you up, Mexicans pick you up).

Carlson, always looking for new transgressions, went beyond echoing the themes favored by white nationalists to endorse their grand replacement theory by name:

I know the left and all the little twitter gatekeepers literally go hysterical if you use the term replacement, if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, voters now voting with new people, more obedient voters of the third-world. But they get hysterical because that’s what’s actually happening. Let’s just say it. It’s true.

Lachlan Murdoch denied that Carlson actually endorsed this theory, articulating his defense on the narrow linguistic point that Carlson said replaced but did not utter the replacement theory to full term. A full review of the guest interview, he said, indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and dismissed the replacement theory.

Later that year, Carlson repeated the theory and said the magic words: In political terms, this policy is called the Great Replacement, the replacement of old Americans with more obedient people from foreign countries.

The diabolical brilliance of his racist character was that he was able to occupy ground between mainstream Republicans and actual Nazis, connecting the two groups’ beliefs and winning the adoration of both. Tucker Carlson is literally our best ally. I don’t believe he doesn’t hate Jews, wrote neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin in the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist publication. Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, marked Carlson’s departure from Fox by calling him immensely talented and one of the most important voices on the right, and he will continue to be those things no matter what comes next.

Carlson’s credibility with the Republican Party’s most nativist, paranoid and bigoted voters has made him a valuable authenticator for its leaders. Kevin McCarthy leaked Jan. 6 footage to Carlson, which he selectively shared to assert that the insurgents had behaved legally and peacefully. Ron DeSantis gave Carlson a written statement calling the Russian invasion of Ukraine a territorial dispute.

It may have been kismet, but it was only fitting that Carlson’s downfall came quickly after leaked internal messages revealed him expressing personal hatred for Trump, a figure he lavished with praise on. on air. Twenty years after he prophesied the downfall of OReilly, the shtick was in place.

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