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Tucker Carlson

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You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country, it means killing people.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson (born May 16, 1969) is an American conservative political commentator, reporter, author and columnist. He hosted the nightly political talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News from 2016 to 2023. Since his contract with Fox News was terminated, he has hosted Tucker on the X social network.

Quotes

[edit]

1990s

[edit]
  • [Grover] Norquist is a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep . . . an embarrassing anomaly, the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home . . . [He] is repulsive, granted, but there aren't nearly enough of him to start a purge trial.
  • I thought I'd be ragged for writing a puffy piece. My wife said people are going to think you're hunting for a job in the Bush campaign.
  • The wonderful thing is we're allowed to say what we think . . . Your stories can be more true, more honest, more direct. If a person at a press conference says something I think is ludicrous, I get to say it's ludicrous . . . You try not to distort the truth because someone you're profiling you think is on the right side of abortion or trade or any other issue. That would be dishonest.
  • I have a lot of trouble writing or doing anything unless the pressure is on . . . If left to my own devices, I'd spend a lot of time playing with my kids and my dogs.

2000s

[edit]
Politics deserves more color.
  • It's a good thing Al Gore has an unappealing demeanor, or George W. Bush would be in real trouble. Bush delivered a mediocre performance at the first presidential debate in Boston. For the first half an hour he appeared nervous. Several times he seemed to lose his train of thought in mid-sentence. Though he relaxed as the night progressed, his remarks often lacked focus. He left Gore's endless attacks on the "wealthiest one percent of Americans" essentially unchallenged. He offered no defense of his own pro-life views, allowing Gore, a genuine extremist on abortion, to sound like the candidate with the mainstream position. He even let Gore interrupt him, repeatedly. Bush was not impressive. Happily for Republicans, Gore was far worse. If George W. Bush is elected president, it will be to a great extent because millions of undecided voters entered the voting booth, considered the phrase "President Gore," and shuddered.
  • Most of the time you can beat a woman in an argument. But what do you win? Nothing. You get short-term pleasure followed by a lot of pain.
  • I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting [the Iraq War]. It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually.
  • But the real story here is an 85-year-old grandmother is attempting to start a class action suit, a frivolous lawsuit, against this video game manufacturer. I thought the elderly were immune from embarrassing behavior like starting frivolous class action lawsuits but they’re not, are they?
  • [T]he idea that if you buy some creepy video game for your grandson knowing it’s a creepy video game, it turns out to be even creepier than you thought, then you’re owed thousands by the people who made it? Ah, no!
  • Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York . . . Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he’s nice but you don't take him seriously. That's Canada.
  • It only eggs them on. Canada is essentially a stalker, stalking the United States, right? Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right?

Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites

[edit]
  • Politics deserves more color. The legislative process needs more people like Don Young. Young, the Republican congressman from Alaska, once used a walrus penis bone as a prop during a congressional hearing. As Mollie Beatty, then the director of the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, spoke about the need to protect endangered species from hunting, Young angrily slapped the eighteen-inch bone against his hand.
  • It was Jack Oliver, the deputy finance chairman of the Bush campaign. He was upset—so upset, I couldn't make out his words at first. "You fucked us!" he yelled. "I can't believe you did that. We gave you all this access, and you fucked us in return." Bush hadn't liked the piece at all. In fact, I later heard from someone who was with him at the time, he was wounded by it.
  • I had just gotten off the Crossfire set when one of our producers handed me a stack of mail. On the way to the elevator, I glanced at it. On top of the pile was a registered letter from a law firm. It got my attention immediately. I've never had a pleasant letter from a lawyer. This one was worse than most. It was written by an attorney in Indiana named Paul M. Blanton. Blanton wanted to let me know that his client, a woman named Kimberly Carter, was planning to file criminal sex charges against me in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. "Ms. Carter has informed me that she was raped by you," Blanton wrote. "If you should have any questions or concerns about any of the aforementioned, please do not hesitate to contact me." Should I have any questions or concerns? I didn't know where to begin. Rape? Kentucky? Criminal charges? I knew I hadn't raped anyone. I didn't think I'd ever even been to Kentucky.
  • Nuts or not, Kimberly Carter had a lot of chutzpah. Six months later, she wrote me again. This time she sent a clock radio with my name on it, along with a note apologizing "for the misunderstanding." A few months after that I got an Easter card from "Your Biggest Fan!" Her next card had five exclamation points, which I took as a sign of escalating mania.

