- The main story is about Tucker Carlson and his controversial statements.
- Tucker criticized new hairstyles and maternity flight suits in the military, which sparked backlash.
- Tucker is known for causing controversy and has a large audience.
- He has been accused of promoting white supremacist talking points.
- Tucker's background and rise in television are discussed.
- Clips of Tucker's earlier TV appearances show him learning and using certain tactics.
- Tucker has a history of making racially insensitive comments.

- The piece criticizes Tucker Carlson, a TV host, for his tactics and messaging.
- It highlights how he positions himself as someone asking hard questions but heavily implies his own answers.
- The piece points out instances where Carlson's statements have racial undertones or implications.
- It argues that Carlson's main narrative is that white people should be afraid of losing power and that he promotes the preservation of Western civilization.
- The piece concludes by questioning Carlson's consistency and highlighting his careful choice of words to avoid directly linking race and civilization.

- The piece discusses Tucker Carlson and his views on diversity and immigration.
- Tucker Carlson is seen as being scared of a country that looks different from the one he grew up in.
- He is accused of promoting white supremacy and endorsing white supremacist views.
- Tucker Carlson's show sells the idea that the country is colorblind and that anyone who mentions race is trying to start trouble.
- The piece argues that even though Tucker Carlson may not explicitly state his preferred solutions, his white identity politics are dangerous and harmful.
- Millions of viewers watch Tucker Carlson's show, which is seen as promoting harmful views on diversity and immigration.

- The text is a critical analysis of Tucker Carlson and his controversial statements.
- It discusses his background, rise in television, and tactics used in his show.
- Tucker has been accused of promoting white supremacist talking points and making racially insensitive comments.
- The piece highlights his narrative of preserving Western civilization and promoting fear among white people.
- It questions his consistency and careful choice of words to avoid directly linking race and civilization.
- Tucker's views on diversity and immigration are discussed, with accusations of promoting white supremacy.
- The text argues that his white identity politics are dangerous and harmful.
- Tucker Carlson's show has a large audience and is seen as promoting harmful views on diversity and immigration.

Tucker Carlson is admired by white nationalists, elected officials, and maybe some of your relatives or coworkers. Given that he has the ear of so many Americans, John Oliver explains where Tucker came from, what his rhetorical tactics are, and what he represents. 

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Our main story tonight concerns, I'm sorry to say, Tucker Carlson, a man who gives Tuckers an even worse name than they already have.

This week, as he now seems to every week, Tucker set off a bit of a firestorm.

So we've got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits.

While China's military becomes more masculine as it's assembled the world's largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine.

Whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no longer exist.

What are you talking about, you performatively outraged wedge salad?

Now, he's packed a lot in there, from transphobia to weirdly extolling the masculinity of China's navy to his completely misplaced outrage at Joe Biden over those flight suits, which were part of an initiative that started when Trump was president, and also included ensuring that body armor actually fits women service members, which is obviously a good idea.

Those comments sparked an all-too-familiar cycle of condemnation, defensiveness, and hype.

And it seems like every week now, Tucker has another 1 of these mini controversies.

And look, I would like nothing more than to not play into his wildly offensive shtick.

You might even be thinking right now, why give him the attention that he's so clearly trolling for?

But the fact is, we're not giving Tucker any attention he's not already getting a lot of.

The night he made those flight suit remarks, he was the most watched show on cable.

He averages over 3000000 views a night and does well in the Key 25 to 54 demo, meaning that young people are watching him, as well as the normal Fox audience of retirees and their sad, imprisoned pets.

He is so important to the network that they are expanding Tucker's presence, launching a new video podcast and long-form documentary series.

And if that wasn't enough, Tucker's also been floated as a potential future presidential candidate, which should be seriously alarming, because of all the things that Tucker is, a conspiracy theorist, a misogynist, Islamophobe, a troll, 1 of the most dangerous is that he is the most prominent vessel in America for white supremacist talking points.

