Tucker Carlson's 8 p.m. show on Fox News is the third most popular cable news show in the country, and he's quickly made use of his rising popularity to turn white nationalist narratives into prime-time stories. Carlson's brand has drawn a following of notable white supremacists, anti-Semites, and misogynists, making him a media figurehead among the “alt-right.”
His show has also grabbed the attention of the president. In August, President Donald Trump responded to a fearmongering Carlson segment on “white oppression” in South Africa, stating that he had ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the issue.
Here is Carlson using language that echoes notable far-right figures:
The figures in this video:
Lana Lokteff: Lokteff runs the white supremacist internet media company Red Ice TV with her husband, Henrik Palmgren. Red Ice TV has hosted extremist Richard Spencer and featured Holocaust denier Kevin MacDonald discussing the “JQ” (Jewish Question). Lokteff and Palmgren took part in the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA. The Daily Beast recently reported that “Red Ice regularly promotes hate against immigrants and Jews, riling up its listeners with claims that white people are ... facing extinction at hands of minority groups.”
Jared Taylor: Taylor is the head of the white nationalist American Renaissance group. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Taylor “believes black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs” than white people and that Black people “are sexually promiscuous because of hyperactive sex drives.” Taylor has appeared on talk shows to attack the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Richard Spencer: Spencer coined the term “alt-right” and has described the movement as “an ideology around identity, European identity.” The Anti-Defamation League described Spencer as “a symbol of a new generation of intellectual white supremacists” who “runs a variety of ventures that promote racist ideology.” Spencer was one of the leading forces behind the violent white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017.
Christopher Cantwell: Cantwell is known as the “Crying Nazi” because of his appearance in a Vice documentary about the Charlottesville rally. The self-described white nationalist used pepper spray on counterprotestors during the event and has since been barred from entering Virginia for five years.
David Duke: Duke is a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. The Anti-Defamation League describes Duke as “perhaps America's most well-known racist and anti-Semite.” It says he “promotes anti-Semitic and white supremacist views as the leader of the white supremacist European American Unity and Rights Organization, as a writer of anti-Semitic tracts, and, in recent years, as an international figure who has promoted his anti-Jewish ideology in Europe and the Middle East, devoting particular attention to Russia and the Ukraine.”
Brian Culpepper: Culpepper is a longtime member of the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Movement, acting as the group's public relations officer for a number of years. He was one of the speakers at a 2017 “White Lives Matter” rally in Tennessee.
Mike Enoch: Enoch’s real name is Mike Peinovich. He is the founder of the racist and anti-Semitic website The Right Stuff. He hosts an anti-Semitic podcast called The Daily Shoah. He has said that the core principle of the “alt-right” is “ethno-nationalism, meaning that nations should be as ethnically and racially homogeneous as possible.” He is pictured here giving a Nazi salute.