Tucker Carlson: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

[Music] moving on our main story tonight concerns i'm sorry to say tucker carlson a man who gives tuckers an even worse name than they already have this week as he now seems to every week tucker set off a bit of a firestorm so we've got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits pregnant women are going to fight our wars it's a mockery of the us military well china's military becomes more masculine as it's assembled the world's largest navy our military needs to become as joe biden says more feminine whatever feminine means anymore since men and women no longer exist what are you talking about you performatively outraged wedge salad now he's packed a lot in there from transphobia to weirdly extolling the masculinity of china's navy to his completely misplaced outrage at joe biden over those flight suits which were part of an initiative that started when trump was president and also included ensuring that body armor actually fits women service members which is obviously a good idea those comments sparked an all too familiar cycle of condemnation defensiveness and hype and it seems like every week now tucker has another one of these many controversies last week it was the dr seuss and look i would like nothing more than to not play into his wildly offensive stick you might even be thinking right now why give him the attention that he's so clearly trolling for but the fact is we're not giving tucker any attention he's not already getting a lot of the night he made those flight suit remarks he was the most watched show on cable he averages over three million views a night and does well in the key 25 to 54 demo meaning that young people are watching him as well as the normal fox audience of retirees and their sad imprisoned pets he is so important to the network that they are expanding tucker's presence launching a new video podcast and long-form documentary series and if that wasn't enough tucker's also been floated as a potential future presidential candidate which should be seriously alarming because of all the things that tucker is a conspiracy theorist a misogynist islamophobe a troll one of the most dangerous is that he is the most prominent vessel in america for white supremacist talking points and i already know what tucker will say about this because whenever this topic comes up he has the exact same reaction what does that even mean white nationalism let's be literal for a minute what is that exactly i don't even know what white nationalism means and i'm not going gonna get on that rabbit hole with you now why doesn't anyone ever define white supreme what is white supremacy can somebody tell us in very clear language what a white supremacist is okay first very clear language seems like a high bar to clear for a man who spends 85 percent of his time making the befuddled face of a 13th century farmer learning about bitcoin and i promise that we we're actually going to give tucker a pretty clear definition of white supremacy later in this piece and he does seem to need one because whenever he tries to define it himself it tends to be self-servingly narrow this show was not on the air for six months before there was an organized and highly aggressive campaign by prominent democrats to denounce us as white supremacists the first time it happened the people who work on this show many of them kids were shocked and horrified by that white supremacists what's worse than that the phrase evokes images of burning crosses and lynchings it's awful okay first i'm so sorry tucker i honestly didn't realize that your show was staffed entirely by children i certainly never intended for them to get caught up in all of this so my sincere apologies you tiny little rascals but i don't burn crosses or lynch people so i can't be a white supremacist is a pretty weak argument he's like saying i can't be an anti-semite because i didn't do the holocaust or i can't be a sexual predator because i didn't produce good will hunting there is more than one way to be a terrible person and tucker conveniently for him doesn't fit neatly into a lot of people's perception of white supremacists especially if they share his definition that it must require burning crosses clan hoods and a name tag that says hello my name is a racist you might even have friends who think tucker can't be racist i've never heard him say the n word as if that is the bar but for the record white supremacists themselves seem to be big fans of what tucker's been doing just listen to derek black a former white supremacist whose father started stormfront the largest oldest white supremacist site on the internet talk about just how much his family likes tucker's show my family watches tucker carlson show once and then watches it on the replay because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have and they're trying to get some tips on how to how to advance it yeah they watch it want to enjoy it and a second time to learn from it they watch tucker the same way i watch the drew barrymore show first time for fun second to figure out how she can possibly successfully pull off a segment in which a child makes a shirley temple while stanley tucci quietly drinks an entire glass of wine on a screen in the background i don't know how you work your magic drew but i want to learn you're advancing this form so given that tucker has the admiration of white supremacists and the era of millions of your relatives co-workers and elected officials we thought tonight it would be worth talking about him where he came from what his tactics are and why what he represents is so dangerous let's start with some backstory tucker grew up in la jolla california where his dad married an heiress to the swanson tv dinner fortune which is already interesting because if tucker's got sad 70s single man frozen food money that means he's been doing groundbreaking shows like cuck-holding is when a humiliating man watches his wife have an affair for the love of the game now to hear tucker tell it he grew up in a simpler better time he once wishfully claimed racial solidarity wasn't a working concept in my southern california hometown most people barely had last names much less ethnic identities which is a pretty weird thing to say if your full name is tucker swanson mcnair carlson and your ethnic identity can best be described as my