Comment: Tucker has had his say; it’s what you would expect

Published 1:30 am Monday, May 1, 2023

By Aaron Blake / The Washington Post

Tucker Carlson has finally responded to his abrupt dismissal from Fox News; kind of.

In a two-minute video released Wednesday night on Twitter, Carlson doesn’t directly address the circumstances behind his exit on Monday. A growing volume of reporting suggests that when Carlson and Fox “agreed to part ways,” as Fox put it in its announcement, it had to do with concerns about Carlson’s increasingly extreme rhetoric, his clashes with management, and his use of vulgar and gender-specific terms for women, as revealed in Dominion Voting Systems’ recently settled defamation lawsuit against Fox. It appears there is even more behind the redactions in the lawsuit filings that disturbed the higher-ups at Fox.

But the vague messages offered in Carlsons’ video do seem at least to allude to the circumstances he suggests are responsible for his firing; even as he rather characteristically offers vast oversimplifications and invites his supporters to believe there may be some sort of conspiracy against his ability to speak.

The comments point to what may be a next act for a cable news host who rather quickly amassed significant political power on the right and could wield that power in the months and years to come.

Below is what Carlson said, with our annotations.

CARLSON: Good evening, it’s Tucker Carlson.

One of the first things you realize when you step outside the noise for a few days is how many genuinely nice people there are in this country — kind and decent people, people who really care about what’s true — and a bunch of hilarious people, also. A lot of those. It’s got to be a majority of the population, even now. So that’s heartening.

The other thing you notice when you take a little time off is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are. They’re completely irrelevant. They mean nothing. In five years, we won’t even remember that we had them. Trust me, as someone who’s participated.

Analysis: Carlson starts out on a harmonious and self-deprecating note. Certainly more than most, he leaned in on such frivolous topics as whether the M&M spokes-candies were sexy enough and what the former romance-novel model Fabio’s views on the economy and homelessness in California were. But Carlson suggests that maybe he’s done with all that.

It’s also worth noting that he suggests that he came to these realizations after just two days of unemployment. Apparently after brief periods of time off in the past, such sudden enlightenment remained elusive, but here we are.

CARLSON: And yet, at the same time — and this is the amazing thing — the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources.

When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.

Analysis: This is well-worn territory for Carlson: suggesting that the things he likes to discuss (when his programming topics have been more serious) are somehow verboten. It couldn’t possibly be that his commentary on the war in Ukraine was overly sympathetic to the Russian invaders, or that he used debunked documents to make his case; no, it’s that you’re not supposed to talk about any war, at all. It’s not that the “great replacement theory” he has espoused is racist; it’s that powerful people have banned any discussions of demographic change more broadly.

Of course, you can debate these topics, and the media regularly does. But Carlson at least seems to point to the reasons for his departure as being connected to how he covered these things, which fits with reporting from The Washington Post, the New York Times and others.

It makes sense to focus on that, given that it feeds into a narrative Carlson has carefully crafted over the years and avoids addressing the other reported reasons for his departure, including his treatment of women.

CARLSON: Both political parties and their donors have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly the United States looks very much like a one-party state.

That’s a depressing realization, but it’s not permanent. Our current orthodoxies won’t last. They’re brain dead. Nobody actually believes them. Hardly anyone’s life is improved by them. This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue. And so it won’t. The people in charge know this; that’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive. They’re afraid. They’ve given up persuasion. They’re resorting to force.

Analysis: Again, a very broad assertion about how powerful forces are conspiring against the little guy (read: Carlson) and disfavored speech. This feeds into the “uniparty” conspiracy theory: the idea that forces that seemingly disagree on a whole lot are, in fact, working together to stifle those who would dare to step outside their orthodoxies.

If we’re reading between the lines, Carlson suggests that Fox is part of the uniparty, and that his firing amounts to “resorting to force.” (He doesn’t directly say this, of course.) And to the extent it’s a statement of purpose moving forward, it would seem to be a warning shot for a network that the Dominion documents showed was deathly afraid of alienating its audience.

CARLSON: But it won’t work. When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars who’ve been trying to silence them shrink, and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail.

Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some, and that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope.

See you soon.

Analysis: There continues to be great irony in Carlson and his allies pitching him as being someone fired for telling hard truths. In addition to promoting baseless and thinly constructed conspiracy theories, the facts on his shows were often just wrong, and the journalism that undergirded his show was often shoddy.

It wasn’t just his claims about specific dead people voting in 2020 who were actually alive, or using an altered document from the Ukraine war to argue against U.S. involvement; it was also repeatedly botching coronavirus data. It was claims about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack that simply didn’t comport with the evidence.

Carlson was often careful to offer conspiracy theories that weren’t easily disprovable; for example, that certain Jan. 6 figures were actually government agents. But it’s worth emphasizing how seldom those theories wound up being substantiated in any way. His show increasingly resembled the content you’d find on Infowars.

If anything, Carlson suggests his unshackling will just lead to more of that. But we’ve seen in the Dominion case how this kind of coverage can create expensive legal problems, and he would now be doing this without the backing of a major corporation. Of course, if people try to fight back against Carlson’s claims, he will probably say they are trying to silence him.

Aaron Blake is senior political reporter for The Washington Post, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper.