Media and Journalism

Tucker Carlson Goes Full White Nationalist

Now will people like Glenn Greenwald stop going on his show?

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Tucker Carlson (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

How long before Tucker Carlson calls Black people the n-word live on air, rips off his shirt to reveal a swastika tattoo, or interviews David Duke – and still keeps his job? I’m only half-joking because on the Wednesday night broadcast of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, he explicitly endorsed the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, yet has apparently faced no serious repercussions.

But what’s also noteworthy is that since last year, and especially over the last couple of months, he has become increasingly bold in letting the mask slip, yet also faced no noticeable rebuke from certain populist left-wing figures who have often appeared on his show.

In case you’re not aware, the Great Replacement is the falsehood that Jews are conspiring to gradually replace white people in the West through immigration from the Third World. It’s what the Charlottesville marchers were referring to when they chanted “Jews will not replace us.” If it’s still unclear how serious this is, consider that the country’s most-watched cable news channel just allowed the country’s highest-rated cable news host to openly broadcast neo-Nazi propaganda.

It’s only the most recent example of Carlson undisguisedly airing white nationalist, authoritarian views that he had been dog whistling for years. Two weeks ago, he hosted on Tucker Carlson Today Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, a blogger who is a leading figure in the neo-fascist Dark Enlightenment, but whom Carlson praised as a “public intellectual.” And last month, he spent a week in Budapest fawning over the authoritarian government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In the words of Daily Kos writer David Neiwert, who has covered the far right for years, “It’s now perfectly accurate to describe Fox News as a white-nationalist propaganda organ.”

But don’t expect that description to rattle Fox News and its masters, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, as long as Carlson and his 4.33 million viewers keep making them money.

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On the other hand, you would think that leftists who have repeatedly appeared on Carlson’s program like journalists Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté, commentator Jimmy Dore and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard might feel embarrassed to be seen as in any way associated with someone who has clearly gone skipping off to the Dark Side with Emperor Palpatine. But as far as I can tell, they don’t. And that says a lot.

I should note that when I say “leftists,” I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill Bernie Sanders supporters. Rather, Greenwald, Maté, Dore and Gabbard are panderers to a particular class of erstwhile idealists who, jaded by perennially disappointing political outcomes, become edgy cynics harboring unhealthy levels of bitterness, paranoia and distrust toward the US, its system of government and news media. Such a worldview can make one amenable to far-right ideas.

All of these figures have made multiple appearances on Carlson’s shows since last year, as recently as this week in the case of Greenwald and Gabbard, yet none have offered meaningful criticism of his fascism or publicly pledged to stop going on his show. Greenwald has even taken his side.

Greenwald’s status as part of the left is admittedly questionable, but he is the most prominent guest of the four on Carlson’s show and famously media-savvy, making his silence on the host’s Wednesday comments especially telling. This is the same Glenn Greenwald who implicitly defended Carlson’s Hungarian expedition, using that signature Greenwald recipe of a teaspoon of misrepresentation of the substance of the criticism, a coarsely chopped snarky attack on the critics, a tablespoon of false equivalence and pinch of whataboutism to taste. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath that he’ll wake up and realize that maybe it’s best not to be a willing participant in fascist propaganda anymore.

Likewise, I also don’t anticipate epiphanies from less frequent but still notable guests of Carlson like Dore, who shares Greenwald’s penchant for presenting as part of the left while time and again caucusing with the far right; or Maté, who as a writer for The Grayzone has carved himself a niche writing apologia for the hideous regime of Syrian Ba’athist dictator Bashar al-Assad; or Gabbard, who on Thursday, amid furor over images of US border guards apparently horse whipping Haitian migrants, found time to tweet that Trump’s border policies “worked and need to be reinstated.”

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But the bigger question is why Carlson – who frequently attacks alleged “socialism” – invites such people on his show in the first place, and why they accept his invitations. I suspect it’s a lot deeper than the mere thrill of being on TV or desire for publicity.

New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait observed this phenomenon in December 2019, writing, “Ironically, the same dynamic has brought anti-anti-Trump leftists into their own strange-bedfellow alliances. Leftists like Mate and Glenn Greenwald sometimes appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, giving an edgy, trans-ideological sheen to his increasingly overt white nationalism.”

But Chait described the effect more than the cause.

More recently, on Wednesday, The Guardian columnist George Monbiot remarked on how disturbing it was to see people on the left lured into far-right conspiracy theories through the anti-vaccine movement as “the themes of resisting power and regaining control of our lives have been cynically repurposed.”

But left-right dalliances long predate COVID-19.

A more probable reason why Greenwald, Maté, Dore and Gabbard have so willingly appeared on Carlson’s show and not spoken out against his fascist rhetoric is that they foolishly see him and his audience as potential allies who have some ideas that dovetail with their own – particularly economic populism and anti-war opinions – while they ignore his racism and authoritarianism. After all, Greenwald bizarrely branded Carlson a “socialist.”

For Carlson, I suspect he platforms left-wing figures for the same reason that in 1920 the German Workers’ Party added “National Socialist” to its name, as an attempt to make fascism’s image more attractive for the left and tempt wayward leftists to join the far right. The cynical and heterodox worldviews of the leftists he brings on also tend to encourage apathy toward liberal democracy, and that’s no doubt attractive as well for a host who wants to replace democracy with white supremacist autocracy serving the interests of economic elites like himself.

Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @biotechvisigoth.

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