Far-right laments Tucker Carlson’s ouster

Beyond the attacks and misinformation, Carlson also embraced some of the more extreme views of white supremacists.

An analysis last year by The New York Times found that Carlson had repeatedly promoted a racist conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement Theory, which posits that Jews and Democrats encourage immigration, feminism and gender nonconformity as part of a conspiracy to wipe out the white race. The analysis found he devoted at least 600 segments to white victimhood. 

Without Carlson, experts say, a sort of pipeline carrying misinformation and hateful ideologies from the fringes of the internet to a large national audience is now missing a crucial juncture. 

“Tucker Carlson often looks for relatively obscure figures and theories that are basically defenses of white supremacy and gender binary ideologies,” said A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor who studies right-wing movements and media at the University of Alabama.

“He platforms those and finds ways of amplifying peculiar, narrow theories that don’t have a widespread circulation,” Bauer said. “Because of that, he’s been particularly dangerous with regard to the problems of misinformation and conspiracy thinking. These fringe and marginal figures who struggled to get mainstream media access saw Tucker Carlson as their route into the mainstream.” 

White supremacist message boards, which frequently watched along live with Carlson’s show, were overloaded with posts lamenting his firing.

Users on the politics board on 4chan implored one another to “stop flooding the board” with new threads announcing his departure.

“Tucker’s one of the last /ourguys/,” a 4chan user wrote, referring to a meme among white nationalists to identify fellow travelers online.

“Bad times coming, anons. Been obvious for a while, but it seems to be reaching its apogee,” another 4chan user wrote.

The “newslinks and articles” board on Stormfront, the web’s oldest self-identifying white nationalist message board, was flooded with new posts lamenting the cancellation of Carlson’s show.

The forum’s posts usually struggle to crack double-digit replies, but a thread about the Carlson news had over 200 posts, many of which blamed his firing on an antisemitic conspiracy theory about control of the media.

NBC News was unable to reach Carlson for comment. He did not respond to direct messages on Twitter, and messages left on cellphone numbers and at an email address associated with him were not answered.

Other prominent white nationalists, like Nick Fuentes and the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, brushed off Carlson’s impact, saying they do not believe his ability to “soft redpill” his audience — or slowly radicalize them into white supremacy — had a major impact.

Eric Owens, who worked for Carlson for five years when Carlson was The Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief, said the future of the far right-to-mainstream pipeline depends on what Fox News executives decide to do next.

“Are they actually worrying about making the country better and avoiding these lawsuits in the future, or are they just going to replace him with another newer, cheaper Tucker?” Owens said in an interview, referring to Dominion Voting Systems’ recent lawsuit against Fox.

Owens, who has frequently renounced The Daily Caller’s current iteration, said Carlson noticeably changed between the time he began working at The Daily Caller in 2012 and when he left in 2018.

“I don’t know what happened to Tucker,” Owens said. “I think the executives at Fox News just kind of lost control, and I think they’re scared.”

Owens pointed to Carlson’s text messages unveiled in the Fox-Dominion trial, which cost the network $787 million to settle. In the texts, Carlson noted that telling the truth about the 2020 election was “measurably hurting the company” and noted that “the stock price is down” while insisting that the network should stop accurately reporting on the results.

“They became a juggernaut, and then they realized they had to serve these really bad impulses,” Owens said of Fox News.

Whether Fox News tries to reproduce the pipeline Carlson built or whether Carlson could rebuild it at another outlet remains to be seen. 

“The question becomes if the grievance machine is still going to need feeding and someone to feed it, what can Fox News add to that time slot?” Faris, of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, asked. “How are they going to replace Tucker?”