Fox News needs to rebrand, since the network’s current incarnation as President Donald Trump’s personal propaganda outlet is about to stop being viable. One clear possibility is returning to the role of the “voice of opposition” that it held during President Barack Obama’s tenure, fighting tooth and nail against the confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s nominations and the passage of his policies.
Fox star Tucker Carlson is testing out that path. Over the last week, he’s run a series of segments targeting Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Clarke began her career as a trial attorney for the division; spent four years leading the Civil Rights Bureau for the New York State Attorney General’s Office; and was most recently president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Clarke shares the Democratic Party’s views on the values of affirmative action in college admissions, diversity in hiring, and voting rights, rather than those of the Republican Party apparatchik who she would replace. Her recent accomplishments include securing damages against the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, who had sicced a troll mob on her organization’s client. And she is a Black woman who is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants.
All of this makes Clarke a perfect target for Carlson, whose descent into bigotry led his own colleagues to describe the network as containing a “white supremacist cell.” Carlson had to cut ties with his top writer last year following the revelation of the staffer’s bigoted trolling, and he has lost advertisers for falsely claimed that white supremacy is a “hoax,” arguing that immigrants make the country “dirtier,” and attacking Black Lives Matter protesters. (For his part, Anglin, one of Carlson’s many white supremacist fans, once wrote of the Fox host, “Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.”)
Carlson’s campaign against Clarke began last week.
“Appointing Kristen Clarke to head the Civil Rights Division is like hiring Beto O'Rourke to lead the NRA,” he claimed on January 8. “Kristen Clarke doesn't believe in civil rights. She believes in identity politics."