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Best of Right Wing Watch - 4/28/23
Our Right Wing Watch team at People For the American Way works hard to document, expose, and disrupt right-wing extremism in America.
Starting today, we're providing exclusive content for our newsletter subscribers! Below is the very first piece featuring analysis of the right-wing reaction of Tucker Carlson's firing. At the the end of the article you'll find the typical weekly "best of the blog" highlights.
NEW: Subscriber Exclusive!
‘Blow to the Right’: Far Right Fumes Over Fox Firing Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson spent his final minutes on Fox News primetime eating pizza and advertising his Tucker Carlson original “Let Them Eat Bugs.”
Three short days later, he was fired.
To Liz Crokin, something was fishy about that pizza. “Tucker Carlson’s last segment Friday night featured a ‘pizza delivery hero’ who stopped a robbery,” she told her Telegram channel with more than 100,000 subscribers. “They ate pizza together in studio. That same night President Trump made an appearance at a pizza restaurant in Fort Myers, Florida and sent pizzas to local law enforcement.”
If you’re confused about Crokin’s fixation on pizza, her next post clarified: Pizzagate. (Remember the far-right conspiracy theory that high-ranking Democrats were trafficking children in a Washington, D.C., pizza establishment?) The Pizzagate and QAnon propagator tied Carlson’s last segment to the keynote speech he gave Friday evening at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary in which Carlson painted proponents of abortion rights as “arguing for child sacrifice.”
“Pizzagate is not just about elites raping and trafficking children,” Crokin wrote. “They also engage in the Satanic ritualistic abuse of children including child sacrifices.” In her telling, Carlson was just trying to save the children.
Crokin wasn’t the only one who saw Carlson as in her camp, brave enough to unveil alleged abuses covered up by the powers at be and to be punished for it. She just happens to be one of the loonier ones.
The Heritage Foundation, which conveyed its intellectual seriousness at 50 with its choice of Carlson as its keynote speaker, stood by their guy in a barrage of tweets. “Telling the truth is worth it, even if it comes at a price,” the right-wing think tank turned MAGA mouthpiece declared. The post featured a snippet of Carlson telling the Heritage Foundation’s ballroom of Trump worshipers, "You look around and you see these people, and some of them really have paid a heavy price for telling the truth, and they are cast out of their groups, whatever those groups are, but they do it anyway."
What is that so-called “truth”?
Carlson lied about the results of the 2020 election, admitting privately that claims of election fraud were bogus while publicly whipping his loyal viewership into a frenzy. He peddled the racist “great replacement theory” hundreds of times to white nationalists’ delight, refashioning xenophobia and racism to something palatable for today’s Republican Party. He obsessed over the decline of male testosterone, encouraging men to tan their testicles to prevent the “end of men” in a special that might as well have been plucked from some manosphere message board.
In short, he skillfully manipulated the garbage piles of the far-right worldview into something that appealed to his millions of viewers.
Tucker’s ousting deals a significant “blow to the Right,” wrote John Doyle, a far-right podcaster who perhaps learned his misogyny from Carlson. “It is difficult to see how the most popular cable news host of all time losing his slot, which frequently broadcasted our ideas, is a net positive for us in the long run,” he wrote on Twitter.
We don’t know why exactly Fox fired Carlson, but they had countless reasons to: the man, maybe more than any other host, had cost the company a fortune—$787.5 million—in Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against the network, he is a target of another suit from a former Fox News producer who says she was subjected to “vile sexist stereotypes,” and he was generally miserable to work with, urging, for example, his lawyers to keep his use of the c-word to describe an executive producer visible in court filings. And of course, he broke the cardinal rule of the Murdochs who reign over Fox: thinking he was bigger than the network. For all his talk about the great replacement, Tucker turned out to be quite replaceable, as was Bill O’Reilly when he was fired for sexual harassment in 2017, leaving Carlson his prime time perch.
But Carlson won’t be going away. He’ll likely find some other platform—perhaps Newsmax or OANN, anywhere further to the right of Fox—or he’ll go out on his own and try to bring his loyal viewership with him.
And for all the anger Carlson’s fans directed at Fox, the network hasn’t changed its stripes. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and plenty of other hosts are still in place promoting right-wing propaganda. Guest hosts are lining up to try out for his powerful primetime slot.
Still, Carlson’s ousting does provide something of a break—3 million people will not hear his message of fearmongering, thinly veiled racism, or transphobia tonight. I for one am going to enjoy for now the sound of his silence.
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