brother's name is buckley swanson peck carlson the only way he could get any more ethnically white is if he mayonnaise now as a child tucker was sent to boarding school where he promptly did two things fail to impress any number of prestigious universities and start dating the headmaster's daughter a headmaster who in return arranged to get him into trinity college he then became a print journalist reportedly after his father told him that journalism will take anybody which to his dad's credit did kind of turn out to be true tucker's lead to tv though came as an accident supposedly back in the 90s dan rather show called the magazine where tucker was working looking for somebody to talk about the oj trial and the receptionist there told him everyone else is still at lunch can you do it which might be the single whitest origin story i have ever heard hey you yeah you with the skin and face we've got an extra career lying around are you interested but despite his total lack of preparation tucker was almost immediately hitting on themes that he'd be echoing for the next 25 years because here is one of his very first tv appearances in the aftermath of the o.j verdict let me ask you mr carlson do you think we're honest with each other race to race oh no of course not i mean you know everybody is terrified of uh of one thing you know whites are of course terrified of being called a racist blacks are uh terrified of being belittled of course i i think we need actually probably less conversation about race i think it might do as good were we to ignore the subject a little bit and treat each other as if there were no color boundary separating us i think that might be helpful i think we talk about it in some ways too much okay first i'm pretty sure that black people are less terrified of being belittled than have been killed jailed economically exploited or indeed denied access to health care after their heads literally explode from hearing someone in a bowtie and plaid blazer suggest being called racist is as bad as actually experiencing racism although i do want to quickly come back to that specific bow tie because look i'm not knocking bow ties in general they're perfectly fine for a child attending his first communion or a hannah barbera animator who can't draw necks but that bow tie is too small either commit to it or don't tucker don't just put on a tiny bow tie and hope that no one notices now from there tucker bounced around a bit with cancelled chills on both cnn and msnbc although in his time at cnn he did manage to produce and i don't say this lightly the most 2003 clip of all time you work with pepsi for a long time candidly just between you and me how much pepsi do you think you drink on an average day i really do like pepsi really what's your favorite okay my favorite kind of pepsi pepsi's pepsi well you don't drink diet pepsi or no just just just just regular pepsi look i cannot stress this enough leave britney alone don't do gotcha journalism about her pepsi consumption not only has she been through a lot she's a stone cold legend she's the definitional diva of the 2000s and i guarantee you there is not a human being on earth who doesn't perk up when that violin hook from toxic comes on exactly put some respect on her name tucker and of course hashtag free brittany and while tucker eventually fell upwards into a primetime fox show in 2016. the fascinating thing is if you go back and watch his early eclipse you can see him learning the tricks of his trade right in front of you what'd you talk about pat buchanan the republican firebrand and noted anti-immigrant crusader and break down one of buchanan's go-to moves with the precision of a dedicated student i mean pat does raise issues that i think are important unfortunately pat buchanan raises them in a way that i think is discredited and when it's hacked he can always fall back on the line well the you know the tiny cabal that controls american politics doesn't like me because i speak truth to power this is actually incidentally almost verbatim what he said the other day that i offend the plutocracy um that i'm a wanted man by the inside the beltway people and in in every sense cast himself as a as a victim who is sort of a karen silkwood of politics someone who's uh so truthful that he's being hunted down by the uh by the conspiracy that runs washington i mean it's all a bit much yeah you're right tucker it is and that is actually a pretty salient point there it's just incredibly hard to take given who's making it in the same way it'd be hard to listen to a lecture on gun safety and overall life choices from takashi 69 i don't care how good your advice is i'm not taking it from you because the tiny cabal that controls american politics doesn't like me because i speak truth to power is now tucker's signature move he does it all the time whenever he's criticized a few years ago he lost advertisers after saying and i quote the immigrants make our country poorer and dirtier and more divided and this is how he fired back those who won't shut up get silenced you've seen it a million times it happens all the time the enforcers scream racist on twitter until everybody gets intimidated it's a tactic a well-worn one nobody thinks it's real and it won't work with this show we're not intimidated we plan to try to say what's true until the last day and the truth is unregulated mass immigration has badly hurt this country's natural landscape oh off tucker you relentlessly indignant picket fence how did you go from criticizing pat buchanan for that precise tactic to basically imitating him it's all to borrow a phrase a bit much but that technique gets to the absolute heart of tucker's show so often he positions himself as someone just asking the hard questions the ones that they don't want you asking questions like is affirmative action racist and should america be selective with immigrants and has the democratic party become anti-white and anti-male just asking questions while heavily implying that the answer to those questions is yes but when in turn anyone questions him they are not just censoring free speech they are launching an attack on the foundations of our democracy and the vast working class who this humble tv dinner princeling somehow represents and the most telling thing about tucker's framing off himself as the scourge of the elites and the hero of the common man is that for