Tucker Carlson’s Nationalist Crusade | The New Yorker
Neff agreed with other AutoAdmit commenters who claimed that Michael Brown deserved to be killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, complaining that “violent criminals are even MORE heroic for black people. He claimed that the four liberal congresswomen known as the Squad – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – wanted “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DEPOSIT FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE THIRD WORLD SHIT.” In another article, Neff warned that “once the Democrats gain a majority, F**K WHITEthings are going to get really wacky very quickly” and lamented that “there is a suicidal impulse among Western people that, honestly, seems to have an almost biological origin.”
In July 2020, after a CNN reporter discovered Neff’s AutoAdmit messages, Neff resigned from Fox News. (Years later, Neff, who later worked as a producer on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, maintained that he was “the least racist person on AutoAdmit,” noting that, unlike many of the site’s users, “I never posted the N-word.”) Carlson, for his part, said he was unaware of these posts. “We do not approve of these comments,” he said. “They have no connection to this show.” But Neff’s AutoAdmit habit was no secret to some of the people he worked with. At Daily CallerNeff bragged about his posts to at least one colleague. “He was really proud of his AutoAdmit character,” a former Applicant The staff member remembers. And Neff’s connection to Carlson wasn’t a secret on AutoAdmit either. In 2017, when Scott Greer, who had been a colleague of Carlson and Neff at Daily Callerappeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his book “No Campus for White Men,” Neff added a favorite AutoAdmit slogan — “the treats of scholarship” — into Carlson’s script introducing Greer. Neff’s fellow AutoAdmit members didn’t miss the Easter egg. “We were able [sic] that,” one wrote.
An analysis of the neo-Nazi site Daily storm found that between November 2016 and November 2018, Carlson was mentioned in two hundred and sixty-five of his articles, most containing excerpts from his show, with headlines like “Tucker FILLINGS Kike liberal with LEAD to demand gun control” and “Tucker Carlson STRENGTHS Big Beaner Whore CHOKING has DEATH on GREASY Tacos.” (Hannity, by comparison, was the subject of twenty-seven Daily storm articles during this period; Laura Ingraham, another prime-time network host, has been the subject of four shows.) As a blog post on the site famous, “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Besides the language used, it covers all of our talking points.
On a Monday morning in April 2023, Carlson was at his winter home in Florida, having just sent his producers the first draft of his monologue for Tonight’s show — a lengthy attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Carlson liked to call Sandy Cortez, invoking her high school nickname — when he received a call from Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. “We’re taking you off the air,” Scott told him. He was being fired. Scott offered him the opportunity to include his own statement in a press release that Fox would send in fifteen minutes to announce his departure, a face-saving move that would make the decision appear to be a mutual separation. Carlson refused. If Fox fired him, he wanted the world to know. After the phone call ended, he sent an email to his team – known within Fox as the Tuckertroop – to tell them the news.
In the days following Carlson’s firing, there was much speculation, both inside and outside of Fox, about the reasons for the firing. Six days earlier, the network settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that Fox News hosts, including Carlson, knowingly broadcast false accusations that the company’s voting machines were used to change vote totals in the 2020 presidential election. Some believed Carlson’s firing was due to offensive comments revealed during discovery, including a text message in which Carlson allegedly called Irena Briganti, the head of media relations at Fox News, from “cunt”. Others wondered if it could have been due to another lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, former booking manager for Carlson’s show, which accused her and the network of creating a hostile work environment. (Fox settled the suit for twelve million dollars.) Still others speculated that it had something to do with a possible trial of Ray Epps, a January 6 protester in Arizona who was at the center of a conspiracy theory – amplified by Carlson – that Epps was a government provocateur placed in the crowd to spur an insurrection. In fact, a sympathetic profile of Epps had appeared on “60 Minutes” the night before Carlson was fired. Maybe Murdoch, who at ninety-two years old perfectly fit the CBS show’s viewer demographic, saw it and got scared. (Epps’ suit was ultimately dismissed.)
