Tucker Carlson’s text: Fox News can’t be surprised — but they may still be scared

The “Choose Your Own Adventure Tucker Carlson – Fox News storybook” has a new chapter. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the former prime-time host was abruptly canned on the eve of a highly-anticipated trial against Dominion Voting Systems when the network’s board got wind of texts that read wholly in line with Carlson’s on-air shtick:

A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race.

The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing.

In the message, sent to one of his producers in the hours after violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Carlson described how he had recently watched a video of a group of men — Trump supporters, he said — violently attacking “an Antifa kid.”

It was “three against one, at least,” he wrote.

And then he expressed a sense of dismay that the attackers, like him, were white.

“Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously,” he wrote.

“It’s not how white men fight,” he said. But he said he found himself for a moment wanting the group to kill the person he had described as the Antifa kid.

Beyond sounding like something written in Madison Grant’s eugenics tract “The Passing of the Great Race,” Carlson’s claims about “white men” and violence are objectively racist and white supremacist because he delusionally assumes, contrary to the mountains of historical and contemporary evidence to the contrary, the inherent honor and superiority and nobility of “white men” as a specific group.

At Mother Jones, Tim Murphy highlights how Tucker Carlson’s self-serving delusions about “honorable” white men (like him, at least in his own mind) and violence reflect a type of undeserved class superiority and smug elitism:

The text is, nonetheless, a revealing document. Carlson’s career has always been defined by an unrestrained current of elitism. He dismissed people he disagreed with in college as “greasy chicken fuckers.” He asked Hunter Biden to help get his son, Buckley, into Georgetown. As a magazine writer he played the part of the preppiest young man in the club, and ingratiated himself as a in-on-the-joke insider—a power journalist who became a source for power journalists. For a long time, he was famous for wearing a bow-tie. That notion of class loyalty he projected was reciprocated far more than it should have been; it was there every time a former colleague or acquaintance pondered if all this from Carlson was just a bit. It’s the sort of distinction that only makes a difference if you’re in the club too.

I don’t really believe that the Fox board, whose members include former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, only got wise to Carlson’s true beliefs when they saw the text about “how white men fight,” although it’s funny to imagine the conversation if they did. The phrase captures his politics with admirable simplicity: the contempt layered on more contempt. These allies of his are uncivil, they are coarse, they are NOKD. He may slip and become like them, but they are not him. This is the bait-and-switch he played at for years. I can’t think of a more fitting ending for Carlson’s tenure than a seemingly 500-word text that says that the Proud Boys’ great offense is that they’re just not very good WASPs.

That Carlson’s “extremely” racist emails are why he was fired is now just one more hypothesis to add to all the others which include that he was disowned by the Fox “News” family because of a sexual harassment lawsuit or it was the almost 800 million dollar Dominion defamation settlement that did him in or because the Murdochs and other management want to embrace Trumpism even more and Carlson was viewed as incompatible with that plan. Tucker was deemed a threat, one theory holds, because he believes that he is bigger and more powerful than the network. That remains to be seen. 

The answer is likely some combination of all of these answers, with the last one, in my opinion, being the most likely. As has been extensively documented by Media Matters and other watchdog organizations, by virtue of his words and actions, Tucker Carlson has repeatedly shown himself to be an unrepentant and proud racist and white supremacist.

Moreover, Carlson’s popularity (and the money that makes for Fox “News”) with his audience is precisely because of how they crave the poisons of white supremacy in its various forms of Trumpism, neofascism, nativism, white victimology and conspiracism that he gave them every day. Ultimately, Fox “News” featured Tucker Carlson in prime time because of and not despite his white supremacy and other hatred and overall bigotry. To argue otherwise strains all credulity.

Alas, much of the ongoing coverage of Tucker Carlson seems to be veering ever closer to being an example of the worst and most facile and superficial types of public discussions of white supremacy and racism, specifically, and politics and society, more generally.

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Emphasis on an individual person easily gets bogged down in debates over the definition of “racist” rather than sustained and serious discussions of how American society is structured by racism, white supremacy, white privilege, and other forms of unjust racialized opportunity structures, as well as the policies and actions — both on the macrolevel and microlevel — that sustain them. With Carlson, and the next white racist villain of the moment, there will soon be the obligatory deflections and childish distractions of “hearts and minds” and “racist bones,” as in “I don’t know what is in x person’s heart so I can’t say if they are really a racist.” For Carlson, this has included questions like, “Was he sincere? Does he really believe what he says?” [My answer: The question is largely irrelevant. Racism and white supremacy are defined by actions and outcomes not intent.]

So-called “free speech” absolutists and defenders will (and are already) rally to Carlson’s defense and point to his being fired as being some type of unfair censorship and being canceled because he dared to tell some type of dangerous “truths” about “the system” contrary to what the so-called elites and political correctness demanded of him. Carlson is not engaging in parrhesia; At his core, he is a self-interested malign actor who is not committed to the truth but instead to getting (more) money, more narcissistic fuel, and even more political power and influence.

In a healthy and mature society, the Tucker Carlson-Fox News saga would be an entry point for an ongoing discussion of how huge swaths of (White) American society are actively and tacitly committed to and benefit from whiteness, white supremacy, and racism and the material, psychological, political wages and other unearned advantages such forces grant to their owners, beneficiaries, subscribers, adherents, and other believers. A truly healthy and mature American society would then use such discussions about the color line and how it intersects with other systems of inequality and injustice to craft better public policy in service to a true democracy that benefits all citizens in a fundamentally fair and just way.

If America was healthy and mature, its opinion leaders and other influentials in the news media and across the public sphere would also focus on Tucker Carlson as being just a cog in a much larger fascist disinformation and misinformation experience machine and type of political technology that is systemically attacking reality itself, the facts, and the truth.

Ultimately, those of us with a public platform and others who help to shape how the American people think should be focusing on this question: What does Tucker Carlson represent?

How do we in the Fourth Estate and across civil society better connect the specific to the general and the society-wide and perhaps even universal as we try to make better sense of complex matters of public concern and then explain what is really happening so that the American people can make better and more responsible decisions about public policy as well as their own individual lives and communities? Chasing down the next chapter or path in the “Choose Your Own Adventure Tucker Carlson – Fox News storybook” is far easier, and more lucrative, but we must do that necessary and civically responsible work in a time of democracy crisis and other great troubles and challenges.