And I already know what Tucker will say about this because whenever this topic comes up, he has the exact same reaction, what does that even mean?

I don't even know what white nationalism means, and I'm not gonna go down that rabbit hole with you now.

Why doesn't anyone ever define white supremacy?

Can somebody tell us in very clear language what a white supremacist is?

Okay, first, very clear language seems like a high bar to clear for a man who spends 85 percent of his time making the befuddled face of a 13th century farmer learning about Bitcoin.

And I promise that we're actually gonna give Tucker a pretty clear definition of white supremacy later in this piece.

Because whenever he tries to define it himself, it tends to be self-servingly narrow.

This show was not on the air for 6 months before there was an organized and highly aggressive campaign by prominent Democrats to denounce us as white supremacists.

The first time it happened, the people who work on this show, many of them kids, were shocked and horrified by that.

The phrase evokes images of burning crosses and lynchings.

I honestly didn't realize that your show was staffed entirely by children.

I certainly never intended for them to get caught up in all of this, so my sincere apologies, you tiny little rascals.

But, I don't burn crosses or lynch people so I can't be a white supremacist is a pretty weak argument.

It's like saying I can't be an anti-Semite because I didn't do the Holocaust, or I can't be a sexual predator because I didn't produce Goodwill Hunting.

There is more than 1 way to be a terrible person.

And Tucker, conveniently for him, doesn't fit neatly into a lot of people's perception of white supremacists, especially if they share his definition that it must require burning crosses, clan hoods, and a name tag that says, hello, my name is a racist.

You might even have friends who think, Tucker can't be racist.

I've never heard him say the N-word, as if that is the fucking bar.

But for the record, white supremacists themselves seem to be big fans of what Tucker's been doing.

Just listen to Derek Black, a former white supremacist whose father started Stormfront, the largest, oldest white supremacist site on the Internet, talk about just how much his family likes Tucker's show.

My family watches Tucker Carlson's show once, and then watches it on the replay, because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have.

And they're trying to get some tips on how to advance it.

They watch it once to enjoy it and a second time to learn from it.

They watch Tucker the same way I watch the Drew Barrymore show.

First time for fun, second to figure out how she can possibly successfully pull off a segment in which a child makes a Shirley Temple while Stanley Tucci quietly drinks an entire glass of wine on a screen in the background.

I don't know how you work your magic, Drew, but I want to learn.

So given that Tucker has the admiration of white supremacists and the ear of millions of your relatives, co-workers, and elected officials, we thought tonight it would be worth talking about him.

Where he came from, what his tactics are, and why what he represents is so dangerous.

Tucker grew up in La Jolla, California, where his dad married an heiress to the Swanson TV dinner fortune, which is already interesting, because if Tucker's got sad 70s single man frozen food money, that means he's been doing groundbreaking shows like, Cuckolding is When a Humiliated Man Watches His Wife Have an Affair for the Love of the Game.

Now, to hear Tucker tell it, he grew up in a simpler, better time.

He once wistfully claimed, racial solidarity wasn't a working concept in my Southern California hometown.

Most people barely had last names, much less ethnic identities, Which is a pretty weird thing to say if your full name is Tucker Swanson McNeer Carlson, and your ethnic identity can best be described as, my brother's name is Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson.

The only way he could get any more ethnically white is if he jizzed mayonnaise.

Now, as a child, Tucker was sent to boarding school where he promptly did 2 things.

Fail to impress any number of prestigious universities and start dating the headmaster's daughter, a headmaster who, in return, arranged to get him into Trinity College.

He then became a print journalist, reportedly after his father told him that journalism will take anybody, which, to his dad's credit, did kind of turn out to be true.

Tucker's link to TV, though, came as an accident.

Supposedly, back in the 90s, Dan Rather's show called The Magazine Where Tucker Was Working, looking for somebody to talk about the OJ trial.

And the receptionist there told him, everyone else is still at lunch, can you do it?

Which might be the single whitest origin story I have ever heard.

