#Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade

Neff agreed with other AutoAdmit commenters who argued that Michael Brown deserved to be killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, complaining that “the violent criminals are even MORE heroic to Black people.” He claimed that the four liberal congresswomen known as the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” In another post, Neff warned that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full F**K WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly” and lamented that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”

In July, 2020, after a CNN reporter discovered Neff’s AutoAdmit posts, Neff resigned from Fox News. (Years later, Neff, who went on to work as a producer on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, would maintain that he was “the least racist person on AutoAdmit,” noting that, unlike many of the site’s users, “I never posted the N-word.”) Carlson, for his part, said that he was unaware of the posts. “We don’t endorse those words,” he said. “They have no connection to this show.” But Neff’s AutoAdmit habit was not a secret to some people he worked with. At the Daily Caller, Neff bragged about his posts to at least one colleague. “He was really proud of his AutoAdmit persona,” a former Caller staffer remembered. And Neff’s connection to Carlson was not a secret on AutoAdmit, either. In 2017, when Scott Greer, who had been a colleague of Carlson’s and Neff’s at the Daily Caller, appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his book “No Campus for White Men,” Neff dropped a favorite AutoAdmit catchphrase—“the sweet treats of scholarship”—into Carlson’s script introducing Greer. Neff’s fellow AutoAdmit members didn’t miss the Easter egg. “We maed [sic] it,” one wrote.

An analysis of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer found that, between November, 2016, and November, 2018, Carlson was mentioned in two hundred and sixty-five of its articles, most of them featuring clips of his show, with titles like “Tucker FILLS Liberal Kike with LEAD for Demanding Gun Control” and “Tucker Carlson FORCES Fat Beaner Whore to CHOKE to DEATH on GREASY TACOS.” (Hannity, by comparison, was the subject of twenty-seven Daily Stormer articles during that period; Laura Ingraham, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, was the subject of four.) As one blog post on the site celebrated, “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”

On a Monday morning in April, 2023, Carlson was at his winter home in Florida, having just sent his producers the first draft of his monologue for that evening’s show—a lengthy attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Carlson liked to refer to as Sandy Cortez, invoking her high-school nickname—when he got a call from Fox News’ chief executive, Suzanne Scott. “We’re taking you off the air,” Scott told him. He was being fired. Scott offered him the opportunity to include his own statement in a press release that Fox would send out in fifteen minutes announcing his departure, a face-saving gesture that would make it seem like the decision was a mutual parting of ways. Carlson refused. If Fox was firing him, he wanted the world to know. When the phone call was over, he sent an e-mail to his staff—known inside Fox as the Tuckertroop—telling them the news.

In the days after Carlson’s firing, there was much speculation, both inside and outside of Fox, about the reasons behind it. Six days earlier, the network had settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that Fox News hosts, including Carlson, had knowingly aired false accusations that the company’s voting machines were used to change vote totals in the 2020 Presidential election. Some thought that Carlson’s dismissal had to do with offensive comments that were revealed during discovery, including a text message in which Carlson reportedly called Irena Briganti, the head of Fox News’ media-relations department, a “cunt.” Others wondered whether it could have been because of another lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on Carlson’s show, who accused him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. (Fox settled the suit for twelve million dollars.) Still others speculated that it had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a January 6th protester from Arizona who was at the center of a conspiracy theory—amplified by Carlson—that Epps was a government provocateur placed in the crowd to spur an insurrection. In fact, a sympathetic profile of Epps had appeared on “60 Minutes” the night before Carlson’s firing. Perhaps Murdoch, who, at ninety-two, fit squarely in the CBS show’s viewer demographic, had seen it and got spooked. (Epps’s suit was eventually dismissed.)