Tucker Carlson—the Fox News star whose brand of barely disguised racism, anti-immigrant nativism, Republican Party fealty, uninhibited disinformation, Trumpist election denial, and bizarre culture-war monologuing turned his show into the highest-rated cable news program in American history—was abruptly canned on Monday morning. So quickly, in fact, that it looks as if there will be no new episodes or any networkwide farewells to Carlson, outside of a brief media statement and an on-air announcement courtesy of Harris Faulkner. For all intents and purposes, Friday night marked the very last Tucker Carlson Tonight episode, an ignominious end for such a highly influential show. A replacement called Fox News Tonight will fill in the prime-time slot effective immediately, with a rotating list of hosts angling to become the next Tucker Carlson.
The exact reason why Fox News pulled the plug on its biggest name, having brushed aside myriad controversies over the course of the show’s six-year reign, remains unclear. One source alleged to the Washington Post that Carlson’s leaked texts from the Dominion legal trial did him in; others report that this move is related to a lawsuit filed by a former Tucker Carlson Tonight producer who brought allegations of sexism and harassment behind the scenes. Whatever the reason, it was clearly not planned well in advance. The Fox network continued to air ads for Carlson’s show over the weekend; the host’s streaming-exclusive series for Fox Nation, Tucker Carlson Originals, kicked off its third season just a couple weeks ago; Friday’s Tucker Carlson Tonight broadcast featured multiple statements inviting the show’s millions of viewers to tune in again Monday. (Incidentally, as my colleague Justin Peters noted, this last episode aired six years to the date after the final episode of The O’Reilly Factor—another once popular Fox show that also suddenly ended after its host was accused of workplace misconduct.)
So, after years of promoting conspiracy theories, hosting big-name politicians and activists, and mourning a supposed decline in male testosterone levels, how did Tucker Carlson Tonight, once touted by its network as the “sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink,” actually end up finishing its run? Well, I watched it, and I can report that it was racist, uncomfortable, and just plain strange.
Democratic “Demographics” and Housing
Somewhat fittingly, the first full segment of Friday’s episode was dedicated to furthering the racist “great replacement theory,” which has long been a Tucker Carlson Tonight mainstay—the idea that liberals are hoping to supplant white Americans by importing swarms of nonwhite immigrants who will vote for Democrats and “change” the United States’ “culture.” Here, Carlson blared a crude graphic of an aviators-clad Joe Biden, imposed over a crowd of brown-skinned immigrants and captioned “Let Them In and Let Them Vote.”
For the electoral prospects of the modern Democratic Party, Carlson explains, “What matters is demographics. You need to import enough people from elsewhere—people who are financially dependent on you in order to live.” Carlson brays that this is what has befallen California, what will eventually befall Texas, and what’s ruining big cities. But the suburbs? Those are still “contested” in terms of their demographic makeup (hmm), and those are the key neighborhoods that elect school boards, state legislators, and members of Congress. “So if you want total control over the entire country, you need demographic change everywhere, including in the suburbs.” Essentially: Democrats want to drive out white residents—like you, the viewer—who live in spacious homes and replace them with outsiders in order to entrench their own power.
From here, the segment takes a long detour into housing—specifically, the decadeslong battles to build more housing in the U.S., to make sprawling neighborhoods much denser, and to integrate communities that are still highly segregated by race. Carlson mentions a 2009 lawsuit that the Obama administration brought against Westchester County, New York, for violating the Fair Housing Act through racially exclusionary zoning practices, and invokes a new federal bill, the HOME Act, that would incentivize local governments not to ban high-rise buildings or high-density housing zones in their neighborhoods. To Carlson, this is nothing less than (white) homeowner apocalypse for (nonwhite) Democratic benefit: “You can’t be safe in your leafy suburb anymore. It has to be urbanized.” After playing clips of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge and Vice President Kamala Harris speaking to current issues with ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods, Carlson expresses shock—shock!—that they would refer to so many homeowners as racist for not wanting new, dense housing in their backyards. See, the housing-concerned government bureaucrats are the real racists here: “If they cared about African Americans, they wouldn’t withdraw the police from the cities.”
To bolster this point, Carlson launches into a bizarre monologue about how the Biden administration is “punishing” Americans with high credit scores—or people “doing the right thing”—by easing approval processes for homebuyers with lower credit scores, many of whom are Black. Carlson seethes that the Biden administration isn’t actually helping such home-seekers by, say, training them for jobs; he claims that the “only” job-training program this administration has successfully set up is “getting Black people to sell weed in cities.” Instead, the government wants to make your neighborhoods dense so as to concentrate more Democratic voters across the country and also enrich their “donors in private equity” who’ve gotten into the housing game.
Then, Carlson brings on a guest: Stephanie Pomboy, CEO of the economic-forecasting firm MacroMavens, who weaves a fanciful narrative about how the Biden administration is taking a leaf from President George W. Bush, whose drive for increased homeownership provided some of the kindling for the financial crisis. (Never mind that Wall Street greed fueled much of the collapse.) But Biden’s plan is “even more sinister,” Pomboy warns. Carlson’s remark to cap all this: “So nicely put!”