Excerpts from appearances on Bubba the Love Sponge

[edit]
  • Carlson: I think they are. On the other hand, you know, the bottom line is the issue of security — who's going to protect the country against, you know, the Muslim lunatics who want to hurt us — is the only thing the Republicans have left. They can't claim that they're, you know, the party of fiscal restraint anymore. They're big spenders, and that's obvious. But that one argument, “Vote for us, we'll protect you,” that still works, because on — you know, let's be totally real. Nancy Pelosi's going to keep you safe while you sleep? I don't think so. She's not.
  • Bubba the Love Sponge: So — so, now listen, can the Democrats not — in the nine, or 10, or eight, or however many months there is — can they not regroup or get a strategy going with, "Listen, we need to — the only thing that these Republicans have is to keep you guys safe." Can they not, you know, responsibly come up with some type of game plan where they can make us feel — make people feel safe as well?
  • Carlson: I think if they're — Oh, they could, absolutely. If there were a Democrat to come out in the 2008 election and say, “You know what the problem is? It’s Islamic extremism. It's not terror, it's not some, you know, indefinable threat out there. It's these lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals, and I'm going to kill as many of them as I can if you elect me.” If a Democrat were to say that, he would be elected king, OK?
  • Bubba: Let's get into a couple things. One, this whole Duke issue. I mean, is this not, honest to God, Tucker, in my opinion, and tell me what you think, I think these guys are innocent.
  • Carlson: Well, I think they could get railroaded. I mean, you know, look, here's the bottom line. And I said this the other day and there was all this outrage and, “How could you say that,” but I mean, this woman sells sex for a living. OK? I'm not attacking that — I'm merely noting it. She sells sex for a living. If she's accusing other people of nonconsensual sex, it's a little more complicated than if some, you know, housewife claims she was pulled off the street and raped. It's just not the same thing. It's harder to determine what's consensual and what's not. And to act like, you know, these guys absolutely did it because she's this oppressed stripper, pardon me, adult dancer or exotic dancer, whatever the hell they're calling her, is ridiculous. I mean, these kids, maybe they did do something wrong, I don't know. But, I mean, you got to give them the benefit of the doubt.
  • Co-Host: Alexa Stewart, we run into her all the time.
  • Carlson: She seems like a — she seems awful —
  • Bubba: Cunt.
  • Co-Host: Yeah, she is awful.
  • Bubba: They're very cunty.
  • Carlson: She seems extremely cunty.
  • Bubba: I like to hear that word, oh yeah — I stepped over him. She seems what now? Go ahead.
  • Carlson: She just does seem a little cunty. I mean you said it; I'm just agreeing with you. I don't use that word because it's offensive —
  • Bubba: Right. I'd love for Tucker Carlson. Tonight on MSNBC a girl that comes across kind of cunty.
  • Carlson: Well she does. I mean, I heard — I mean, now I'm a Brent fan, so, I'm just stating my bias right out front here. I heard her on with him and I just wanted to give her the spanking she so desperately needs.
  • Carlson: By the way, women hate you when they do you wrong and you put up with it.
  • Co-Host: Exactly.
  • Carlson: Because they hate weakness. They're like dogs that way. They can smell it on you, and they have contempt for it; they’ll bite you.
. . .
  • Bubba: Bill Clinton is a real man, and Bill Clinton could give a fuck whether Hillary wins or loses. He's just playing the role right now. He's trying to get some whores. He doesn't give a fuck about that battle-ax. He's trying to keep her busy right now.
  • Carlson: But he can [sic] laid anytime he wants.
  • Bubba: Oh, right.
  • Carlson: Why doesn't he divorce her and, you know, take up plural marriage or something with a bunch of teenagers in a foreign country.
  • Bubba: He's saying, “Oh, wait, I don't want her to drop out early, because that means she has to get off the campaign trail. Fuck that. I need to keep her going."
  • Carlson: I've seen a lot more of the typical — and I mean this — typical whining from a Black politician about how, "You don't like me because I'm Black." Using racism as a defense, right? I catch you doing something bad, "Well, oh, you're a racist." That is something that I have covered up close and personal my entire adult life for 17 years being around Black politicians saying that exact thing. The Congressional Black Caucus exists to blame the white man for everything, and I'm happy to say that in public because it's true. Everyone knows it's true.
  • Carlson: I don't like the feminist crap. I hate that and that's one of the reasons I despise the Democrats because they're always rolling that crap out. "Well, you don't like him because he's Black. You don't like her because she's a woman." Oh, shut the fuck up.
  • Bubba: But go ahead, Spice.
  • Co-Host: Hang on, Tuck. So you're telling me that this choice of him choosing Sarah was a better choice than a Romney?
  • Carlson: Yes, definitely.
  • Co-Host: I just can't see it.
  • Carlson: I feel like a more risky choice, needless to say, but don't think Rom — you get anything out of Romney, I really don't.
. . .
  • Carlson: Look, everybody is so intimidated by, you know, the Democratic Party and those whackies in the media on this race and gender nonsense. The country's so fucked up on the subject that getting a white man, I mean everyone's embarrassed to be a white man I guess, that's a bad thing.
  • Bubba: No, I love being a white man. It kicks ass, my friend. I love it.
  • Carlson: I don't have a problem with it. I don't really think of the world in those terms but, you know, white men, you know, they've contributed some, I would say.
  • Co-Host: Well, quite a lot.
  • Bubba: Tucker's high on pills.
  • Carlson: Well, I mean creating civilization and stuff, I think they've done a pretty — I don't know, whatever! I just don't like to think of the world in those terms but —
  • Bubba: How many pieces of Nicorette has he had today?
  • Carlson: A lot of people would rather see the world in those terms and a lot of people in politics do, and now the Republicans do even more and I just disapprove.
  • Bubba: Fine people of Canada, please understand that Tucker is a very good friend of mine, but I in no way, shape, or form share his views of how he feels about people from Canada. I love Canada. They're great people up there. Tucker feels that you guys are a bunch of assholes.
  • Carlson: I totally disagree. If I didn't like Canada, I wouldn’t consider it worth invading. I mean, Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys — that’s why it wasn't worth invading.
  • Bubba: Keep burying yourself.
  • Carlson: But Canada's a solid place with good-looking women and good fishing. We should invade.
  • Carlson: Well, actually, he's not in prison for that. He didn’t — Warren Jeffs didn't marry underaged girls, actually.
  • Co-Host: No, he's in prison for facilitation of child rape.
  • Carlson: Whatever the hell that means.
  • Co-Host: That means that —
  • Carlson: He's in prison because he's weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy.
  • Co-Host:: No, he is an accessory to the rape of children. That is a felony and a serious one at that.
  • Carlson: What do you mean an accessory? He's like got some weird religious cult where he thinks it's OK to, you know, marry underaged girls, but he didn't do it. Why wouldn't the guy who actually did it, who had sex with an underaged girl, he should be the one who's doing life.
. . .
  • Carlson: He's not accused of touching anybody; he is accused of facilitating a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man. That's the accusation. That's what they're calling felony rape. [crosstalk] That's bullshit. I'm sorry. Now this guy may be… a child rapist. I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her. That’s bullshit
. . .
  • Carlson: All of a sudden, like we're very skeptical about everything until like some prosecutor comes out and says, "This guy's bad" and the rest of us nod in agreement like a church choir, "Yeah, he's bad." How do we know he’s bad? What do we know exactly? Nothing… I should make the laws round here, and Michael Vick would have been executed, and Warren Jeffs would be out on the street.
  • Bubba: The governor of Arizona, right now. That's the problem. We'd all be --
  • Co-Host: Dog killing, bad. Child rape, eh, not so much.
  • Bubba: Yeah, dog killing, really bad.
  • Carlson: — child rape. I'm not for child rape. I'm just saying, if you mistreat dogs like that, we're going to have to execute you.

