Defending Tucker Carlson
With John McWhorter
Tucker Carlson was recently fired by Fox News, and shortly thereafter, a remark he made in a text to a producer went public. Commenting on a crowd of white men beating an Antifa activist during the January 6 riots, Carlson wrote, “This is not how white people fight.” My friend John McWhorter wants to know what I think about it.
I think Carlson’s character, including the alleged implicit racism of his remark, is not the main question here. Carlson covers stories that no one other major media figure will touch. The main question is whether silencing him will make the issues he raises go away. The violent, indefensible riots in Chicago; or the question of US involvement in Nord Stream pipeline explosion; the handling of the Covid pandemic. No one on any of the big news networks wants to speak openly about any of this. But firing Carlson isn’t going to make these issues go away, and his viewers know it. You can bet that wherever he pops up next, they’re going to follow him.
Regardless of the propriety of Carlson’s text, that is the most salient concern, and it’s what I talk about with John in the excerpt from this week’s episode, which you can watch or read in an abridged transcript below. (We also have a laugh about Carlson’s apparent endorsement of testicle tanning as a way to boost testosterone—a detail I hadn’t been aware of until John brought it up.)
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JOHN MCWHORTHER: My ears are ringing this morning because of your friend, Tucker Carlson...
GLENN LOURY: "My friend." (Laughter.)
...and this thing that he said, this thing about "This isn't how white men fight."
NEWS CLIP: Carlson made a racist comment in a text to a producer in January of 2021. Carlson reportedly messaged the producer that he watched a video of a group of supporters of former president Donald Trump beating an Antifa kid. Carlson texted it was “not how white men fight."
Why don't we tell people what we're talking about here? Tucker Carlson has been exposed, this is emails or texts at Fox News that were made available due to discovery in the Dominion voting machine libel case that they brought against Fox, which was settled for three quarters of a billion dollars, and now there's some aftermath.
John, you wanna tell them exactly what you're talking about?
Well, there've been these texts that we hadn't seen yet that apparently made Rupert Murdoch et al fire Carlson rather abruptly a week ago. And apparently in one of these internal texts, and a long one, [he talks about how] he sees a group of white men beating up on another white boy.
It's an Antifa person, isn't it? And is it January 6th that this is happening?
I think it was. And they are white, you could say in a very general way, skinheads. I doubt if that's what they were, but ones who would try to beat the hell out of an Antifa protestor like that.
And Carlson seems to be under the impression that that's a — I think it's safe to say — it's a black way. He's not referring to Chinese people. But white people don't fight like that.
He didn't say "black," he just said “white don't fight like that.”
Right, but there's a barbarity that you wouldn't expect of white people. Who would you expect it of? I think it's safe to say that he's thinking of probably black and latino gangsters.
Apparently that's just not the white way though. White people fight more politely.
That's pretty… You know, I am not one to walk around calling people racist because it's fun or out of some sense that my doing so improves society because we have to identify every little smudge of it that we find, but that's a pretty bigoted thing to imply. I mean, it basically plays into the idea that there is a kind of violence that is, for some reason or it's in some sense, inherent to, yes, black people, and maybe latino people too.
He's not referring to any other people. He means brown people.
Let me ask you this. So I'm gonna, I'm going to defend Tucker Carlson here. (Laughter.)
Have fun.
I mean, he just got fired by Fox. The first thing I'd say is, isn't it interesting that we're learning about this particular message at this time?
Who benefits? Well, Fox News, obviously, is in control of the information flow and has a problem of managing the blowback from firing its most popular host. So, obviously you wanna make him look bad.
Secondly, there's this piling on. Your employer, The New York Times did a major “expose” of the white replacement theory, conspiracy theory, racist character of Tucker Carlson's ratings busting program.
Mm-hmm.
Now I watch it, not religiously, but I watch on occasion. I tune in at eight o'clock to hear what the monologue is going to be from Tucker Carlson, about a whole lot of range of issues:
From Ukraine, where he's one of the only voices in major journalism saying, is this a good thing for us to be doing? One of the only people saying who blew up that Nord Stream pipeline, who really did blow it up? One of the only people saying, can you count the number of former CIA officials and former generals and whatnot who are coming on liberal cable news and feeding to the American people with a spoon the propaganda of the defense establishment in this country, can you count them? He's one of the only people doing that.
He had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his program to talk about vaccines. I know, no one is supposed to credit Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
When the kids riot in Chicago and they run like mobs down the middle of Michigan Avenue and Wabash Avenue and State Street, and they beat up random strangers with their fists flailing like that, the only place on national television that you're going to see any videos of these kids behaving in this way, is on Tucker Carlson.
