Until his abrupt ouster on Monday, Tucker Carlson used his primetime Fox News show — the most-watched hour on cable news — to inject a dark strain of conspiracy-mongering into Republican politics.
He's railed against immigration, claiming "it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided."
He's called white supremacy a "hoax" and asserted hate speech is "a made-up category designed to gut the First Amendment and shut you up."
As Fox News's "tentpole," drawing around three million viewers a night, Carlson's show "has been both a source of that kind of nationalist, populist conservatism that Donald Trump embodied, but it's also been a clearinghouse for conspiracies," said Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who studies conservative media.
Many of the false narratives Carlson promoted were part of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, the racist fiction that non-white people are being brought into the U.S. to replace white voters.
The theory was once considered the fringe territory of white nationalists. But "thanks to Tucker Carlson, this kind of dreck that you would normally only see on far-right forums and online spaces had a primetime audience on cable news every night," said Melissa Ryan of CARD Strategies, which tracks disinformation and extremism online.
Carlson's show gave many Fox News viewers what they wanted, she said, including false claims about the 2020 election, COVID vaccines, and the January 6th Capitol insurrection,...
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