2010s

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When was the last time you stopped yourself from saying something you believed to be true for fear of being punished or criticized for saying it? If you live in America, it probably hasn’t been long.

2016

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  • Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.
  • When was the last time you stopped yourself from saying something you believed to be true for fear of being punished or criticized for saying it? If you live in America, it probably hasn’t been long.
  • A temporary ban on Muslim immigration? That sounds a little extreme (meaning nobody else has said it recently in public). But is it? Millions of Muslims have moved to Western Europe over the past 50 years, and a sizable number of them still haven’t assimilated. Instead, they remain hostile and sometimes dangerous to the cultures that welcomed them. By any measure, that experiment has failed.

2017

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  • Let me just stipulate. I am for getting along. I am for colorblindness, I’m for tolerance, 100%. 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. Is that bigoted?
  • Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all.
  • It’s going to confuse the living shit out of our viewers . . . When’s the last time you saw someone defend Iran on Fox News? Right around never?
  • That is not actually what is illegal as far as I understand.
    What I understand is the removal of an entire portion of the female sex organ without the consent of the child.
    Now you underwent this as an adult, there is a quantum difference between making a decision to do something like that and having that decision made for you, that cannot be reversed, as a child.
    That seems to me, probably the worst thing you could do to a child.

    Would you concede, because there are a lot of women who feel mutilated by this .. this is not, y'know .. this is being lead by women .. that maybe we should let adults make this decision and not impose it on six year olds .. is that fair?

