Asshole of the Month: Tucker Carlson

Fox News pioneered the dark art of pandering to the right-wing mob’s baser instincts to boost ratings and profits. But we really had no idea how hypocritical the whole charade had been until the stunning revelations flushed out in March by the Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6-billion lawsuit against Fox. Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity and the whole cast has been outed as two-faced bad actors running this sick farce, but the number-one mouthpiece, Tucker Carlson, wins the Oscar for Best Performance.

Let’s back up a bit and review Carlson’s past before this latest triumph of turpitude. His father, Dick Carlson, was a powerful media executive: CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and director of the Voice of America, the U.S. government’s international propaganda operation. When Tucker was six, his mother abandoned the family. Dick remarried, wedding Patricia Swanson, the wealthy heiress of the Swanson frozen-food empire, enabling Tucker to graduate from elite St. George’s private high school in Rhode Island before enrolling at private Trinity College in Connecticut. In his 1991 yearbook entry at Trinity, he identified himself as a member of the “Dan White Society,” named after the former cop who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978.

In summary, Tucker was a pampered, blue-blood boy with an itch for disrespecting marginalized people. After graduating from college, he applied for a job at America’s most elite fraternity, the CIA, but was rejected. Ouch! “You should consider journalism,” his father advised. “They’ll take anybody.”

And so they did. Carlson was hired as a fact-checker, then an opinion writer at a number of rags before migrating to TV, where he would go on to co-host CNN’s Crossfire. In an infamous appearance from 2004, comedian and Daily Show host Jon Stewart told him, “You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.” After Crossfire was canceled, Carlson ditched the stupid bowtie and landed a similar gig on MSNBC—it too was soon canceled. Unable to hold a media job for long, in 2010 he co-founded the conservative news website The Daily Caller, which, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “descended into extremism and sensationalism, publishing unsupported and frequently vulgar attacks on Democratic leaders, false criticisms of liberal causes and popular conspiracy theories. The site also became known for its promotion of racist and sexist stereotypes.”