• An old video of Tucker Carlson from 2006 was posted to Twitter on Wednesday. 
  • The video shows Carlson warning about the dangers of conspiracy theories.
  • Carlson also said it is “vital” that people have a “common frame of reference for reality.”

An old video from a March 2006 panel discussion shows Fox News host Tucker Carlson warning about the dangers of conspiracy theories.

Carlson was speaking at a panel in 2006 titled “The American News Media: Liberal or Conservative Bias?” 

“In a democracy, it is vital that people have, that citizens have, a common frame of reference for reality,” Carlson said. “There has to be a place where all citizens can go, and look at facts about what happened yesterday, and say, you know what, I agree that that’s probably roughly what happened.” 

Carlson added that it’s important that the electorate has a straightforward, honest press to rely on for the truth. 

“In the absence of any universally recognized standard or source of news, what happens? Well, rumors take the place of news,” Carlson said.

“And so ultimately, you have an electorate that is really poorly informed, and incredibly suspicious,” he added. “And in that environment, all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories bloom and take the place of facts.”

A clip of Carlson from the 2006 event was uploaded to Twitter on Wednesday. It was posted by the Republican Accountability Project, an organization that says it aims to point out the “lies and conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud and ‘rigged’ elections.”

At the time of the 2006 panel discussion, Carlson was still a host on the MSNBC program “The Situation with Tucker Carlson.”

Carlson, 17 years on, is now one of Fox News’ firebrand news anchors. He hosts “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” one of the channel’s top shows.

Within the last year, he’s raged about M&Ms, pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, and defended Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

This week, texts from Carlson were published in court filings from Dominion Voting Systems as part of the company’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox. One set of texts was sent by Carlson to an unnamed confidant on January 4, 2021 — two days before the Capitol riot. 

In those messages, Carlson said he looked forward to being able to “ignore” then-President Donald Trump, adding that he hates Trump “passionately.” The sentiment expressed in the texts stands in stark contrast to Carlson’s subsequent promoting of Trump’s baseless voter-fraud conspiracy theories.

In another text exchange published in the court filing, Carlson told the Trump-allied lawyer Sidney Powell that she should not promote voter-fraud conspiracy theories without evidence. 

“You’ve convinced them that Trump will win. If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying,” Carlson texted Powell on November 17, 2020.

This week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Capitol Police chief Thomas Manger, and the White House all criticized Carlson for his show’s reporting on the January 6 Capitol riot. Carlson was given exclusive access to tens of thousands of hours of surveillance footage from the riot, but chose to characterize the violent attack as a touristy visit by mostly peaceful people, they said.

Representatives for Carlson at Fox News did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.