tucker who constitutes the common man is very selective take ilhan omar just watch him lose his over a clip that he's about to play of something she said if anyone should love america it's ilhan omar this country rescued her from a squalid kenyan refugee camp and made her a national figure quite an ascent but ilhon amar is not grateful she hates us for it watch omar tell us it is time to dismantle our country as long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting who is being shut out we will perpetuate this inequality so we cannot stop at criminal justice system we must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it dismantle the american economy and the american system of government institutions that generations of americans built over hundreds of years all right there is already enough there in the sneering condescension that ilhan omar should be quietly grateful her entire life because she was granted asylum when she was a child but let's just consider the vast distance between what you just heard her say and what he seemed to hear because according to tucker dismantling the system of oppression means dismantling the entire american economy and system of government now did he inadvertently make a nuanced point about how systemic oppression is definitionally baked into every level and facet of that very same system yeah yes he did am i going to give him credit for doing that no especially not when this is what he said next the problem is there are many of us here who do like this country we live here we don't want to destroy it we have every right to fight to preserve our nation and our heritage and our culture wow preserve our heritage and culture that is direct in fact his pre-written caption there we have to fight to preserve our nation and heritage through a lot of comparisons to the 14 words the famous white supremacist slogan that says we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children and when you put the two together there is you know a slight similarity there i'm just saying if you typed tucker's quote into a blank word document nine times out of ten clippy's gonna ask are you trying to recite the 14 words now of course clippy has been asking that a lot more ever since he started spending so much time on youtube careful how much time you spend on their clippy it's turning you into an and if you think well come on that seems like a bit of a stretch you can't know what tucker means by our heritage and culture you should know that he hasn't always been that disciplined about his messaging in the late 2000s he used to call into a radio show hosted by shock jock bubba the love sponge and in those calls the thin veil covering his racism would occasionally get thrown off in moments like this a rock is a crappy place filled with a bunch of you know semi-literate primitive monkeys but i just have zero sympathy for them or their culture a culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks okay that isn't just incredibly offensive it's also the kind of fact-free cultural hot take that is the essential tucker carlson experience because while it is clearly by no means the most important thing there for the record table forks were apparently first used in the middle east and byzantine empire and were still conspicuously absent in europe until centuries later in fact when the niece of a byzantine emperor brought a case of forks to venice for her wedding feast in the 11th century she was roundly condemned by the local clergy for her decadence with one saying god in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks his fingers therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating which is absolutely fascinating because it's not just a full refutation of tucker's lazy racism it's also a very fun fork fact facts are fun the point is when you know how tucker speaks when he speaks freely the filter through which he processes the world for his audience becomes painfully apparent because he is smart enough not to openly say into a camera that certain races are more deserving of scorn or less worthy of respect he will just heavily imply that depending on who he's talking about take the capital riots tucker said that he deplored the violence but repeatedly compelled his viewers to try and understand where the demonstrators were coming from on january 6 we had a riot at the u.s capitol why did that happen it happened because millions of american voters were convinced that the last election was not fair where did they get that idea well it wasn't simply because the last president told them so you're hearing that now as if they're animals who take commands and do what they're told but they're not animals they're people they're american citizens who can see what's happening and come to their own conclusions about it they saw the radical increase in mail-in voting millions did and it corroded their faith and the public's faith in our systems of election okay hold on people didn't think the election was rigged because they saw an increase in mail in voting they thought that because people like you repeatedly told them the election was rigged and that plea for understanding there is especially hard to take when you contrast it with how he reacted to last summer's black lives matter protests people like this don't bother to work they don't volunteer or pay taxes to help other people they live for themselves they do exactly what they feel like doing they say exactly what they feel like saying they spray paint their opinions on buildings on television hour by hour we watch these people criminal mobs destroy what the rest of us have built they have no right to do that they don't contribute to the common good they never have yet suddenly they seem to have all the power well that's quite a different tone and it is interesting to see who gets to be american citizens who came to their own conclusions and who gets to be criminal mobs who destroy what the rest of us have built and it does seem like the dividing line for tucker on that question is how easily can you sunburn and look my point here isn't that tucker is inconsistent in addressing two violent protests in vastly different ways is that he's actually incredibly consistent because in both instances his clear takeaway is that white people should be terrified of the idea of any situation where they aren't in power the main narrative of tucker show