2018

[edit]
  • This was mid-October 2001. I’d gone to Pakistan for New York magazine to cover the Taliban. I was flying from Islamabad to Peshawar, on the Afghan border, to Dubai. It was right after 9/11, so everyone was paranoid about air travel. I was sitting in first class on a big Airbus, and everyone was chain-smoking Marlboros. There were clouds of cigarette smoke, but no alcohol was allowed. We stop in Peshawar, and all these randoms file in and sit on the floor of the cockpit and smoke cigarettes. It made me nervous. This was not a First World thing to do. So we took off again, and because of the bombings in Afghanistan, we had to fly the long way around, over Iran. It ended up being a four-hour flight. Around two in the morning, we’re starting to descend. All of a sudden, bam, the plane just stops . . . And then the plane starts to drop. The engines rev and the plane turns sideways. It’s clear we’re crashing, no doubt about it. People are screaming. We finally touch down and bounce right off the runway. The right wing snaps off and all these sparks are coming up. Everyone knows we’re going to die . . . You’d think in the face of imminent death you’d be like, This is happening, it’s inevitable, and I’m peaceful about it. I was not peaceful at all. So the plane goes into a sand dune and ends up on its side. I was the first person off. I kicked open the door, the slide came down, I ran into the darkness and immediately got picked up by guards. I was brought to a room, locked in there and then put on a British Airways flight eight hours later.
  • You know, the funny thing about that, and one of the reasons I’ve never talked about it, is there’s no winning. Either you lie and say, “I’m so wounded by that.” Or you tell the truth and sound like a sociopath. In my case, the truth is my childhood wasn’t that bad. It was actually pretty fun. I love my dad. Losing my mom was sad, I guess. My parents got divorced because my mom was a nutcase. Boo-hoo, poor me. But my dad got remarried to a wonderful woman, my stepmom, whom I love. I always worried I was suppressing all this rage. I used to say to my girlfriend, now wife, “What am I going to do if she ever reappears?” Then I actually did get the call, and it turned out she was living in remote France, in the Pyrénées mountains, working as a sculptor . . . [My aunt] called me and said, “Your mother’s dying.” That didn’t even make sense to me. “My mother? Who’s my mother?” And she said, “Your mother. You know, my sister.” . . . “She’s dying and she’s going to be gone soon. You’ve got to go visit her.” I thought about it, and I said, “No, I don’t think I do.”
Ship of Fools
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  • Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created. Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that.
    • Carlson, Tucker (2018). Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. Free Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-1501183669. 
  • Voters knew from the very beginning exactly who Bill Clinton was. They knew because voters always know. In politics as in life, nothing is really hidden, only ignored. A candidate’s character is transparent . . . Voters understood Clinton's weaknesses. They just didn't care . . . Once he got elected, Clinton seemed to forget he'd won . . . Clinton's new priorities seemed to mirror those of the New York Times editorial page: gun control, global warming, gays in the military. His approval rating tanked. New Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress in the first midterm election. Clinton quickly learned his lesson. He scurried back to the middle and stayed there for the next six years, through scandal and impeachment. Clinton understood that as long as he stayed connected to the board center of American public opinion, voters would overlook his personal shortcomings . . . That's how democracy works . . . Somehow, Bill Clinton's heirs learned nothing from the experience.
    • Carlson, Tucker (2018). Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. Free Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-1501183669. 
  • Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime . . . If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that . . . [W]e are told these changes are entirely good . . . We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.
  • But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.
  • The few sincere liberals left, the ones actually fighting corporate power, seem like bewildered relics from an earlier age. For generations, there was no more famous activist on the left than Ralph Nader . . . If life were fair, Nader would be living out his days in a socialist retirement home in Florida, greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims. Instead, he's mostly reviled by his former admirers. His crime was daring to run for president in 2000. Democrats blamed him for Al Gore's narrow loss to George W. Bush. They never stopped blaming him. "Ralph Nader Still Refuses to Admit He Elected Bush," read a headline in New York magazine sixteen years after the election.
    • Carlson, Tucker (2018). Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. Free Press. pp. 26-27. ISBN 978-1501183669. 
  • The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.
    • Carlson, Tucker (2018). Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. Free Press. p. 83. ISBN 978-1501183669. 
  • Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? I asked once. She didn’t answer, but did call me a racist.
    • Carlson, Tucker (2018). Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. Free Press. p. 173. ISBN 978-1501183669. 

2019

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  • Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever . . . Omar isn't disappointed in America, she's enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress. Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately. Maybe that's our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren't self-confident enough to make them assimilate, so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that, maybe we are importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem, and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It's not sustainable. No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results. So, be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She's a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately, or else.

2020s

[edit]
The candidate who makes it easier for 30-year-olds to get married and have kids will win the election and will deserve to win.

