Screenshot : Fox News

If you’ve ever wondered what Kanye West would be like if he were raised by a frozen- food heiress and the U.S. a mbassador to Seychelles, look no further than Tucker Carlson. Although I cannot vouch for Tucker’s beat-making ability or his emcee skills, Carlson is the poster boy for what happens when a narcissist is put in front of an audience who hails douchebaggery as resistance and mistakes overconfident, egocentric ignorance for intelligence.

Tucker Carlson is basically white Yeezus.

But on Monday night’s episode of his hour long show, Fox News’ Mayo-Yeezy threw away his weathered and beaten, alt-right adjacent dog whistle, removed his pointed white hood and revealed his new ministry as a full-fledged white nationalist.


Just as most people think Kanye changed after he lost his mother, people tend to think Tucker is transforming into a white nationalist since the e lection of Donald Trump. But Donda West has been gone for more than a decade and Tucker Carlson has been like this for years.

Most of the time, Carlson cloaked his racism in a combination of righteous indignation and fabricated rationalism that made him look, in comparison to his cohorts, like the “fair and balanced” network’s smart little nephew. Carlson became the opening act for the flared nostrils that adorned the face of Trump-fellater, Sean Hannity, after the departure of Bill O’Reilly (whose old white man, sepia-toned bigotry now seems quaint. I bet he still refers to his servants as “colored”).


But lately, the Millhouse Van Houten of Fox News began replacing his usual pious sanctimony and flatulence-aware facial expressions that made his audience think that he both “smelt it” and “dealt it,” with shout outs to his alt-right homies.

In a March diatribe, just before Yé informed us that slavery was a choice, Carlson invoked the ghost of Klansmen past when he lamented that White people weren’t “designed” to live around immigrants. Then, in early September, the Doogie Howser of white power hinted at his willingness to go full MAGA when he used white nationalist buzzwords to ask how “diversity” made us stronger when everyone knows that when people are all alike (or, by insinuation, white), it makes society better.


A few days later, Carlson doubled down on his anti-diversity screed, but it was all just a prelude for his coming out party.


On Monday night, Tucker perked the ears of white nationalists everywhere when he brought up the white supremacist watchword, “white genocide,” in a segment and subsequent interview. Carlson insisted that a Georgetown professor’s tweet that called Kavanaugh and the members of the Senate Judiciary committee, “entitled white men,” was advocating white genocide, which, he insisted (because they always do), is not what Martin Luther King Jr would have wanted.

Just in case you aren’t familiar with the theory of white genocide and how it relates to white nationalism and diversity, The Root explained it this way:

The theory goes that the white race is being eliminated by immigration, multiculturalism and diversity efforts. Proponents usually cite the rhetoric that the United Nations definition of genocide includes “replacing” a people—it does not (pdf)—which is what is being done to the great Aryan race... According to them, affirmative action in colleges and corporations promotes the replacement of whites by ignoring objective, “merit-based” metrics in favor of diversity. The criers of cold white tears (which eventually become snowflakes) believe that SAT scores, standardized tests and employment recommendations are being rejected to allow blacks and Latinos to erase Caucasians from achieving the American dream.


The sharply dressed contingent of white supremacists who call themselves the “alt-right” actually emerged into the mainstream based on this concept. Back in 2012, I interviewed one of the forefathers of what was then called the “white man movement” when signs reading “Diversity = White Genocide” simultaneously showed up in cities around the country.


The pushers of the “white genocide” conspiracy argued that affirmative action, the vilification of white men, the rise of reverse racism on Twitter and even interracial relationships in Cheerios commercials (yes, they believe that) will lead to the eventual extinction of people who wear Dockers and get acid reflux from the spiciness of celery. Namely, white men.

And that’s why Tucker Carlson and Fox News are so upset about this Brett Kavanaugh debacle.


The consternation felt by Carlson’s ilk has nothing to do with Kavanaugh’s alleged actions or lack thereof. It’s about who Kavanaugh is and what this country is becoming. If a white man whose life has been infused with privilege as he glided his way to the top of America’s pyramid of power and influence can be made into a villain simply for being a white man, then what chance does any white man have?

How dare we question the tactics of the esteemed s enators, and by proxy, all white men for wanting to hand the reins of power and privilege to a fellow white man? Brett Kavanaugh drank beer in high school, just like many other white men. Who amongst them haven’t grabbed a pussy or two? What God-fearing white man hasn’t threatened a woman with rape when he was drunkenly surfing his way through life?


After all, if a white man who went to one of the most elite high school, colleges and law schools in America can’t get a lifetime appointment without facing the prospect of taking responsibility for their own actions, it means that the very existence of white men is in jeopardy.



Tucker isn’t upset that Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault. He isn’t even upset that Kavanaugh might not become a Supreme Court justice. He is upset because Kavanaugh, the white men on the Senate Judiciary Committee and white men, in general, are being questioned and confronted about their whiteness.


By advocating for diversity, asking questions about someone they may have treated unfairly and calling them exactly what they are — white men — we threaten their control of their once-great country. To Tucker Carlson and other white men, that is equivalent to a genocide.

This is the thing they fear.

Men like Donald Trump, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa ) and Brett Kavanaugh are worried that they will have to explain how a small cabal of old white men ended up with all the money, influence and control. But Tucker Carlson already knows how this ornery collection of entitled oligarchs all achieved their lifetime appointments, and so d oes everyone else. They got it the old fashioned way:

White power.