is that power is being taken away from you his viewer and that this needs to be resisted he's run segments just asking questions remember like how exactly is diversity our strength and has argued not just that it isn't but that it's a threat to our existence as a cohesive country in fact he'll often call to resist that threat with an interesting choice of phrase western civilization is our birthright it makes all good things possible undefended it collapses and so we've got to fight to preserve it it's a war with one side trying to erase all remnants of its opponent in this case western civilization is the culture into which they're coming the western civilization we're talking about superior to the culture that these immigrants are bringing do you think it's possible to move a large muslim population into the west and successfully integrate them into western culture have you seen that anywhere yeah for tucker it seems western civilization is somehow both the mighty and essential bedrock upon which all modern human existence is built and also a delicate house of cards that will collapse if you so much as look at it wrong and again he will be careful not to verbally link race and civilization like he's calling into a love sponge's radio show in 2006 but he will occasionally dance incredibly close to it let me just stipulate i'm for getting along i'm for color blindness i'm for tolerance 100 but i also think that if things radically change in your country it's okay for you to say what is this and maybe i don't want to live in a country looks nothing like the country i grew up in is that bigoted uh yeah yeah it is that's like saying i've got ten fingers and toes a pointy face with a little pink rosebud mouth a cat sized body a long weird tail and i eat garbage does that make me a possum yes yes it does that's the literal definition of the thing you just described and that is the whole thing with tucker he might not say black or white he'll insist that he's for color blindness he'll build in deniability by phrasing things as a question like what does racism look like what kind of embodying the answer but when you put all of this together the pattern is clear he is scared of a country that looks nothing like the one he grew up in because diversity isn't our strength immigrants make our country poorer dirtier and more divided and any attempt to change that culture is an attack on western civilization all of which is really just a long way of saying that when tucker asks what is white supremacy the answer is basically that it's a belief that in a country where white people are dominant that's all down to their natural and innate abilities and any effort to change that is an affront to the natural order of things so it's frankly no wonder that that guy's family watches tucker twice a night of course tucker has been endorsed by white supremacists james alsup a far-right activist who marched in charlottesville once said this to a conference room full of fellow white supremacists an example of someone engaging in very effective rhetoric is of course tucker carlson tucker is helping mainstream conservatives change the way they think about politics and causing a massive swath of trump voters to look deeper into many of the issues that we already talk about the left is aware of what he's doing and he's aware of what he's doing so it works phenomenally oh that might be the single worst laugh i have ever heard and i say that as someone who has almost forgotten what human laughter sounds like i've been stuck inside casper's for 12 long months now i'm so desperate to hear the response of a live audience but if it is a neo-nazi chuckle ping-ponging off the walls of a hotel ballroom i think i might be out and look if everything i've shown you tonight somehow still isn't enough let's hear from a literal former grand wizard of white supremacist david duke he's not only tweeted approvingly about tucker in the past saying tucker is right and can't cuck the tuck which as all tucker viewers know refers to when a humiliated man watches his wife have an affair duke even has a podcast where he sometimes just recaps tucker's segments from the night before last year when endorsing trump for president duke even suggested that tucker carlson should be his vp explaining tucker's value to the white supremacist cause like this he doesn't use the word white very often but that's the underlying message that he's he's showing and he shows that there is massive racism in america against white people while at the same time saying there's no systematic racism but people get the message yeah people do get the message although to be fair it's not like it's written in a complex code it's a walking yacht club scrunching his face up for an hour every night and saying to a conservative audience they are coming for you in modulating tongues we're not exactly in riddle of the sphinx territory here and all of this is why as tempting as it is to dismiss the controversy that follows tucker every week as one more artifact of our outrage culture it's important to remember that what tucker is saying is outrageous because no one in their right mind would sit down pop in their headphones fire up david duke's podcast and think hey i'm not a white supremacist but millions of people watch tucker on tv every night spouting well-laundered versions of pretty much the same talking points and there is real harm in that because while white supremacy is clearly dangerous when promoted by self-avowed white supremacists it can actually be even more dangerous when it isn't and what tucker carlson show sells in addition to utterly terrible pillows is very seductive it's the idea that this country is fundamentally colorblind that anyone who mentions race is just trying to start trouble that historic oppression is no longer relevant and that in fact you his viewers are the ones currently being oppressed and if he can sell his audience on his white identity politics if he can persuade them that the big existential threat to america right now is diversity it sort of doesn't matter if he says allowed what his preferred solutions to that might be and while it's bad enough to hear that white supremacist families gather around to watch tucker twice the fact is millions of viewers a night watch him once and once is already more than enough you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 7,982,555