2020

[edit]
  • For a lot of middle class people, wages are not keeping pace with expenses. Child care, housing, education, health care -- they're all getting more expensive by the year. The student loan bubble is still inflating. It's burdening young people with debts so large, they can't start families. Now, these are economic problems, but they require a political solution. The candidate who makes it easier for 30-year-olds to get married and have kids will win the election and will deserve to win. Remember that. It's truer than any economic theory conceived on any college campus in the last hundred years.
  • Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump. They love him in spite of everything they've heard. They love him, often, in spite of himself. They're not deluded. They know exactly who Trump is. They love him anyway. They love Donald Trump because no one else loves them. The country they built, the country their ancestors fought for over hundreds of years, has left them to die in unfashionable little towns, mocked and despised by the sneering halfwits with finance degrees -- but no actual skills -- who seem to run everything all of a sudden. Whatever Donald Trump's faults, he is better than the rest of the people in charge. At least he doesn't hate them for their weakness. Donald Trump, in other words, is and has always been a living indictment of the people who run this country. That was true four years ago when he came out of nowhere to win the presidency. And it's every bit as true right now, maybe even more true than it's ever been. It will remain true regardless of whether Donald Trump wins reelection.
  • And now Trump, I learned this morning, is sitting back and letting them lose the senate. He doesn’t care. I care. I’ve got four kids and plan to live here.

2021

[edit]
  • A couple of weeks ago, I was watching [a] 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. 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. 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?
  • Streams of politicians, who just months before had told us that cops were racist by definition, praised Brian Sicknick as a hero. They had finally found a police officer who served their political uses. Just one problem: The story they told was a lie from beginning to end. Officer Sicknick was not beaten to death, with a fire extinguisher or anything else. According to an exhaustive and fascinating new analysis on Revolver News, there's no evidence that Brian Sicknick was hit with a fire extinguisher at any point on Jan 6. The officer's body apparently bore no signs of trauma. In fact, on the night of Jan. 6, long after rioters at the Capitol had been arrested or dispersed, Brian Sicknick texted his brother from his office. According to his brother, Sicknick said he'd been "pepper sprayed twice" but was otherwise "in good shape". Twenty-four hours later, Officer Brian Sicknick was dead.
  • [T]wo sitting members of the United States Senate announced they oppose the entire foundation of American civil rights law, and then proceed to attack the core principle, the main principle, of our country. Some people on Twitter were shocked by it, but otherwise you’d never really know it happened. But it did happen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii publicly informed the White House that until the Biden administration puts more people they like in powerful jobs, they will refuse to confirm White nominees. ‘I am a no vote on the floor on all non-diversity nominees,’ Duckworth said, out loud, with cameras rolling. ‘I will vote for racial minorities and I will vote for LGBTQ, but anybody else, I’m not voting for.’
    ..
    So here you have two actual U.S. senators announcing in public they will deny jobs to people who have the wrong skin color. That’s not news? Oh yes, it is news, though Mazie Hirono and Tammy Duckworth may not realize it’s news. In their defense, Hirono and Duckworth are well-known as the dimmest politicians in Washington. Neither one could carry a dinner conversation. But not everyone in Congress is stupid or oblivious. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., certainly isn’t. The Senate Majority Leader misses nothing. Chuck Schumer has spent his entire life telling us at high volume that racial discrimination is wrong, which obviously it is. Then, this week, two of his colleagues went on television to demand racial discrimination. What did Chuck Schumer think of that? Schumer didn’t say a word about it. No one in the Democratic Party did.
  • Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term "replacement," if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually.
  • Magazine journalism is worth remembering. They're mostly gone now, but for a long time magazines played a significant role in the life of the country. If you wanted to understand what the rest of the world was like, you read magazines.
    • 21 August 2021 in introduction of The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism seen on his site
  • Non-white DNA is the quote "source of our strength" ... imagine saying that! This is the language eugenics, it's horrifying. But there's a reason Biden said it. In political terms this policy is called "the great replacement", the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries. They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it's happening, they'll scream at you with maximum hysteria. And here you have Joe Biden confirming his motive on tape with a smile on his face.
    • 22 September 2021 regarding Joe Biden's 17 February 2015 quotes
  • The Ideologues are in control, and that is a huge problem for the rest of us. It’s a problem because ideologues have no interest in the lives of actual human beings. Ideologues care only about their theories, about the bright new future they are building. Humans are just speed bumps on the way to utopia.