Hunter Biden’s Laptop
Carlson utilized his now-former Fox colleague Kevin Corke, a member of the network’s White House press corps, to break down a new letter from House Republicans. This letter reveals that former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell recently testified to Congress about a statement he’d drafted with dozens of former government-intelligence officials before the 2020 election, alleging that the New York Post’s controversial story about Hunter Biden’s laptop might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. In this latest testimony, Morell stated that he’d spoken with Antony Blinken, then an adviser for Biden’s campaign, about the Post’s story—and that this conversation spurred him to put together the intelligence statement. To Carlson, this appears to be full proof that it was Biden and his people who engaged in “election interference” in 2020. (Naturally, this conclusion relies on some convenient elision of the facts.)
Guests!
Though Carlson probably didn’t know this would be his last hurrah, he had a lot of common guests swing by. A short list:
• Clay Travis: The conservative radio host and sports pundit joined to talk about the mass shooters who ravaged Louisville and Nashville—mainly about the fact that the former’s “manifesto” was released to the public while the latter’s still being processed by the FBI. Why? “It doesn’t fit the narrative,” Travis explains. You see, if the Nashville killer had been a male supporter of Trump or Fox News, all his details would have been reported everywhere—but, Carlson claimed, police and politicians are obscuring this letter because the author is “transgenderist.” (The shooter’s gender identity is still unknown, although it appears they were assigned female at birth but used he/him pronouns on a social media profile.) “Why are Republicans helping hide this?” the host wails. (This is not what’s happening.)
• Mark Meckler: From Carlson’s introduction, you’d never get the sense that this guest is a longtime conservative activist who’s headed some prominent organizations (and even written for the Daily Caller, the website Carlson co-founded). The way Carlson talks about him, Meckler merely seems to be an everyday citizen concerned about Chinese fentanyl that’s being routed through Mexican immigrants at the southern border, which is why he’s organizing a rally at the Texas Capitol to get Gov. Greg Abbott to completely seal off the border. “You have a Republican governor who’s actively collaborating with the left” in choosing not to shut down immigration, Carlson tells Meckler, keeping up his frequent negging of the very conservative Abbott.
• Chadwick Moore: The gay conservative writer and frequent Tucker Carlson Tonight guest was on Friday to share the host’s bafflement over the plus sign in the LGBTQIA+ designation. After presenting a clip of Biden stumbling over the acronym in a speech (“senile as always”), Carlson complains that he keeps seeing the plus sign everywhere, doesn’t know what it means, and would like to talk to any “plus people” out there willing to explain. (The plus sign has been used for years and has a fairly straightforward meaning.) Moore is happy to join in on the fun, joking about “lobbying Big Gay,” inviting Carlson to “hide in the plus,” and even claiming that “no one knows what the Q stands for,” which is quite offensive to Carlson, who deems himself “a believer in precision in language.” (Most people are very familiar with all parts of the acronym.)
• Eddie Scarry: The frequent commentator for outlets like the Washington Examiner and the Federalist was part of Tucker Carlson’s rant on the Netflix docuseries Queen Cleopatra, which, in casting a Black actress to play the ancient ruler, serves as another example of how “The Woke Left Is Attempting to Rewrite History,” the chyron reads. Carlson points out that some Egyptian scholars have expressed displeasure with the show, and Egyptian identity “is a thing we take very seriously on this show.” Carlson and Scarry go on to decry the pox of representation in pop culture. “I never felt affirmed by the fact that the skipper [from Gilligan’s Island] was white,” Carlson sneers before bursting out into laughter. “I don’t care. I still don’t.” I’m sure!
Heaven’s Gate, Ukraine, and … Pizza??
From here, things got even stranger. Carlson likened transgender Americans to members of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, who believed in “androgynous immortality” and practiced self-castration. There was an interview with Indiana Sen. Mike Braun about the leaked Pentagon documents and the war in Ukraine, complete with Carlson’s professed desire for more Republicans to be like Mike (read: not supportive of the Ukraine defense effort). And he promoted a new episode of the Fox Nation exclusive Tucker Carlson Originals, in which the host purports to explore why the elites want you to eat bugs. (Since the streaming program was part of Carlson’s 2021 contract with Fox, it’s unclear if we’ll ever know the full answer.) Finally, we have a special appearance from Tyler Morrell, the Pennsylvanian pizza guy whose story went viral after he helped local police apprehend a fleeing suspect while out on a delivery route. Carlson had Morrell on the show earlier in the week to praise his heroism (chyron: “It’s the Yeast I Could Do”), but this time Morrell swung by to personally deliver four boxes of sausage-and-pineapple pizza to Carlson’s desk. “What a great way to end the week—this was a great segment,” Carlson exclaimed while going to town on a slice. “That’s it for the week! We’ll be back on Monday.” Little did he know.
