The text message in question is one from the day after the Jan. 6 coup attempt, and references some of the street fighting between far-right Donald Trump supporters like the Proud Boys and opponents they deemed to be “antifa.” Tucker describes the video to one of his producers thusly:
A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.
That would be the blazingly racist part, and it’s also complete bullshit from Tucker because Tucker assuredly knows full well that one of the most common operational patterns of the Proud Boys and similar very white groups is to stage rallies provoking counterdemonstrators, goad those demonstrators with taunts and threats, and then surround and violently attack whichever demonstrators (or random passersby) present the easiest targets of opportunity. Video of similar fights is commonplace. It’s what the far-right groups do, and in fact the video Tucker is referring to would appear to be from Proud Boy street fights after their December 12, 2020, “March for Trump” in Washington. The violence culminated later that evening in attacks targeting multiple Black churches inside the city, and Tucker got pretty excited seeing those methods in action!
Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be.
Yeah, we’re all reeling in surprise here. Tucker Carlson saw a pro-Trump mob violently attacking a single “Antifa kid” and his immediate instinct was to cheer the mob. Wow, how out of character.
Oh, we should add the rest of the text message just so the white nationalist frozen fish stick heir can’t sue us for hiding his subsequent disclaimer that makes it all better again:
The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?
Ha ha ha ha oh Lord, that part is golden. You can practically hear Jiminy Cricket dictating it into Tucker’s ear right before Tucker unleashes a full can of Raid into his little green face.
Anyway, the Times reports that according to anonymous sources, the Fox News board only became aware of this message on the Sunday before the trial and “grew concerned that the message could become public.” The next day the board informed Fox executives that it was going to hire an outside legal team to probe Tucker “Great Replacement Theory” Carlson’s “conduct.” Remember, this is allegedly the first time that anyone on the Fox News board had been made aware that the primetime host who has been pushing nightly shows about white nationalist conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant misinformation, pandemic misinformation, nightly paranoias, and musings about which M&M mascots seemed most f–kable just might have some baggage they wouldn’t want to make public.
Interpolating from those facts, it appears that the lawyers immediately found plenty of material that Fox News executives couldn’t brush back under the rug without taking on enormous legal risks. The company was already facing a high-profile lawsuit from an ex-producer who charged that the Tucker Carlson show’s staff in particular fostered a grossly misogynistic workplace in which harassment was commonplace; once the Fox News board had some sort of document in their hands that confirmed that, for example, Tucker was also going around calling one of the top women in the company a “c–t,” keeping him around meant they’d be on the hook if that woman or other employees filed lawsuits against them for the same hostile work environment. It was no longer a matter of questionable show content; it was a matter of legal liability.
But, and this is the important part, Tucker Carlson’s messages had already been combed over by company lawyers in great detail. Are we really supposed to believe that on the Sunday before the Dominion trial began, executives “discovered” for the first time that their top white nationalism-promoting host might have some baggage attached?
Bull. Shite. Pure and total nonsense. There is not a chance in hell that the Fox News board did not know that Tucker Carlson was widely accused of racist sentiments and that he led a show infamous inside the company for its hostile work environment. That’s some record spin. Large enough to alter Earth’s orbit spin. Large Hadron Collider-level of company spin. Gawd.
If we were really meant to believe that the Fox News board only learned that Tucker was engaged in inappropriate workplace behavior (sexism, racism, a general toxicity so advanced that Fox executives long ago had to assign him a personal asshole wrangler to mediate between Tucker and the rest of the company), then why the hell would the Fox board not be launching a similar investigation of the company executives that hid all this from them?
One of the most pressing questions you should have when reading any news story based on anonymous sources dishing out special scoops, is Why the hell are we hearing about this now? The New York Times piece is full of clues suggesting that it is a Fox-promoted leak meant to immunize the company from other damaging information that might come out in the coming days. Don’t blame us, the story might as well be titled. When we found out we said good day, sir, and sent him packing.
There’s another possible reason anonymous sources provided the Times with this particular text message at this particular time, and it’s just as likely to be the truth. It was not long ago that Rolling Stone reported, based on similarly anonymous claims, that Fox News had been assembling a secret “oppo file” loaded with materials Tucker Carlson would not want to see made public, and was holding that file specifically to “keep Tucker Carlson in check”—that is, as something to hold over Tucker’s head if he at some point feels the need to start badmouthing Fox or spilling the company’s own internal secrets.
Tucker is exactly the sort of person who would do that, and such standoffs are not exactly rare among the nation’s scuzziest upper crust. So it’s quite possible that this whole New York Times story came about simply because somebody inside Fox decided they needed to drop a hint about the cards they are holding. You’ll note that the Times story doesn’t specifically say that this is the only racist or sexist or otherwise termination-worthy message the Fox News board became aware of on that one unpleasant Sunday. There’s no reason to believe this message is the worst of the bunch, either. It’s just a warning shot.
In the meantime, at least one Fox host with his own history of making racist comments on-air appears to be auditioning for the newly opened White Power Hour gig. Will the Fox board be hiring a team of outside lawyers to look into this one too?
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Dimitri of WarTranslated has been doing the essential work of translating hours of Russian and Ukrainian video and audio during the invasion of Ukraine. He joins Markos and Kerry from London to talk about how he began this work by sifting through various sources. He is one of the only people translating information for English-speaking audiences. Dimitri’s followed the war since the beginning and has watched the evolution of the language and dispatches as the war has progressed.