“Obviously, he's a racist!” It's not that easy. I don't think you can dismiss Tucker Carlson, who has a huge audience — who are those people? They're all racist? They turn in to get red meat?
That is the bubble of Manhattan speaking. I ain't going there.
Tucker Carlson is an important voice in American journalism. Yes, he's conservative and yes, he's a provocateur. Yes, he is. But you can't read him out of the conversation by calling him a witch. And that's what people are doing, they're calling him a witch.
What about the border? He's the only person — not the only one, obviously, not the only one — raising the question or whether we're going to allow the future of our country to be determined by a failure to enforce our own laws. That's a fair question. You don't have to be an anti-Mexican, anti-brown person to raise that question about our country.
He's the only one saying that when a man shows up with exaggerated breasts coming almost over his knees and is putting himself in front of children, is that what we actually want in our country? He's practically the only person who's saying that.
So it's just too easy to put a hood on Tucker Carlson and shut him off the stage without addressing any of the actual things that make him the most popular cable host broadcaster in the country. I'm sorry, I'm not gonna do that.
…
This racist thing, it's not an argument. It's ad hominem in the extreme. It's saying “bad person, bad person, bad person,” when the whole currency of the realm here is not whether or not somebody is gonna go to heaven, the currency of the realm here is whether or not their arguments are persuasive.
Should he be allowed to say innuendo, “That's not how white people fight,” which is like saying, “When I see that kind of melee going on, I'm inclined to think that it's black, so I'm surprised I hear that it's not white”?
No, of course, that's not an artful thing to say. If I were the editor-in-chief or the publisher of the organ, I wouldn't have him saying that on my platform.
Should he be allowed to say it? Of course he should be allowed to say it. I mean, there shouldn't be any law against saying it. But, if he works for me and I control the copy that goes out on my platform, that's not what I would have said. I wouldn't have that said for the reasons that you allude to, which is that it's socially unproductive and it feeds into various stereotypes.
On that hand, I'll say this. This is an emperor has no clothes argument. Because you won't let him say it, because he forbears, because he goes along with the program and we're quiet about it, it doesn't mean that people can't see it.
That's true.
And that they don't think it.
Mm-hmm.
And I think it's not a straightforward problem to reckon whether suppressing a commonly held and obvious fact from overt expression kills the fact or makes it even more powerful and more dangerous.
The other issue here is that Black men and women, above any other race, analyze every statement through a race based lens. I think this mindset is a byproduct of manufactured hysteria. If you look at the FBI crime statistics, black on white crime is 10x higher than white on black crime, yet blacks are told by most media outlets that white people, particularly white men, are out to get them. The propaganda machine envelops every aspect of their life from birth to death, and does so in such a way that it becomes difficult to just look at the objective stats without trying to infer something horrible from something trivial; and clearly the radical left proposing "my reality" as an alternative to "objective reality" is a dangerous proposition; some blacks will say that they can feel white people looking at them differently (my reality), and therefore whites must be secretly racist: but there is a really good reason why white people look at black people differently than they look at Asians and Hispanics.
Blacks commit most violent crimes. There were around 600,000 black on white violent crimes last year compared to around 50,000 white on black crimes. And Black on Black crime, Black on Asian crime, and Black on Hispanic crime were also higher than Hispanic on black and Asian on black crime, and so it doesn't surprise me that Hispanics, Asians and Whites, and many other blacks generally avoid blacks.
Gangster rap, sadly, has become the black cultural identity, and so naturally they are stereotyped because our replicator continues to survive by making distinctions between what is dangerous and what is not. When we are afraid of something, we avoid it, and we look at it suspiciously until the threat passes.
Furthermore, when I see photos of blacks pre 1970, they look very normal. They look like someone you'd meet for lunch, but the cultural identity over the last fifty years has clearly changed for the worse and it must be talked about otherwise it will continue to degenerate.
Tucker Carlsen talks about some of these things, and some people don't want to have that conversation. They don't want to have real conversations about black crime rates, about the 2014 Ukraine coup, funded by the department of state, or the self righteous campaigns to liberate the world with one ideology (in this case NATO's), or the dangerous totalitarian proposals coming from the WEF, etc, etc. He's got guts and courage and that ought to be admired in a journalist.
The thing that annoys me about the TC text kerfuffle is that by putting all the attention on one "offensive" word, one can ignore the rest of the text, which is an excellent example of a spiritual victory over one's own base inclinations.
If a black man had said "that's not how black men fight," nobody would have had an issue. This is one of those instances where something which can be interpreted as racist, becomes proof of racism, without any attempt to allow the context to define.