Melissa Joskow / Media Matters
Pete D'Abrosca wasn't the first white nationalist Tucker Carlson has hosted
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published
On December 6, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson hosted Pete D’Abrosca, a blogger with ties to white nationalist movements, to promote his run for Congress. This is not the first time the Fox host, who has a long history of promoting white supremacy, has brought on a guest who associates with far-right extremism or has promoted narratives championed by the movement.
Here’s a noncomprehensive list of past guests on Tucker Carlson Tonight who have connections to far-right extremism:
Carlson hosted Greer to promote his book No Campus for White Men in February 2017. Greer, who at the time of his appearance on Fox was a columnist at The Daily Caller, was outed in July 2018 by The Atlantic as having written for the white supremacist journal Radix under a pseudonym. This wasn’t the first time The Daily Caller, a website co-founded by Carlson, has published a white nationalist.
In August 2018, Carlson hosted far-right British activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson, after he was released from prison pending trial for contempt of court charges. Robinson is the former leader of the English Defense League, an anti-Muslim extremist group.
Hopkins has appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight 15 times in 2017 and 2018 according to Media Matters’ internal database. Hopkins is a far-right British commentator, (thought she appears to have left her employer) who has built a media grift around being virulently xenophobic. Her racist comments include calling for a “final solution” following a terror attack in the U.K., labeling refugees as “cockroaches,” and calling for London police to profile young Black men. Hopkins has also promoted a conspiracy theory about “white genocide” in South Africa circulated by white nationalists (she shares this position with Carlson). She has numerous ties to far-right figures, including Robinson, Infowars’ Alex Jones, white nationalist and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Brittany Pettibone, and white nationalist Lauren Southern.
Carlson hosted apartheid apologist Ernst Roets of AfriForum in May 2018 to fearmonger about the South African government’s effort to correct unequal distribution of land ownership that occurred during apartheid. AfriForum is the South African Afrikaners’ rights group pushing the white nationalist conspiracy theory that a land reform proposal in South Africa is part of a plot for “white genocide.” Roets was on a tour of America promoting the conspiracy theory with his AfriForum colleague Kallie Kriel, who is also an apartheid apologist. Roets has appeared on white nationalist Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube talk show and gave an interview to The New American, the magazine founded by the conspiratorial far-right group the John Birch Society. When Carlson held a subsequent segment on the conspiracy theory a few months later, President Donald Trump asked the secretary of state to look into the issue.
Carlson has hosted white supremacist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) seven times since 2017. One of these appearances included a cleanup interview after King tweeted that Americans “can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” (which echoes the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory). During the interview, Carlson defended the congressman’s racist comments, saying, “Everything you said I think is defensible and probably right.” After King expressed explicit support for white nationalists and white supremacy in an interview with The New York Times, Carlson first ignored the interview except to attack the media and then deflected when pressed, saying, “Steve King, whatever he said, he didn’t call for an ethnostate.” King’s racist views have been known for years.
In September 2017, Carlson hosted Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, an alternative social media platform dubbed a “haven for white nationalists” and a “magnet for the alt-right,” after it was removed from the Apple and Google app stores for violating hate speech rules. A little over a year later, Torba and Gab were in the news again after one of the site’s users posted a message there before murdering 11 Jewish people during a worship service at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania. The site has since almost completely fallen apart.
Carlson has four times hosted Joey Gibson, leader of the Portland, Oregon-based far-right group Patriot Prayer, which has been involved in violent street fights. Gibson is currently facing criminal and civil charges related to a fight that broke out at a bar this past May in which a woman was knocked unconscious. The group is also closely connected to the violent far-right extremist group the Proud Boys. In 2015, Carlson gave an interview to Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes in which Carlson defended statutory rape. He also posed for a picture with members of the group in 2018.
Since 2017, Tucker Carlson has hosted racist conspiracy theorist Roger Stone eight times. Stone has been an Infowars regular, has close connections to the violent street gang the Proud Boys, and has a long legacy of violent, racist, and sexist comments. Carlson has repeatedly used his show to lobby President Trump to pardon Stone, who in November 2019 was found guilty on charges related to his September 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee. Carlson has also appeared in a documentary on Stone's life and wrote an introduction to one of his books.