The pot calls O’Reilly black
Throughout the 2000s, Carlson’s on-air persona was very different to the one he projects today. Sporting a bowtie and a suit, he reveled in his position among the upper-classes. “I’m an out-of-the-closet-elitist… I don’t run around pretending to be a man of the people; I’m absolutely not a man of the people, at all.” he
said in a 2008 radio interview. Even after he joined
Fox News as an analyst in 2009, he was still very frank about his role in the media. “I am 100% his bytch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do,” he
said, referring to the conservative press baron who owns
Fox News,
The Wall Street Journal and a host of other outlets.
He also had little time for right-wingers and their faux populism, which he regarded as attempting to appeal to working-class people by offering them false consciousness. In a 2003
interview, he criticized
Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, stating:
I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of his schtick. It’s built on the perception that he is the character he plays; he is everyman. He’s not right-wing, he’s a populist fighting for you against the powers that be… And that’s great as a schtick. But I’m just saying that the moment it is revealed not to be true, it’s over!.. Because the whole thing is predicated on the fact that he is who he says he is. And nobody is that person. Especially not somebody who makes many millions a year.”
And yet, when Carlson replaced O’Reilly in his 8 p.m. slot on
Fox News, he adopted virtually the same persona, as a fiery, unpredictable outsider standing up for working people and saying what so many are thinking. He has certainly taken a number of positions against the establishment consensus. He was the only mainstream pundit to
cover the Syria-OPCW coverup in 2019 and has generally
supported calls to free Australian publisher Julian Assange.
Moreover, his rhetoric about elites in Washington is sometimes eerily reminiscent of Senator Bernie Sanders. For instance, in 2019 he
said:
Working-class people of all colors have a lot more in common, infinitely more in common with each other than they do with some overpaid MSNBC anchor. And if you were allowed to think about that for long enough, you might start to get unauthorized ideas about economics, and that would be disruptive to a very lucrative status quo.”
Talk like this has built his credibility in conservative circles and even among portions of the political left. Carlson regularly invites on leftist commentators who are rarely seen on the other networks. Journalist Glenn Greenwald even went so far as to
say that he would “consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist.”
Yet closer inspection of his position finds that Carlson largely identifies Democrats rather than Republicans as the real problem. “Democrats have become the party of the elite, professional class,” he
tells viewers, with the phrases “elite” and “liberal elites” often used interchangeably. Even in the quote above, he identifies “overpaid
MSNBC anchor" as the problem, rather than the upper class more generally.
Tucker’s real purpose
Thus, the
Fox News host also attempts to channel popular frustrations away from the real causes of economic grief and into a pointless and endless red vs. blue culture war. Carlson has attempted to get his viewers angry about how liberals are supposedly claiming that the number “8” and
trees are racist, or trying to get you to
eat bugs. As media critic
Carlos Maza noted:
The goal of Tucker’s show isn’t to challenge the elite; it is to make sure that you never realize who they are. To get you so mad at atheists, feminists, immigrants, millennials, trans people, pot smokers, college students, vegans, the NFL, Brooklyn witches and Lena fukking Dunham, that you don’t get mad at the people who are actually in charge.”
Carlson is generally quite respectful of his interviewees, his affable personality and charm disarming many. Yet when a guest actually brought up systemic failures of capitalism and highlighted his network’s own part in it, Carlson shut it down. In 2019, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman was brought on to criticize the World Economic Forum at Davos, but it did not go as planned after Bregman went off-script, highlighting the phony nature of Carlson’s critique. “You are a millionaire funded by billionaires… And that’s the reason you’re not talking about these issues… You are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” he
told Carlson. “You’re all like ‘I’m against the globalist elite, blah, blah blah.’ It’s not very convincing,” he added, to which Carlson replied, “Why don’t you go fukk yourself!” The interview was terminated and never broadcast.
“The goal of Tucker’s show isn’t to challenge the elite; it is to make sure that you never realize who they are”
Throughout his career, he has also
consistently opposed labor unions – historically, the principal method through which working-class people build consciousness and organize for better wages and conditions. Why is this? In a 2009 radio segment, when he was yet to don his O’Reilly-borrowed everyman persona, he laid it out. Referencing his own privileged upbringing, he
explained, “One thing you learn when you grow up in a castle and look out across the moat every day at the hungry peasants in the village is you don’t want to stoke envy among the proletariat.”
“Tucker Carlson isn’t a populist,” Maza
said; “he’s a safety valve; a way to make sure that when the peasants in the village get angry, they don’t take it out on the party giving tax cuts to him or [Rupert Murdoch], his multi-billionaire boss.” Maza noted that Carlson spent twice as long discussing how liberals think trees are racist as he did covering Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which were, at the time, the biggest giveaway from the poor to the super-wealthy in American history. That Carlson is still an elitist at heart and not some kind of radical, anti-neocon outsider can be gauged by the fact that last year he was
spotted eating dinner together with President George W. Bush at a private residence in Florida.
Carlson has also stoked racial resentment on his show,
platforming far-right guests and
scaremongering about gypsies coming to America and suggesting they would defecate in public. He also
claimed that immigrants make the country “poorer and dirtier” and
repeated the “great replacement” conspiracy theory – an idea that the Democrats are intentionally inviting people of color to the U.S. in an attempt to replace the white race.
A brilliant disguise
While Carlson has generally opposed increasing tensions with Russia, this
should not be mistaken as a principled, anti-war stance. Rather, Carlson wants the U.S.’ attention to be firmly on what he
calls “the China threat.” In a segment entitled “America is being sold to China,” he frames the opioid crisis as a possibly deliberate Chinese attack on the U.S. He has also
claimed that Biden has “accelerated America’s bend to communist China” and that Beijing is engaged in “wholesale theft” and “relentless espionage” against the United States, in what, for him, amounts to “the biggest story of the decade.”
In this position, Carlson is mirroring that of the Pentagon, which long ago began its so-called “Pivot to Asia.” For years, the U.S. military has been building up its forces for what the head of Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard,
described as the “real possibility” of a nuclear war with China.
In December, Carlson attempted to fuse his crusade against woke liberals with an aggressive pro-confrontation message. He and media personality Jesse Kelly
agreed that wokeness will lead to hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in battle, presumably because the military has become too sissified to win in a coming war against China, a power Carlson described as a “massive, real threat.” Kelly added:
We don’t need a military that’s women-friendly. We don’t need a military that’s gay-friendly, with all due respect to the Air Force. We need a military that is flat-out hostile. We need a military full of type-A men that want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls. But we don’t have that now. We can’t even get women off of naval vessels. That should be step one. But most of them are already pregnant anyway.”
Carlson nodded along, even as Kelly hinted at genocide against Chinese people.
Ultimately, while Carlson – like
others – has found a massive audience for his populist sentiment, careful scrutiny of his background and past statements prove that this is little more than an act. In the same manner as Bill O’Reilly, this elitist trust-fund kid has managed to make his audience believe that he is a radical outsider working on behalf of ordinary people like him, despite the fact that the billionaire-owned
Fox News has given him a platform and a multimillion-dollar contract.
Despite his family’s wealth and close connections with state power, he has convinced millions that he is on their side. Yet Tucker Carlson is no threat to the establishment; in fact, he is one of their greatest assets.