2022

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  • You don't want to live in a country in which moral panics breakout regularly. By the way, moral panics diminish the people engage in them and hurt the people who don’t. They're degrading. They're crazy. They're the opposite of what you want. You want to live in a country where wisdom and restraint and rational behavior and decency determine the outcomes not screaming. So for nearly two years, the shouting has not ended. Hysteria is now the official language of public discourse in the United States. That's not good for anyone except those benefiting from it... Who is benefitting? Anyone who lies for a living. The liars have perfect cover.
  • Sexualizing children, mutilating their genitals, do you get off on it?
    • (19 September 2022)
  • In general people's kooky theories don't bother me.
    You can be a flat earther, a circumcision activist, you can be whatever you want to be.
    But if you try and take over my power grid on the basis of your ridiculous theories, then we have a right to fight back, no?
    • (29 September 2022)
  • There is no scientific justification for sexually mutilating kids.
    They are not doing it for a scientifically defensible reason.
    They are doing it because they believe in a very specific religious ideology.
    • on Tucker Carlson Tonight in "Stop Sexualizing Kids" monologue (21 November 2022)

2023

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  • On the Destruction of the Kakhovka Dam] No one who's paid to cover these things seem to entertain even the possibility it could have been Ukrainians who did it. No chance of that.
    Ukraine, as you may have heard, is led by a man called Zelensky. We can say for a dead certain fact that he was not involved. He couldn't have been; Zelensky is too decent for terrorism.
    Now you see him on television, and it’s true you might form a different impression. Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of [US investment giant] BlackRock.
    But don't believe your own eyes. Actually, Mr Zelensky is a very good man... of all the people in the world, our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend in the tracksuit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a damn. He's literally a living saint, a man in whom there is no sin.
  • Who organised those Black Lives Matter riots three years ago? No one's gotten to the bottom of that. What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it's still classified.
  • [On the claims of David Grusch and the supposed cover-up by the US government of recovered UFOs and (alleged) absence of reports from some major media outlets] That's what the former intel officer revealed, and it was clear he was telling the truth [...] In other words, UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is extraterrestrial life.
    Now, in a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn't.
  • Of course, Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator! Just because he's trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed, doesn't mean he has a totalitarian impulse, c'mon, that's absurd! It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title ‘wannabe dictator’!
  • [Referring to Ben Shapiro, an American conservative commentator] They don’t care about the country at all, [...] but I do … because I'm from here, my family's been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I'm shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned. And I can't imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America, because he doesn't, obviously.

2024

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  • There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that's right! Dad comes home. And he's pissed! Dad is pissed! He's not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they are his children, they live in his house. But he's very disappointed in their behaviour, and he's gonna have to let them know. He's gonna have — "Get to your room, right now! And think about what you did!" And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And, no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.

Quotes about Tucker Carlson

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Alphabetized by surname.
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z

A

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  • 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 doeing, so it works phenomenally.

B

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  • Some people, like me, believe retirement should be partly socialized. Others, such as Tucker Carlson, believe in a purely private system: If you don’t save for your own retirement, your neighbor has no obligation to bail you out. Both arguments have roots in the American spirit: We are at once wonderfully communitarian and intensely individualistic. I felt then – and now – that rather than pretend there is not a major philosophical difference, or that there is one objectively perfect solution, we should debate our policy options vigorously.
  • As scholars such as Leo Chavez and Otto Santa Ana have shown, threat narratives of replacement, conquest, invasion, and infestation have circulated for well over a century. What is new is how this racist rhetoric is being promulgated by a particularly influential set of forces that includes a white nationalist president, formidable conservative media ecosystem, and an empowered anti-immigrant and alt-right political contingent, often undergirded by a persistent gun culture." Together, this nativist assemblage has taken up the white nationalist rhetoric of the "great replacement"-a conspiracy theory in which white people are being systematically "replaced" by people of color through mass migration (possibly orchestrated by Jews and other "globalists"). Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham in particular characterize white Americans as being "replaced through immigration to the benefit of Democrats"...Asserting that "foreign citizens will be electing our political leaders" and characterizing Democrats as "the party of foreign voters now," Carlson describes Democrats as engaging in "demographic replacement," using a "flood of illegals" to create "a flood of voters for them." Speaking to Fox's disproportionately white and elderly viewers, Carlson has asserted that he is not "against the immigrants" but rather "for the Americans," because "nobody cares about them. It's like, shut up, you're dying, we're gonna replace you."
    • Cristina Beltrán p115 Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (2020)
  • In recent weeks, Carlson has been pushing a bogus Kremlin claim that Russia had to invade because Ukraine was building bioweapons labs with help from … Hunter Biden. This odious lie might be designed as a "false flag" operation to justify Russia's use of chemical weapons. Yet Carlson, the consummate "useful idiot," continues to peddle this loathsome propaganda under the guise of just asking questions.
  • Maybe he should be a little more concerned about the suffering of [Ukrainian] civilians at Russian hands? But on his show Monday night, he didn't mention the Bucha massacre. The Kremlin is, naturally, delighted with Carlson's support and has made quotations from his dishonest program a mainstay on its television shows and social media feeds.
  • Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic. Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriors—the whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the world—the transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who can’t afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. It’s a cynical game that treats all of life as a play for ratings, a battle for clicks, and this demands constant outrage, white-identity signaling, and the kind of absurd generalizations that Rachel Bovard used to get that room so excited.
    Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.
  • Mr. Carlson misread, mischaracterized me. He’s a good reporter, he just misunderstood about how serious that was. I take the death penalty very seriously. I take each case seriously. I just felt he misjudged me. I think he misinterpreted my feelings. I know he did.