But despite his total lack of preparation, Tucker was almost immediately hitting on themes that he'd be echoing for the next 25 years.

Because here's 1 of his very first TV appearances in the aftermath of the OJ verdict.

Carlson, do you think we're honest with each other race to race?

I mean, you know, everybody is terrified of, of 1 thing, you know, whites are of course terrified of being called a racist, blacks are terrified of being belittled, of course.

I think we need actually probably less conversation about race.

I think it might do us good were we to ignore the subject a little bit and treat each other as if there were no color boundary separating us.

I think we talk about it in some ways too much.

Okay, first, I'm pretty sure that black people are less terrified of being belittled than of being killed, jailed, economically exploited, or indeed, denied access to healthcare after their heads literally explode from hearing someone in a bow tie and plaid blazer suggest being called racist is as bad as actually experiencing racism.

Although, I do want to quickly come back to that specific bow tie, because look, I'm not knocking bow ties in general.

They're perfectly fine for a child attending his first communion or a Hanna-Barbera animator who can't draw necks.

Don't just put on a tiny bow tie and hope that no 1 notices.

Now, From there, Tucker bounced around a bit with canceled shows on both CNN and MSNBC.

Although, in his time at CNN, he did manage to produce, and I don't say this lightly, the most 2003 clip of all time.

Candidly, just between you and me, how much Pepsi do you think you drink on an average day?

Don't do gotcha journalism about her Pepsi consumption.

Not only has she been through a lot, she's a stone-cold legend.

She's the definitional diva of the 2000s, and I guarantee you, there is not a human being on Earth who doesn't perk up when that violin hook from Toxic comes on.

Put some motherfucking respect on her name, Tucker, and of course, hashtag FreeBritney.

And while Tucker eventually fell upwards into a prime-time Fox show in 2016, the fascinating thing is, If you go back and watch his earlier clips, you can see him learning the tricks of his trade right in front of you.

Watch him talk about Pat Buchanan, the Republican firebrand and noted anti-immigrant crusader, and break down 1 of Buchanan's go-to moves with the precision of a dedicated student.

I mean, Pat does raise issues that I think are important.

Unfortunately, Pat Buchanan raises them in a way that I think is discredited.

And when it's hacked, he can always fall back on the line, well, the tiny cabal that controls American politics doesn't like me because I speak truth to power.

This is actually incidentally almost verbatim what he said the other day, that I offend the plutocracy, that I'm a wanted man by the inside the beltway people and in in in every sense cast himself as a as a victim who is sort of a Karen Silkwood of politics.

Someone who's so truthful that he's being hunted down by the conspiracy that runs Washington.

And that is actually a pretty salient point there.

It's just incredibly hard to take, given who's making it.

In the same way, it'd be hard to listen to a lecture on gun safety and overall life choices from Tekashi69.

I don't care how good your advice is, I'm not taking it from you.

Because the tiny cabal that controls American politics doesn't like me because I speak truth to power is now Tucker's signature move.

He does it all the time, whenever he's criticized.

A few years ago, he lost advertisers after saying, and I quote, that immigrants make our country poorer and dirtier and more divided.

The enforcers scream, racist, on Twitter, until everybody gets intimidated.

We plan to try to say what's true until the last day.

And the truth is, unregulated mass immigration has badly hurt this country's natural landscape.

Oh, fuck off, Tucker, you relentlessly indignant picket fence.

How did you go from criticizing Pat Buchanan for that precise tactic to basically imitating him?

It's all, to borrow a phrase, a bit much.

But that technique gets to the absolute heart of Tucker's show.

So often, he positions himself as someone just asking the hard questions, the ones that they don't want you asking.

Questions like, is affirmative action racist?

And should America be selective with immigrants?

And has the Democratic Party become anti-white and anti-male, just asking questions while heavily implying that the answer to those questions is yes.

But when in turn, anyone questions him, they are not just censoring free speech, they are launching an attack on the foundations of our democracy and the vast working class who this humble TV dinner princeling somehow represents.

