The text that reportedly led to Tucker Carlson's firing from Fox: "It's not how white men fight"
A text message Carlson sent to one of his producers after the Jan. 6 insurrection laid bare his white nationalist beliefs, and the hypocrisy inherent in them
Yesterday, the nebulous circumstances behind Tucker Carlson’s abrupt axing from Fox News on April 21 came into sharper and more alarming clarity thanks to a text obtained by The New York Times, which finds Carlson telling on his own inflammatory, racist views while discussing the Jan. 6 insurrection with one of his producers.
The text—which was included in redacted form as part of a filing included in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox, but previously unreported—reportedly alarmed officials at the network, who feared the text could become public when Carlson took the stand and raise broader concerns about the network outside the scope of the suit. Dominion initially took Fox to court over the 2020 election, alleging that Fox knowingly disseminated falsehoods about election fraud. The A.V. Club has reached out to representatives for both Carlson and Fox News for comment.
In the message, which Carlson allegedly sent to one of his producers in the weeks following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, he describes watching a “group of Trump guys” attack an “Antifa kid,” and “pounding the living shit out of him.” Calling the attack “dishonorable,” Carlson opines: “It’s not how white men fight.” The full transcript of the text finds Carlson musing on his knee-jerk inability to see the “Antifa creep” as a human and the perils of reducing “people to their politics” in the same breath that he off-handedly reveals thinly-veiled white supremacist logic. The message can be read in full here:
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. 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?
Per the NYT, the message prompted the Fox board to hire “an outside law firm to conduct an investigation into Mr. Carlson’s conduct.” The text also reportedly had a heavy hand in Fox’s decision to settle with Dominion for $787,500,000, roughly half of the initial $1.6 billion Dominion sought. Carlson’s personal texts—others of which saw him harshly criticizing Trump as a “demonic force” and referring to female Fox employees with misogynistic language—were collected as part of the trial’s discovery process.
Over the last six years, Carlson had consistently espoused white nationalist beliefs on his late-night program Tucker Carlson Tonight, going as far as to endorse “The Great Replacement” theory, notably cited in a manifesto written by Christchurch, New Zealand mass murderer Brenton Harrison Tarrant shortly before he killed 51 people in a mosque in 2019. In 2018, Carlson lost advertisers after stating that immigrants make the United States “poorer and dirtier;” he also opined in 2019 that white supremacy in America is a “hoax.”
On Monday, the NYT—along with a collective of other media organizations—called for the judge overseeing the Dominion defamation lawsuit to release some of Carlson’s redacted messages to the public. The content of the Jan. 6 text was disclosed to the NYT during interviews with several individuals close to the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity; in public filings, the text remains blocked out in black. Although it was uncertain if the message would actually be revealed in court, Carlson’s behind-the-scenes conduct became such a large concern that Fox was willing to sacrifice the extensive viewership his show brought in on short notice, indicating there’s possibly even more to the story.