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He declared himself part of the "Jesse Helms Foundation" in 1991 and he's only gotten worse since.
By Alice Kelly — Written on Apr 23, 2021
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has yet found himself caught up in controversy. This time it’s not for anything he has said on air.
According to his 1991 Trinity College yearbook, Carlson wrote that he was part of the “Dan White Society.” Yes, the same Dan White who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and city Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Milk was the first openly gay elected official in California. Carlson also wrote that he was a member of the “Jesse Helms Foundation.”
Helms was a former North Carolina senator who vehemently opposed homosexuality and the integration of schools.
This comes just days after Carlson laughed in the face of a former police officer who attempted to suggest how future officers could avoid killing Black men during a segment on George Floyd. Carlson then cut the interview short while the officer was illustrating these vital suggestions.
But this evidence is just one of many reasons why Carlson and his bigotted opinions don’t deserve a platform. We’ve been watching this man wreak havoc on minority communities for years.
Here are just some of his most upsetting and offensive on-air moments.
Carlson has a history of attacking immigrants
In a scathing 2018 broadcast, Carlson told his audience that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier,” while appearing onscreen alongside images of seemingly unrelated pieces of trash.
Carlson then complained that instead of naturalizing presumably more worthwhile human beings, the U.S. is “getting waves of people with high school educations or less.”
The U.S. does not rank particularly high in key areas of education, particularly maths and science, in comparison to some of the many countries that immigrants come from. Thus, Carlson’s comments bear little weight.
As for whether or not immigrants make the U.S. poorer, that is up for debate. But Carlson certainly made Fox News slightly poorer after several advertisers pulled their ads from the network following his diatribe.
Carlson is also noteworthy for a feud with Shep Smith, then a fellow Fox News anchor over the integrity of their shared employer.
Carlson says white supremacy is a hoax
Just three days after a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas where a shooter wrote a manifesto about the "Hispanic invasion of Texas," Carlson told audiences that white supremacy is a hoax.
In spite of the conversations about racial injustice that were simmering at the forefront, Carlson claimed that white privilege is, “not a real problem in America.”
Even President Trump had condemned the acts and racist bigotry at the time.
Carlson had previously identified what he perceived to be the real threat to America: Hispanic voters. He echoed Trump’s concerns about how immigration would impact future election results by accusing Mexico of “interfering in our elections by packing our electorate.”
These comments, and his previous suggestions that uneducated immigrants are threatening the success of America and the Republican party, are undermined by the fact that most of the Democratic party’s votes come from the white, college-educated voters that Carlson loves so much.
Carlson has been accused of believing in The Great Replacement
Like most figures who deny the existence of white supremacy, Carlson later found himself in trouble for demonstrating behaviors of a — you guessed it — white supremacist.
Carlson doubled down on some of his previous statements about immigrants corrupting the U.S. by complaining that the Democratic Party was “trying to replace the current electorate” with “new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”
He followed up by saying, “I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate.”
Facts and figures have never mattered much to Carlson historically, but if they did, he would know that the 2020 elections saw record numbers of immigrant and non-white voters turning up to support Trump and the Republican party.
Because of his racist rhetoric and willingness to buy into dangerous conspiracy theories, many called for Carlson’s resignation, accusing him of advancing The Great Replacement theory.
Wikipedia describes this theory, which has been operating in many forms and under many names for hundreds of years, as such:
"The Great Replacement is included in a larger white genocide conspiracy theory that has spread in Western far-right movements since the late 20th century, notably through the efforts of American neo-Nazi activist David Lane."
This theory alleges that people of color are replacing white people in the West, enabled by Jewish people and progressive politicians. It is essentially the foundational theory of white supremacy.
With all of these errors in judgment and on-air gaffes, it's past time that we looked at them as a series of independent incidents and realized that this is just who Carlson is. He even told us so in his college yearbook.
Now that that's settled, we should wonder why no one has taken the mic away.
Alice Kelly is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Catch her covering all things social justice, news, and entertainment. Keep up with her Twitter for more.