13 Terrible Things Tucker Carlson Said That DIDN’T Get Him Fired

Fox News has broken up with headline host Tucker Carlson, announcing in a terse statement on Monday that the departure was effective immediately.

The news comes as a surprise. During the years in which the host built his status at Fox News hawking racism, conspiracy theories, and seeding hatred and discrimination into the minds of his viewers, the network’s corporate overlords stood behind him at every turn. Time and time again, the network protected Carlson through public backlash, advertiser boycotts, and a sea of reporting errors that would have cost most any other media figure their job. At one point, Carlson went so far as to publicly thank  “Fox and the Murdoch family for the unwavering support of this show day after day.”

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That unwavering support has come to an abrupt end. But Carlson should have been removed from the airways long ago. That Fox allowed him to carry on as long as they did is the single greatest indictment of how poisonous the network has become. A comprehensive list of all of the horrid things Carlson broadcast on his show could fill tomes, but here are just some of the most egregious on-air statements made by the now former Fox host.

2. In December of 2018, Carlson accused immigrants coming to the United States of making the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” The resulting backlash resulted in at least 20 companies pulling their ads from Tucker Carlson Tonight. 

2. The network did not reprimand Carlson in 2019, when progressive watchdog Media Matters unearthed tapes of Calrson’s appearances on shock jock radio host Bubba The Love Sponge’s show. In the recordings, Carlson credited “white men” for “creating civilization.” In one recording, the Fox Host, previously a staunch defender of the war in Iraq, said he felt “no sympathy” for Iraqis, calling them “semiliterate primitive monkeys.” He went on to say that Afghanistan would never “be a civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.” Despite another advertiser boycott, Carlson remained defiant, and Fox News stood behind him.

3. During his time at Fox, Carlson was the leading voice in right-wing media promoting the racist, anti-semitic, “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Carlson repeatedly warned viewers that Democrats were “importing” new citizens “to replace the disobedient ones.” Carlson once likened the Biden administration’s immigration policy to “eugenics” against white people.

4. The Fox host was a staunch opponent of the Black Lives Matter movement, and often invoked racist tropes and stereotypes to justify violence and discrimination against Black Americans. On June 3, 2020, Carlson centered his monologue around a montage of unarmed Black Americans who were killed by police, laying out his reasoning as to why each victim deserved to have been killed.

5. Carlson’s insistence that racial violence was a myth permeated his show on an almost nightly basis, even in the face of the most grotesque news. In the aftermath of a 2019 shooting in an El Paso Walmart, which was carried out by a man looking to target immigrants, Carlson claimed that the concept of white supremacy was a “hoax.”

6. Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, Carlson became one of the loudest figures in the country spreading unfounded conspiracy theories about vaccines. Carlson exploited unreliable data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to claim that the Covid-19 vaccine was “the single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history.”

7. Carlson would go on to liken vaccine requirements to Jim Crow laws, and at one point claimed that vaccination requirements in the US military were intended to “identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anybody else who doesn’t love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately.”

8. Like many of his colleagues at Fox News, Carlson worked on behalf of former President Donald Trump to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The host to this day spreads claims of subversion in the election. But in its immediate aftermath, Carlson pushed claims that mail-in-voting had contributed to fraud, that dead people had voted for Biden en-masse, and hosted election conspiracy theorists Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell.

9. In perhaps one of the most absurd on air statements made by a Fox News anchor regarding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Carlson claimed that violent protesters who breached the building  “were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers.”

10. Carlson repeatedly  attempted to rewrite the events of Jan. 6. In November of 2021 Carlson released a two part special on Fox’s streaming service Fox Nation titled “Patriot Purge.” The special argued that Jan. 6 was a “false flag” attack orchestrated by the government to usher in a purge of Republican voters.

11. Earlier in his Fox career, Carlson was already making the rampant misogyny fueling his commentary known. During an interview with Teen Vogue editor Lauren Duca, who had criticized Ivanka Trump on Twitter, Carlson told Duca to “stick to the thigh-high boots. You’re better at that.” The interview resulted in a widespread wave of harassment against Duca, including threats of death and rape.

12. In the 2019 Bubba The Love Sponge tapes Carlson defended convicted child rapist and cult leader Warren Jeffs, and made several perverse, sexual remarks about prominent journalists and entertainers. Fox did not level any consequences against their host.

13. During his tenure at the network, Carlson leveled intense attacks against Transgender people and the LGBTQ community. In the months leading up to his ousting from Fox, Carlson called transgender individuals “a cancer on the country” and suggested that teachers who discussed gender orientation with their students should “get beaten up.”

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