Rating: 4.5083413 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: XMGxxRRtmHc

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mlc885]

"weirdly extolling the 'masculinity' of China's Navy"

It really was weird.

[u/alterator]

Mirror pt1 (10min): https://streamable.com/enxbct

Mirror pt2 (10min): https://streamable.com/ys0t8j

Mirror pt3 (5min): https://streamable.com/6sx9dg

Thanks all :) Edit: updated as copyright took them down

[u/Malachi108]

While you're here, check also Some More News segment on Tucker which is twice as long and just as funny.

[u/Spanky_McJiggles]

How dare John make me look at Tucker Carlson with my own eyes.

[u/Madpup70]

One of the few times I am 100% sure that I won't be shocked with what John Oliver presents in his show.

Edit: I was not shocked.

[u/[deleted]]

"Standing up for what's right" Hilarious tagline Fox.

[u/ab370a1d]

replace 'White Supremacists' with 'Hindu Nationalists' and 'blacks and minorities' with 'Muslims', and this entire video sounds focused to how Indian media is going around these days

[u/inagartenofeden]

What he really thinks of his "fans"

"One thing you learn when you grow up in a castle and look out across the moat every day at the hungry peasants in the village is you don’t want to stoke envy among the proletariat.”

The goal of Tucker's show isn't to challenge the elite. It's to make sure you never realize who they are. To get you so mad at atheists, feminists, immigrants, millennials, trans people, college students, pot smokers, vegans, the NFL, Brooklyn witches, and Lena f*cking Dunham that you don't get mad at the people who are actually in charge.

-Carlos maza

[u/wonkalicious808]

Fox's own lawyers basically describe Tucker's viewers as unreasonable people because they believe what he says. Maybe John doesn't want to punch down at them, but maybe he should. Because, yeah, Tucker is exploiting them. But they desperately want to be exploited. They're not too stupid to realize what's happening. They're hyper emotional and immoral. And their ridiculous fears and anti-Americanism weaken the country.