As the New York Times tells it, the trigger for Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News was a text message he sent the day after the Capitol riot.
Carlson and an unidentified producer had been discussing the riot as an outgrowth of Donald Trump’s being a “demonic force, a destroyer,” in Carlson’s wording. After the producer replied that the “Trump anger spiral is vicious,” the Fox host agreed.
“That’s for sure. Deadly,” Carlson replied at 4 a.m. “It almost consumed me in November when Sidney Powell attacked us. It was very difficult to regain emotional control, but I knew I had to.”
The conversation picked up again in the afternoon and Carlson shared a story. It began:
He went on to describe a sort of epiphany about “the Antifa creep”: “if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?”
This message, the Times reports, spurred new scrutiny of Carlson that led to his ouster. But it’s very hard to believe that the sole component of that scrutiny was Carlson’s casual reference to “how white men fight.”
Carlson had for years been explicit — increasingly so — about his views of race and diversity in America. He fumed that immigrants make the country “dirtier,” leading to an advertiser boycott. He elevated misleading statistics about immigrant criminal activity to suggest that they increased societal danger. He embraced a white nationalist argument about South African farmers, to broad approval from white nationalists. He defended fired White House speechwriter Darren Beattie, who had been ousted for appearing at a conference alongside a known white nationalist.
And then there was the replacement theory. Over and over, Carlson suggested that immigrants were being brought to the United States to shift the electorate to the left. He blamed Democratic leaders and left-wing philanthropist George Soros, arguing that there was an explicit effort to “change our country fundamentally” through increased immigration. This was a white-nationalist trope, now airing on the country’s most-watched cable news channel in prime time.
That this same person should sniff about the dishonorable way in which a group of thugs chose to attack a political opponent, suggesting that it failed to live up to the higher cultural standards of the White race, is fully in line with Carlson’s public presentations. White people are better than that, Carlson is saying — suggesting a racial hierarchy that comports with the dirtiness of immigrants and the need to fend off non-White hordes.
In fact, Carlson’s views on race were so well-established that it was part of his shtick. People kept saying he was racist — so he spent a lot of time arguing that the left would say the same thing about anyone who shared his right-wing politics.
Soon after President Biden was sworn into office — and only about two weeks after his “how white men fight” text — Carlson rejected Biden’s inaugural-speech pledge to uproot domestic extremists including white supremacists.
“Now that we’re waging war on white supremacists: Can somebody tell us in very clear language what a white supremacist is?” Carlson said on his show. Since Biden “has now declared war … we should know specifically and precisely who exactly he has declared war on.”
Biden’s comments were predicated on the violence at the Capitol. Carlson’s “they call everyone racist” response was similarly an undercurrent to his three-part series trying to blame the Capitol riot on federal provocateurs — a series that prominently featured the input of the aforementioned Darren Beattie. Not surprising that both men would want to diffuse perceptions of what constituted white nationalism.
It is impossible that Fox News was not aware that Carlson harbored views that aligned neatly with white nationalists. To consider the “how white men fight” line only in isolation might be alarming, but it exists alongside all of Carlson’s other comments and rhetoric. The only thing that’s different about it is that it overlaps the class pretentiousness Carlson often tried to bury on his broadcasts with the racial views that he didn’t.
What is striking about the text message is the bloodlust. Carlson has always worn his heart on his sleeve; his hyperactive outbursts of laughter are a social media meme. But what is presented in that text is different, an explicit embrace and enthusiasm for violence. For political violence. For the sort of violence that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol.
It’s not clear what clip Carlson is referring to in the text, but the context points at a likely culprit. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, there were three days in which pro-Trump demonstrators engaged in acts of violence in D.C. Jan. 6 is the best known. But there were also demonstrations in November (the “million MAGA march”) and December that devolved into violence when night fell.
An incident from the latter month matches Carlson’s description. A video emerged — and was published by the New York Post — showing a group of men surrounding someone dressed in all black on a dark D.C. street. They grab at him, trying to pull off his hat. The scene devolves and the man being surrounded pulls out a knife.
If this was the clip Carlson was watching, there are two important details to note. The man identified as “antifa” — a member of a loose-knit movement of sometimes violent activists focused on combating fascism and racism — was Black. The men attacking him were White, and several were wearing the garb of the far-right Proud Boys movement. In the aftermath of the violence, in fact, multiple news reports noted that the post-demonstration violence generally involved the Proud Boys, a reactionary group that often engages in street brawling. (The violence that unfolded in November was similarly linked to the Proud Boys.)
Carlson’s visceral support for the fight, then, wasn’t just his approval of violence. It was explicitly support for political violence, which he admitted in the text message. Yes, he caught himself — as he said he caught himself when furious with the Trump campaign previously. But he could “taste” his desire to see the “antifa” guy punished since Carlson was “sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him,” as he said later in the message. Because this guy was “antifa,” Carlson wanted to see him killed. If it was the clip that appeared in the New York Post, Carlson wanted to see a Black man killed by members of the Proud Boys because the former disagreed with Carlson’s politics.
That is startling. Carlson’s on-air rhetoric often suggested that he and others on the right were not so feral as to embrace violence. That was what they did.
In one of the last shows that aired on Fox News before Carlson was fired, he made this argument. He aired a video showing a group of young people apparently attacking a woman in Chicago. The young people were Black; the woman White.
“This was racist mob violence and we should not be surprised by that. This is what mobs do. The hive mind takes over,” Carlson said, framing the violence from Black participants as subhuman. “The lowest instincts take over and people who are different get hurt, often killed.”
That the federal government wasn’t investigating the situation in Chicago — according to Carlson, anyway — was a reflection of partisan priorities.
“Democrats approve of racial violence. They are stoking it everywhere,” Carlson told his 3.2 million viewers that night. “No, it’s not your imagination. They want race hate and violence.”
Less than a week later, Carlson was fired — apparently because of a text message revealing his own racial bias and support for political violence.