You’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country, it means killing people.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson (born May 16, 1969) is an American conservative political commentator, reporter, author, and columnist who has hosted the nightly political talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News since 2016.

Quotes

Date unidentified

  • I love women, but they're primitive. They're not hard to understand. [1]
  • I think Michael Moore is loathsome, though, not because he dislikes Bush, but because he seems to dislike America.
    • source needed
  • Don't take a leak on my shoes and tell me it's raining.
    • source needed
  • STEWART: No, this [CrossFire], it's theater. Like, take this for example. How old are you?
CARLSON: I'm 35.
STEWART: And you're wearing a bow tie. See my point? Now, I'm not saying you're not a smart man, because those are hard to tie.

1990s

  • Grover Norquist is a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep… an embarrassing anomaly, the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home… [He] is repulsive, granted, but there aren't nearly enough of him to start a purge trial."
    • Slate magazine, 17 July 1997

2000s

  • "I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it (the U.S. war in Iraq). It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually."
  • Maybe in fact it was better to have Saddam in there. Maybe Saddam, as bad as he was-was not the worst we could get. Maybe chaos was the worst we could get. That's the truth.
    ..
    I mean, look, no matter how you feel about Bush, watching him speak is difficult. It's like— it's like watching a drunk man cross an icy street.
  • There may be countries worth invading, but I don't think we'll be invading them.
    ..
    It's almost impossible to make the case that Bush is a conservative. That may be good; that may be bad.
    ..
    I think [Pat] Buchanan is far too easily and glibly dismissed.
    ..
    The Republican Party of 2005 bears no resemblance to the Republican Party of 1994
  • From the 15 December 2005 edition of MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson:
CARLSON: Here's the problem, [radio host] Max [Kellerman]. Here's the problem with telling Canada to stop criticizing the United States: It only eggs them on. Canada is essentially a stalker, stalking the United States, right? Canada has little pictures of us in its bedroom, right? Canada spends all of its time thinking about the United States, obsessing over the United States. It's unrequited love between Canada and the United States. We, meanwhile, don't even know Canada's name. We pay no attention at all.

[...]

CARLSON: Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he's nice, but you don't take him seriously. That's Canada.
  • You know what gets women going is arguing with them,
    It's true. It's true. You debate politics with a woman and just go—just full blown out there, especially feminism. If you're talking to a feminist, and she's giving you, ‘Well, men really need to be more sensitive,’ (say) ‘no, actually, men don't need to be more sensitive, you just need to be quiet and kind of do what you're told.’
    ..
    I love women, but they're primitive. They're not hard to understand. And one of the things they hate more than anything is weakness in a man.
  • BUBBA THE LOVE SPONGE: Fine people of Canada, please understand that Tucker is a very good friend of mine, but I in no way, shape, or form share his views of how he feels about people from Canada. I love Canada. They're great people up there. Tucker feels that you guys are a bunch of assholes.
    TUCKER CARLSON: I totally disagree. If I didn't like Canada, I wouldn’t consider it worth invading. I mean, Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys -- that’s why it wasn't worth invading.
    THE LOVE SPONGE: Keep burying yourself.
    CARLSON: But Canada's a solid place with good-looking women and good fishing. We should invade.
    • 2008 (either July 10 or October 7) on Bubba the Love Sponge, unearthed 11 March 2019

2010s

2018

Ship of Fools
  • But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.
  • Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime. If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. [W]e are told these changes are entirely good. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.

2019

  • These are the people who write our movies and our sitcoms,
    They are not shocked by naughty words. They just pretend to be when it’s useful. It’s been very useful lately
    ..
    Since the day we went on the air they’ve been working hard to kill this show
    ..
    we will never bow to the mob. Ever.
  • Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever....

    Omar isn't disappointed in America, she's enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress.

    Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.

    Maybe that's our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren't self-confident enough to make them assimilate, so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that, maybe we are importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem, and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It's not sustainable.

    No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results. So, be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She's a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately, or else.

