Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson (1969 - ) is an American far right columnist and television host.

He was a star presenter on cable news channel Fox News, hosting the top-rated Tucker Carlson Tonight show from 2017 until his dismissal in 2023. At its height Carlson's nightly show attracted more than 3 million viewers daily. Carlson is also the founder of the radical right website The Daily Caller, popular with white supremacists.

A self-proclaimed libertarian and staunch defender of Donald Trump, Carlson has repeatedly broadcast conspiracy theories on a range of subjects including vaccinations, immigration, the Covid-19 pandemic, the results of the 2020 United States presidential election, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and other conflicts.

In 2018 he questioned the veracity of a chemical attack on civilians in Syria attributed to the armed forces of Bashar al-Assad's regime, claiming that it could be a manipulation to get the US to intervene militarily in the conflict. He has also suggested that the murders of white farmers in South Africa are part of a campaign orchestrated by the government in Pretoria to reclaim land belonging to the white minority.

During the Covid-19 pandemic Carlson regularly adopted positions similar to Covid-skeptic conspiracists. In April 2021 he said on Fox News of the Covid vaccine: “maybe it doesn't work and they're just not saying so”. His comments were labeled by immunologist Anthony Fauci, coordinator of the US pandemic response as “a crazy conspiracy theory”. A few months later, in July 2021, Carlson accused Dr Fauci of being “the man who helped create Covid”. In January 2022, he was among those who relayed a truncated extract from an interview with Rochelle Walenski, a senior US health official, that twisted her comments about vaccinations and deaths from Covid-19 among those with multiple pre-existing health conditions.

Carlson is a supporter of the “Great Replacement” theory, adapted to the American context. Under this theory, the Democrats have conspired to bolster their electoral advantage by welcoming millions of undocumented migrants whom they presume will support them at the polls due to their minority status. In September 2021, Carlson broadcast an edited and manipulated video of Joe Biden, dated from 2015, in which the then-vice president allegedly said he would like to bring large numbers of immigrants to the country to put white citizens in the minority.

In the autumn of 2021, Carlson showed Fox News viewers a documentary called Patriot Purge about the assault on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. He argued that the attack was in fact the work of far-left and antifascist groups, with the complicity of the FBI, in an attempt to discredit Donald Trump's supporters.

In January 2022, Carlson appeared in a new documentary, “Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization”, in which the American philanthropist George Soros, the bogeyman of the conspiracy movement and hard right, was portrayed as conspiring against Viktor Orban's Hungary.

In February 2022, two days before the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, Carlson delivered an on-air editorial declaring "Americans have been trained to hate Putin", and that US support for Kiev was about “the writing off of Joe Biden's personal debts to Ukrainian oligarchs.” With the official outbreak of war, he again took a pro-Putin stance, describing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as a puppet in the hands of the West. "The war in Ukraine is certainly not to help Ukrainian people, those poor people”, he said in May 2022. Carlson also asserted Democrats were were dragging America into a war with Russia as a form of payback, because they believed Moscow had stolen the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. He also took up the conspiracy theory spread by the Kremlin about the existence of alleged secret "biolabs" in Ukraine that could have justified Russian intervention.

In April 2022,  Carlson praised Alex Jones, one of the leading figures in the US conspiracy movement. “He's smart, he's funny as hell, he’s truly funny. He's a lot more talented than I am in many ways,” Carlson told viewers on his nightly program.  According to Jones' statement in January 2023, the two men had been friends “for ten years”. Text messages from Jones' mobile phone also show that he and Carlson exchanged numerous messages in which the Fox News host agreed with several of Jones' conspiracy theories.

Carlson is also the author of a documentary film entitled “The End of Men”, which argues that masculinity in the West is under threat from the combined attacks of progressivism and feminism. As a possible solution, the film advocates testicular tanning, claiming that it would stimulate testosterone production.

In December 2022, Carlson claimed to have interviewed an anonymous source who told him that she “believed” the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

At the end of April 2023,  Carlson was finally sacked by Fox News. The channel's management did not publicly disclose the reasons for his dismissal, but it happened shortly after he was ordered to pay over $787 million in defamation compensation to Dominion Voting Systems. Fox News had accused Dominion Voting Systems, the company responsible for electronic voting in the November 2020 US presidential election, of providing false results to favor Joe Biden over Donald Trump, and this accusation likely played a role in his dismissal.

On December 14, 2023, during an interview with Blaze personality Alex Stein, Tucker Carlson was asked about his thoughts on an ice wall and flat Earth theory. Tucker responded by stated he is "open to anything"...

(Last updated on 12/21/2023)