C

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D

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  • I do a lot of shows. He is, without question, the fairest and most intelligent interviewer I’ve ever experienced on the conservative side.

F

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  • The times I’ve been on TV I didn’t find him to be an effective advocate of his viewpoint. I don’t think he does a good job. That’s what his problem is.

G

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  • If indeed Carlson was fired in part for workplace misogyny, he will fall into a venerable Fox tradition. The network has a history of tolerating the abuse of women until revelations become too inconvenient, at which point even figures who’d seemed irreplaceable, like Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, are tossed overboard. Contempt for women was part of Carlson’s brand at Fox News; his infamous “The End of Men” special urged men to tan their testicles to ostensibly increase testosterone and thereby rescue society from collapse. It would be fitting if contempt for women is what finally derailed him.
  • Like Trump, he would find success by catering to people who despised the world that had spurned him. He made revenge into a career.

H

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I wish he wouldn't give up writing for TV. And I hope he sometimes hears the distant, hollow echo of my voice, "Tucker, don't do that!" ~ Christopher Hitchens
  • Carlson is comfortably familiar. He’s one of us, an entertaining companion at lunch, full of gossip and wit and even ideas. At the same time, over the years, he has become radically unfamiliar. There are not many journalists or other people regarded as public intellectuals who are promoters of Trump and Trumpism, and who share the president’s fluency in insult and indignation. It is the composite nature of Carlson’s character—belonging at once to two divergent worlds—that makes him interesting to fellow journalists in a way that, say, Sean Hannity, with a larger audience and more direct influence with Trump, generally is not. Many colleagues once viewed him as an important voice of the intelligentsia. Many now believe he has joined the dumbgentsia. They wonder, as Columbia Journalism Review put it, “What happened to Tucker Carlson?”
  • Christopher Hitchens: [W]e picked each other's favorite writers we had from the other side, to see whether we could, get the cream of left-right political writing. So I must've picked Tucker.
  • Interviewer: Why?
  • Hitchens: Do you know, I can't remember what the piece is now, and I hope he isn't watching. It's, although this was pre-9/11 it seems like so long ago to me. I'm, I hope Tucker will forgive if I say I don't remember which piece we picked from him.
  • Interviewer: And another book I wanna...
  • Hitchens: But I do remember telling Tucker, I wish he wouldn't give up writing for TV. And I hope he sometimes hears the distant, hollow echo of my voice, "Tucker, don't do that!"

J

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  • I've been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. Has anybody heard of somebody called — has anybody heard of Tucker Carlson? [...] What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his — by his perspective.
    I haven’t watched anything that he’s said

K

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  • He's great at digging up stuff and great at getting people to confide in him and tell him things they later wish they hadn't . . . He's engaging and boyish, and people take a liking to him.

L

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  • Tucker's not one to be plagued with dark nights of the soul . . . He seems to bob along and that's part of his appeal, his perpetual chipperness. The guy can handle more workload than anybody I know.

M

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  • From his position in the 8 p.m. slot, Carlson has managed to become one of the most influential voices in conservative politics, often by refusing to adhere to Republican conventional wisdom. Only a few weeks before the Iran flare-up, he delivered a monologue in praise of Elizabeth Warren’s “economic patriotism” plan; in January, he launched an intra-conservative war over the virtues of capitalism with a monologue attacking Mitt Romney, private equity, and conservatives who “worship” the market. He is also perhaps the most reviled talking head in the country thanks to his frequent diatribes against diversity, immigration, and multiculturalism.
  • Although Carlson flirts with white identity politics, particularly on the topic of immigration, his real ideology isn’t white nationalism or even conservatism, at least in the sense that conservatism has come to be defined in America. More than anything, he espouses the Middle American radicalism that John Judis, writing in 2016, identified as the ideological core of Trumpism. Middle American radicals (MARs) are neither fully liberal nor conservative but a blend of the two, mixing populist economics and a hostility to big business with intense nationalism, right-wing positions on race and immigration, and a desire for strong presidential leadership. Their animating idea is that the broad (and implicitly white) middle of American society — those Carlson referred to, in a podcast interview with Ben Shapiro, as people with “100 IQs making 80 grand a year” — is besieged on two sides, by a corrupt elite above it and a grasping underclass below.
  • Tucker and I agree on just about nothing, but he has always been kind to me, and a fun person to fight with. I wish him all the best.