About Carlson

  • He has never been believable as a hatemongering brownshirt; his political ethnicity is probably closer to traitor than demagogue. You'd know exactly which side of the desert island to search for Carlson, if he were ever to be stranded on one with the Barnard French faculty and the Tuscaloosa chapter of the Klan – he'd be on the left bank, passionately misquoting Baudelaire.
  • Carlson occupies the same role for conservatives in the media landscape that Colmes does for liberals. Colmes is a pale-faced, paint-by-numbers loser whose only job is to be a believable liberal for people who live in trailers. Carlson is CNN's idea of a conservative. His right-wing ideas come from his changeable, expensive brains instead of his stomach. In the same way that the helpless, ineffectual Colmes is a reassuring image to hardcore conservatives, Carlson puts a soothing face on conservatism for educated East Coast progressives – because even the biggest neo-Marxist wanker from Brown takes one look at Carlson and sees the one man in America he would feel sure of being able to kick the shit out of in a back alley.
    • Matt Taibbi
  • He is a patsy and a fraud – the kind of public personality totalitarian regimes used to nurture for years in order to execute for a lack of orthodoxy at some opportune historical moment much later on.
    • Matt Taibbi
  • Fox News host Tucker Carlson can congratulate himself for the sentiment coming from the White House. Last week, Carlson apparently decided that the discussion on immigration featured an insufficient amount of racism and hate. So he attacked Omar, who arrived in the United States at the age of 12, for having the temerity to point out that this country doesn’t always live up to its own lofty ideals.

    Folks who go into the news business dream of leaving a mark....As for Carlson, he’s making his mark by inspiring racist tweets.

  • One of my recent analyses contains more than 140 examples of when Tucker Carlson has relied on white nationalists and anti-Semitic tropes in his programming. One of the most prominent ways this manifests is an obsession with racial demographics, and how they are changing in the United States. Tucker Carlson is obsessed with "cultural preservation." There is an entire international far-right movement that echoes such sentiments. Carlson is also constantly fear-mongering about immigrants and blaming every possible problem on the individual choices of immigrants, as opposed to systemic institutions that perpetuate poverty and racism and which impact all people in the United States.
  • Tucker Carlson has built his career over the last decade on the inherent authority which comes with being on television. He can use his platform to mainstream white nationalist or white supremacist talking points and ideas that his audience otherwise would not be privy to. Tucker Carlson has managed to pervert the privilege with comes with being on television into an opportunity to mainstream white nationalism.

    What Tucker is doing is not abstract. Mainstreaming these talking points puts vulnerable communities under direct threat of physical and material harm. The FBI has documented a rise in hate crimes since Trump's campaign and through to the third year of his presidency. There have been massacres targeting Muslims, black people and Jewish people in churches, mosques and synagogues. There is a real life-and-death consequence from the unfettered white nationalism on Fox News, the No. 1 cable news network in the country.

  • From his position in the 8 p.m. slot, Carlson has managed to become one of the most influential voices in conservative politics, often by refusing to adhere to Republican conventional wisdom. Only a few weeks before the Iran flare-up, he delivered a monologue in praise of Elizabeth Warren’s “economic patriotism” plan; in January, he launched an intra-conservative war over the virtues of capitalism with a monologue attacking Mitt Romney, private equity, and conservatives who “worship” the market. He is also perhaps the most reviled talking head in the country thanks to his frequent diatribes against diversity, immigration, and multiculturalism.
  • Although Carlson flirts with white identity politics, particularly on the topic of immigration, his real ideology isn’t white nationalism or even conservatism, at least in the sense that conservatism has come to be defined in America. More than anything, he espouses the Middle American radicalism that John Judis, writing in 2016, identified as the ideological core of Trumpism. Middle American radicals (MARs) are neither fully liberal nor conservative but a blend of the two, mixing populist economics and a hostility to big business with intense nationalism, right-wing positions on race and immigration, and a desire for strong presidential leadership. Their animating idea is that the broad (and implicitly white) middle of American society — those Carlson referred to, in a podcast interview with Ben Shapiro, as people with “100 IQs making 80 grand a year” — is besieged on two sides, by a corrupt elite above it and a grasping underclass below.

References

This article is issued from Wikiquote. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.