Tucker’s Back – for now – on Twitter

Tucker Carlson is back. Recently fired by Fox News, the media personality released the second episode of his new project on Twitter on June 6, 2023. Similar in format to Tucker Carlson Tonight, though considerably shorter and lacking high-profile guests, production value, and editorial support, his new and simply titled “Tucker on Twitter” series has nonetheless been well received by many on the American right. While posting videos on a social media site may seem like a step down from helming the most watched show on American prime-time cable television, Carlson doesn’t take this view. Invoking measures taken by citizens of the Soviet Union seeking knowledge of the outside world, he states his hope that the platform will be a “shortwave radio under the blanket.” 

Garnering over 140 million views between his first two videos – although a view could merely be someone scrolling past the video on their timeline – it seems that Tucker Carlson has retained his ability to attract an audience. To get a better understanding of the project and what viewers can expect from Carlson, Logically Facts crawled under the blanket and tuned in. 

Episode 1: “An alien species is flying hypersonic aircraft over our cities”  

During his first episode, Carlson mainly focused on the war in Ukraine. Opening by discussing the recent destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, Carlson mischaracterized the construction as a piece of Russian infrastructure. “Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up,” he opined, ignoring the fact that this is fiercely contested. 

Carlson has been a consistent critic of the Ukrainian government, to the extent that previously, clips taken from his Fox show have been repurposed by Russian propaganda outlets. On Twitter, this tendency takes on new life. Carlson was more overtly antisemitic than ever, describing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “Sweaty and ratlike, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.” He then lamented Western support for the country and accused the media of presenting a warped image of the conflict. 

In an effort to convince viewers of the malign intent of the Ukrainian government and its supporters abroad, Carlson presented footage of Zelenskyy meeting with Senator Lindsay Graham. “The Russians are dying; it’s the best money we’ve ever spent,” Graham appears to tell Zelenskyy. Seemingly unaware of widespread coverage demonstrating that the clip in question is edited and that these statements were made at different points in the pair’s discussion, Carlson describes the footage as “two middle-aged guys celebrating the killing of a population.”

According to Carlson, for mainstream journalists, “curiosity is the greatest crime.” In his view, this is evidenced by the mainstream outlets seemingly ignoring a whistleblower who this month claimed to have seen evidence of extraterrestrial life. Seemingly without credulity, Carlson told his audience, “The U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft. The Pentagon has spent decades studying these remains in order to build more technologically advanced weapons systems.” Confidently concluding that “An alien species is flying hypersonic aircraft over our cities,” Carlson failed to tell his audience that the whistleblower behind this account has provided no evidence to substantiate their claims. 

Episode 2: “Cling to your taboos like your life depends on them, because it does”   

The second installment of Carlson’s series is markedly less focused on current events. Instead of providing his analysis of recent news items, he takes a broader view, choosing to rail against what he frames as the erosion of cultural taboos.

Invoking the malign influence of an ill-defined shadowy elite, Carlson asks his audience to consider how one would go about achieving “power not simply to control people’s behavior, but to control how they think.” According to Carlson, to accomplish this, “you would need to take charge of the country’s taboos.” 

In Carlson’s worldview, this process is already well underway. Warning that his country has forgotten that “there is no master race,” he claims, “punishing people based on their skin color is not only permitted in modern America, it is mandatory throughout business, government, and higher education as long as the victims are white.”

Seemingly alluding to unhinged conspiracy theories concerning the former President’s marriage, Carlson sought to back up his claims of an America in moral decline, telling his audience, “By 2008, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Barack Obama had a strange and highly creepy personal life, but nobody ever asked him about it.”

According to Carlson, this supposed erosion of cultural taboos has led us to a point where law enforcement prioritizes arrests of white supremacists over combatting child sexual abuse. Carlson doesn’t provide any firm evidence to support this narrative, opting instead to insinuate that recent failings by Meta to detect pedophile networks on Instagram are the result of this cultural decline.

What’s next for Carlson?

While developments in American conservative media can be difficult to predict, it appears as though Tucker Carlson is, for now, set on developing an audience on Twitter. If successful, this may allow him to preserve his cultural relevance and political heft after his removal from Fox News. While exactly how this will play out remains to be seen, there is a potential obstacle on the horizon for Carlson. 

On June 7, Axios reported that Carlson’s former employer had informed his lawyers he had “violated his contract with the network when he launched his own Twitter show.” While specifics relating to Carlson’s contract with Fox News are not publicly known, this has led some to speculate that his venture on Twitter will be short-lived. 

For his part, it does not appear as though Carlson will walk away from his project without a fight. Responding to Fox News’ claims, a lawyer representing the media personality told Axios, “Fox defends its very existence on freedom of speech grounds. Now they want to take Tucker Carlson's right to speak freely away from him because he took to social media to share his thoughts on current events." 

On June 12, Fox reportedly sent a cease and desist letter to its former host, to which Carlson’s lawyers responded, “he will not be silenced by anyone.”