And the most telling thing about Tucker's framing of himself as the scourge of the elites and the hero of the common man is that for Tucker, who constitutes the common man, is very selective.

Just watch him lose his shit over a clip that he's about to play of something she said.

If anyone should love America, it's Ilhan Omar.

This country rescued her from a squalid Kenyan refugee camp and made her a national figure, quite an assent.

Watch Omar tell us it is time to dismantle our country.

As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality.

So we cannot stop at criminal justice system.

We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.

Dismantle the American economy and the American system of government.

Institutions that generations of Americans built over hundreds of years.

right, there is already enough there in the sneering condescension that Ilhan Omar should be quietly grateful her entire life because she was granted asylum when she was a child.

But let's just consider the vast distance between what you just heard her say and what he seemed to hear.

Because according to Tucker, dismantling the system of oppression means dismantling the entire American economy and system of government.

Now, did he inadvertently make a nuanced point about how systemic oppression is definitionally baked into every level and facet of that very same system?

Am I gonna give him credit for doing that?

Fuck no, especially not when this is what he said next.

The problem is, there are many of us here who do like this country.

We have every right to fight to preserve our nation and our heritage and our culture.

In fact, his pre-written caption there, We have to fight to preserve our nation and heritage.

Drew a lot of comparisons to the 14 words, the famous white supremacy slogan that says, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

And when you put the 2 together, there is, you know, a slight similarity there.

I'm just saying, if you typed Tucker's quote into a blank Word document, 9 times out of 10, Clippy's gonna ask, are you trying to recite the 14 words?

Now, of course, Clippy has been asking that a lot more ever since he started spending so much time on YouTube.

Careful how much time you spend on there, Clippy.

And if you think, well, come on, that seems like a bit of a stretch.

You can't know what Tucker means by our heritage and culture.

You should know that he hasn't always been that disciplined about his messaging.

In the late 2000s, he used to call into a radio show hosted by shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge.

And in those calls, the thin veil covering his racism would occasionally get thrown off in moments like this.

A rock is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate primitive monkeys.

I just have 0 sympathy for them or their culture, a culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks.

Okay, that isn't just incredibly offensive, it's also the kind of fact-free cultural hot take that is the essential Tucker Carlson experience.

Because while it is clearly by no means the most important thing there, for the record, table forks were apparently first used in the Middle East and Byzantine Empire, and were still conspicuously absent in Europe until centuries later.

In fact, when the niece of a Byzantine emperor brought a case of forks to Venice for her wedding feast in the 11th century, she was roundly condemned by the local clergy for her decadence, with 1 saying...

Which is absolutely fascinating, because it's not just a full refutation of Tucker's lazy racism, it's also a very fun fork fact.

The point is, when you know how Tucker speaks when he speaks freely, the filter through which he processes the world for his audience becomes painfully apparent.

Because he is smart enough not to openly say into a camera that certain races are more deserving of scorn or less worthy of respect.

He will just heavily imply that depending on who he's talking about.

Tucker said that he deplored the violence, but repeatedly compelled his viewers to try and understand where the demonstrators were coming from.

On January 6th, we had a riot at the U.S.

It happened because millions of American voters were convinced that the last election was not fair.

Well, it wasn't simply because the last president told them so.

You're hearing that now as if they're animals who take commands and do what they're told, but they're not animals.

They're people, they're American citizens who can see what's happening and come to their own conclusions about it.

They saw the radical increase in mail-in voting, millions did, and it corroded their faith and the public's faith in our systems of election.

People didn't think the election was rigged because they saw an increase in mail-in voting.

They thought that because people like you repeatedly told them the election was rigged.

And that plea for understanding there is especially hard to take when you contrast it with how he reacted to last summer's Black Lives Matter protests.

They don't volunteer or pay taxes to help other people.

They do exactly what they feel like doing.

They say exactly what they feel like saying.

They spray paint their opinions on buildings.

On television, hour by hour, we watch these people, criminal mobs, destroy what the rest of us have built.

