Tucker Carlson is the most watched media personality in the United States and to those familiar with his rhetoric that is an incredibly worrying fact.
Carlson is a prevalent promoter and platformer of just about every single despicable view: White nationalist rhetoric, Russian propaganda, 2020 election denial, antisemitism, misogyny, and vaccine misinformation.
Carlson, however, is actually something worse than a bigot. He is a calculated grifter.
He is not some uniquely bigoted figure with a large platform, but a reflection of undercurrents in America and what it takes to be successful in journalism. The de-platforming of Carlson with his firing from Fox for unknown reasons is not going to quell all the ills we attribute to him, as he’s merely the symptom of a sick system that desires him.
The recent Dominion lawsuit, unveiled documents revealing that Carlsonprivately detests Trump and his politics —but played along with his election conspiracies for profit.
When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked Trump’s claims on dominion, Carlson asked for her to be fired because she was “measurably hurting the company”.
It is especially damning that Carlson is acutely aware and expressive of the damages of his rhetoric and the people he publicly supports but simply does not care about the actual consequences. The most dangerous thing about Tucker Carlson is that he has no principles.
Carlson is motivated very simply by fame and money. He tracks his ratings minute by minute to see which segments and stories perform well. As it turns out, fear-mongering about immigrants and promoting the “Great Replacement Theory” was very popular, so Carlson kept pushing it. Carlson algorithmically finds and promotes topics of outrage to maximize his viewership. He’s essentially producing a product that is demanded by large amounts of people— with no shame in what he’s saying or what happens to the people he attacks on his show who regularly receive death threats.
By being a calculated right-wing outrage machine, Carlson is able to mold his views and maintain a constant degree of relevance that an ideologically strict bigot would struggle with. It’s why Carlson rebuked Ben Shapiro on promoting automation and instead pushed for limiting its implementations in driverless cars, as well as pushing seemingly progressive anti-corporate rhetoric at times. He shifts his sails to wherever the winds of populism are. Even though Carlson himself has been de-platformed from his mainstream media pedestal someone else will simply take control of the ship. —albeit with less talent at maintaining a straight face while expressing anger about M&M’s going woke and being less sexy.
