AMERICAN
NATIONALIST: PART 1
How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer
Cable
By Nicholas
Confessore
April 30,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html
This is the first article in a series on Tucker
Carlson. Read Part 2 and Part 3.
Tucker
Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an
entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the
other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto
boss.
Most of
Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had
gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their
annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming
on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip
advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have
finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.
The answer
became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.
When
“Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his
earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that
said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the
desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke
directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former
Fox employee told of the exchange.
“We’re
good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the
restaurant.
In the
years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in
the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful.
Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge
them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to
an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making
America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by
hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under
siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by
diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien
cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or
label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in
the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump
administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new
arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and
forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis
police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal
mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The
following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news
show in history.
His
encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential
election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those
who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office,
playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the
attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and
politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for
his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift
focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin
ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired
for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin
cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking
points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons
labs.
Alchemizing
media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American
tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr.
Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning
himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position
him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around
Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican
Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent
champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and
brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the
rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched
gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr.
Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before
he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white
nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes
up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like
VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the
gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested
were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last
April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist
conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were
deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace”
the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of
1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr.
Carlson had done so.
“Tucker is
ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the
Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after
his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his
podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along
with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American
Renaissance a few years ago.”
AMERICAN
NATIONALIST: PART 2
How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News — and Became
Trump’s Heir
By Nicholas
Confessore
April 30,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-fox-news.html
This is the second article in a series on Tucker
Carlson. Read Part 1 and Part 3.
Tucker Carlson had a problem.
After years
in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his
new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s
evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the
boundaries of conventional politics.
But as Mr.
Trump thrashed through his first months in office, Mr. Carlson found himself
with an unexpected programming challenge: Fox was too pro-Trump. The new
president watched his favorite network religiously, and often tweeted about
what he saw there, while Fox broadcasts reliably parroted White House
messaging. No one was more on message than Sean Hannity, then Fox’s
highest-rated star, who frequently devoted his show to Mr. Trump’s daily
battles with Washington Democrats and the media.
Newly
planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the
disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he
needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr.
Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day,
he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would
constantly need apologizing for.
The
solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It
would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces
reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his
producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp
the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s
changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from
the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr.
Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the
country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism
from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the
centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
He began
seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird”
and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture.
He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to
“Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left “streets
covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” (It was not true:
Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who
had pulled down his pants outside because he couldn’t make it back home in
time.) He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as
growing discrimination against white Americans. Stories about the threat of
immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed up the
intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative
that would come to define “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: falling birthrates among
the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly
alter American society — all engineered or encouraged by a “ruling class”
desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-tonight.html
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