N

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O

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Not gonna lie, it’s kinda fun watching a racist fool like this weeping about my presence in Congress. ~ Ilhan Omar
  • When you look at what Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence — very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that we have to be willing to contend with.
  • "I couldn't care less about what this talking inferiority complex has to say, but I do feel for the women and survivors in his life who now see they wouldn't be believed or safe with him...Many survivors of assault don't tell family, friends, etc bc of how they see others treated
  • According to Tucker, "dismantling the system of oppression" means "dismantling the entire american economy and system of governement". 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? Yeah, yes he did. Am I'm going to give him credit for doing that? FUCK NO, especially not when this is what he said next.

P

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He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He's simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it. ~ Heather Digby Parton
  • One of my recent analyses contains more than 140 examples of when Tucker Carlson has relied on white nationalists and anti-Semitic tropes in his programming. One of the most prominent ways this manifests is an obsession with racial demographics, and how they are changing in the United States. Tucker Carlson is obsessed with "cultural preservation." There is an entire international far-right movement that echoes such sentiments. Carlson is also constantly fear-mongering about immigrants and blaming every possible problem on the individual choices of immigrants, as opposed to systemic institutions that perpetuate poverty and racism and which impact all people in the United States.
  • Tucker Carlson has built his career over the last decade on the inherent authority which comes with being on television. He can use his platform to mainstream white nationalist or white supremacist talking points and ideas that his audience otherwise would not be privy to. Tucker Carlson has managed to pervert the privilege with comes with being on television into an opportunity to mainstream white nationalism.

    What Tucker is doing is not abstract. Mainstreaming these talking points puts vulnerable communities under direct threat of physical and material harm. The FBI has documented a rise in hate crimes since Trump's campaign and through to the third year of his presidency. There have been massacres targeting Muslims, black people and Jewish people in churches, mosques and synagogues. There is a real life-and-death consequence from the unfettered white nationalism on Fox News, the No. 1 cable news network in the country.

R

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S

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  • The Republican Party has grown more racially and religiously homogeneous and its politics more dependent on manufacturing threats to the status of white Christians. This is why Trump frequently and falsely implies that Americans were afraid to say "Merry Christmas" before he was elected, and why Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham warn Fox News viewers that nonwhite immigrants are stealing America. For both the Republican Party and conservative media, wielding power and influence depends on making white Americans feel threatened by the growing political influence of those who are different from them.
  • data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus...That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, "It hasn't been the disaster that we feared"...The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later...Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson's words, "mindless and authoritarian," a "weird kind of arbitrary fascism." To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract. (p 235-6)
  • Oprah Winfrey: You caused a media storm by calling Crossfire host Tucker Carlson a dick when you went on his show last year. Do you regret that?
  • Jon Stewart: I regret losing my patience. That's about it. But calling him a dick? Not really. I was calling that guy who was on that show right there a dick—I don't pretend to know Tucker as a person. But I regret going on air as tired as I was and not being more articulate with what I wanted to say.
  • Tucker Carlson was at one time the most watched cable news presenter in the States until he was sacked from Fox News. [...] On 9 February, Carlson, now freelance, interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow. What you got was a sometimes surreal but most often extremely boring encounter in which the Russian president lectured the far-right American television personality on abstruse bits of Russian history that set out his junk case that Ukraine belonged to Russia. Putin talked rubbish but Carlson let him get away with it. [...] The interview lasted two hours but Carlson failed to mention the fate of Russia's most famous political prisoner once. Is it possible that Putin banked Carlson's lack of interest in Navalny and steeled him to have him murdered a week later? I believe it is. [...] I struggle with this. I struggle with how someone as fluent as Carlson could be so wittingly ignorant of the succession of people critical of Putin who have ended up dead. I struggle with knowing the torture Navalny suffered in the Russian gulag, that his lawyer was so shocked on seeing her client's face gone grey, but that Carlson, given a two-hour slot with the man responsible for the killings of so many, with the man ultimately responsible for creating Navalny's airless isolation cell, could not be bothered to mention his name.
    It is as if Tucker Carlson is Moscow's creature.

T

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V

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W

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  • Fox News host Tucker Carlson can congratulate himself for the sentiment coming from the White House. Last week, Carlson apparently decided that the discussion on immigration featured an insufficient amount of racism and hate. So he attacked Omar, who arrived in the United States at the age of 12, for having the temerity to point out that this country doesn’t always live up to its own lofty ideals. Folks who go into the news business dream of leaving a mark . . . As for Carlson, he’s making his mark by inspiring racist tweets.
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