They don't contribute to the common good, they never have.

Yet suddenly, they seem to have all the power.

And It is interesting to see who gets to be American citizens who came to their own conclusions, and who gets to be criminal mobs who destroy what the rest of us have built.

And it does seem like the dividing line for Tucker on that question is, how easily can you sunburn?

And look, my point here isn't that Tucker is inconsistent in addressing 2 violent protests in vastly different ways.

It's that he's actually incredibly consistent.

Because in both instances, his clear takeaway is that white people should be terrified at the idea of any situation where they aren't in power.

The main narrative of Tucker's show is that power is being taken away from you, his viewer, and that this needs to be resisted.

He's run segments just asking questions, remember?

Like, how exactly is diversity our strength?

And has argued not just that it isn't, but that it's a threat to our existence as a cohesive country.

In fact, he'll often call to resist that threat with an interesting choice of phrase.

And so we've got to fight to preserve it.

It's a war with 1 side trying to erase all remnants of its opponent.

Is the culture into which they're coming, the Western civilization we're talking about, superior to the culture that these immigrants are bringing.

Do you think it's possible to move a large Muslim population into the West and successfully integrate them into Western culture?

For Tucker, it seems Western civilization is somehow both the mighty and essential bedrock upon which all modern human existence is built, and also a delicate house of cards that will collapse if you so much as look at it wrong.

And again, he will be careful not to verbally link race and civilization, like he's calling in to a Love Sponges radio show in 2006, but he will occasionally dance incredibly close to it.

Let me just stipulate, I'm for getting along, I'm for colorblindness, I'm for tolerance, 100 percent.

But I also think that if things radically change in your country, it's okay for you to say, what is this?

And maybe I don't want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in.

That's like saying, I've got 10 fingers and toes, a pointy face with a little pink rosebud mouth, a cat-sized body, a long, weird tail, and I eat garbage.

That's the literal definition of the thing you just described.

He'll insist that he's for colorblindness.

He'll build in deniability by phrasing things as a question like, what does racism look like?

But when you put all of this together, the pattern is clear.

He is scared of a country that looks nothing like the 1 he grew up in, because diversity isn't our strength, immigrants make our country poorer, dirtier, and more divided, and any attempt to change that culture is an attack on Western civilization.

All of which is really just a long way of saying that when Tucker asks, what is white supremacy?

It's a belief that in a country where white people are dominant, that's all down to their natural and innate abilities, and any effort to change that is an affront to the natural order of things.

So, it's frankly no wonder that that guy's family watches Tucker twice a night.

Of course Tucker has been endorsed by white supremacists.

James Alsop, a far-right activist who marched in Charlottesville, once said this to a conference room full of fellow white supremacists.

An example of someone engaging in very effective rhetoric is, of course, Tucker Carlson.

Tucker is helping mainstream conservatives change the way they think about politics and causing a massive swath of Trump voters to look deeper into many of the issues that we already talk about.

The left is aware of what he's doing, and He's aware of what he's doing, so it works phenomenally.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Oh, that might be the single worst laugh I have ever heard, and I say that as someone who has almost forgotten what human laughter sounds like.

I've been stuck inside Casper's asshole for 12 long months now.

I'm so desperate to hear the response of a live audience.

But if it is a neo-Nazi chuckle, ping-ponging off the walls of a hotel ballroom, I think I might be out.

And look, if everything I've shown you tonight somehow still isn't enough, let's hear from a literal former grand wizard of white supremacists, David Duke.

He's not only tweeted approvingly about Tucker in the past, saying, Tucker is right and can't cuck the tuck, which as all Tucker viewers know, refers to when a humiliated man watches his wife have an affair.

Duke even has a podcast where he sometimes just recaps Tucker's segments from the night before.

Last year, when endorsing Trump for president, Duke even suggested that Tucker Carlson should be his VP, explaining Tucker's value to the white supremacist cause like this.

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Tucker Carlson: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)