He is the most watched and heard guy in America. Also the most hated by half the country, who can't even see it. He's the one who sets the nation on fire every night from eight to nine on the East Coast. The man who keeps alive the flame of polarization recently lit by Donald Trump. He is, in short, the great figure of the American extreme right, beyond the badly wounded institutional politics of the first superpower. Anyone there, and not a few from outside, know that we are talking about Tucker Carlson, a Fox News star, born 53 years ago in California and with a long history as a conservative journalist, but very much on his own terms, as his preference for Broadcast your show from your home in rural Maine.
Carlson's influence and capacity for tension reach such a point that, on the last weekend of April, The New York Times dedicated a very long serial to him, 20,000 words of text in total, culminating in seven pages in a row in the edition Sunday.
The social power of this televangelist is especially worrying today due to his role as the main promoter of the supremacist theory of the great replacement: the thesis on the deliberate substitution of the country's pure whites for "obedient immigrants from the Third World" who, encouraged to come by the liberal elites are making America a “poorer, dirtier” place; a thought in full resurgence and that eight days ago prompted Payton Gendron, 18, to kill ten people and injure three others – all but two black – in a Buffalo supermarket.
Four days after the massacre, the presenter with blue eyes and a permanently furrowed brow was quick to distance himself from the content of the online manifesto that, with explicit defense of the replacement theory, the police attributed to the accused. “The Gendron letter is nothing more than a rambling pastiche,” he said.
Perhaps Carlson wanted to avoid direct accusations of apology for violence after having skirted that dangerous ground in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old boy who in the summer of 2020 killed two people at an anti-racist protest in Kenosha (Wisconsin). Days after the events, the journalist wondered "why should we be surprised that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to keep order when no one else did."
To the scandal of half the country and the satisfaction of Carlson and another large portion of the US, starting with its 3.5 million daily viewers, a jury acquitted Rittenhouse in November, concluding that he acted in self-defense. Then the presenter interviewed him. There he called him "sweet boy".
The New York Times published its mammoth report on the character after analyzing 1,150 episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight. The newspaper focused on the "replacement" conspiracy designed to sink the whites. The commentator cited this thesis in more than 400 episodes.
It is not accidental. Since he debuted his space in November 2016, Carlson has built his rise on an extreme conservatism that had much in common with Trumpism, but was careful to distance himself from the former president. A conservatism woven from exaggerated or false stories about refugees “filling the streets with feces” and plummeting birth rates among natives besieged by prolific foreign “hordes”.
The maker of the highest-rated show in U.S. cable television history hit its all-time high in the second quarter of 2020, with more than 4.3 million viewers. It was when the police killed George Floyd and, before maintaining that he had actually died of an overdose, Carlson said that the Black Lives Matter movement did not seek to defend the lives of blacks but to practice "anti-white racism." And he added: "Remember that when they come for you." Later, the journalist would link that movement to an alleged secret plot after the "montage" of the assault on the Capitol in January 2021.
The documentary in which he developed the idea of this other "conspiracy", Patriot Purge , caused last November the resignation of the conservative analysts Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg to continue collaborating with Fox. Then, in April, the presenter scandalized the rest of the media by accusing them of "lying" and exaggerating about Putin's killings in Ukraine.
But it's the same. The author, also, of the "most racist program in the history of television" (The New York Times) continues to be the most invited guest to the homes of his fellow citizens, every night, in prime time. America burns with Tucker Carlson.
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