By Donald Jeffries
Tucker Carlson has come a long way over the past decade. He’s an entirely different person from the young, bowtie-wearing mainstream conservative he used to be when he first burst upon the scene as a talking head on CNN back in 2000. Before that, in the 1990s, Carlson wrote for The Weekly Standard, the mouthpiece for the neocon foreign policy establishment.
Carlson’s nightly Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has become the highest-rated news program on television. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that Carlson no longer touts the typical conservative, neocon party line. And he has stopped wearing his bowtie. In fact, Carlson has become a passionate critic of America’s neocon foreign policy, with its endless, nonsensical wars and occupations. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that he has become, perhaps, the strongest voice for peace in the mainstream media.
There is a recent precedent for all this. Pat Buchanan gradually evolved from a young Nixon speechwriter (who famously came up with the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism,” used in a speech by Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew) to a populist who blasted America’s trade deals, and was against every American foreign policy misadventure since the Gulf War. Until Donald Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign, Buchanan was also America’s foremost critic of its disastrous immigration policies. Buchanan’s transformation was triggered by the suffering and unfairness he saw among blue-collar workers whose jobs had been outsourced by a rigged system, when he challenged incumbent President George H.W. Bush for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination.
There doesn’t appear to be a similar epiphany-style event that explains Carlson’s radical change in political perspective, however. Carlson has even appeared on the “Alex Jones Show” several times, although he still largely avoids conspiratorial topics like 9/11, the JFK assassination and certain aspects of World War II history. But, in almost every other way, Carlson has essentially become a “conspiracy theorist.” He is now routinely demonized by almost everyone else in the mainstream media. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was in part responsible for forcing this newspaper’s predecessor The Spotlight into bankruptcy, called for Carlson’s firing last year, triggered over his comments about “The Great Replacement” theory on commentator Mark Steyn’s program, when he said:
I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote, and they’re diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do that. Why are we putting up with this?
Carlson has been at his most daring and controversial on racial matters. Virtually alone among television pundits, he has consistently highlighted the racial double standards employed on a regular basis by both government and private industry. According to the ADL, “The Great Replacement Theory” is what “undergirds the modern white supremacist movement in America.” This absurd mantra about “white supremacy” was tackled directly on air in August 2019 by Carlson, when he declared that “white supremacy” was a “hoax,” and he lost even more advertisers and sponsors as a result. In late 2018 and early 2019, he lost more than 25 sponsors over his comments regarding immigration and other related issues. One of his controversial statements was:
Study after study has shown that, when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow—more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarcerations rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.
The Guardian asserted that “his hatred is infectious,” and claimed that the Fox News host “courted white supremacists” on his show. Numerous other equally inaccurate slurs have been leveled against Carlson by even bigger media outlets. When Carlson produced the documentary “Patriot Purge” for Fox Nation, the attacks went viral. Focusing on the wildly misrepresented Jan. 6 protests, which Carlson, nearly alone, has covered honestly over the last year in the mainstream media, it drew a response from fellow Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera on Twitter, which said, “‘False Flags?’ Bull****!” Weepy Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger called it “disgusting.” Fox News contributors Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg resigned in protest over the documentary.
Carlson has also provided a platform to alternative views about the Covid narrative, and featured guests who had been injured by the vaccine. He has had parents labeled as “domestic terrorists” by our Justice Department on the show to relate their experiences taking on our horrific school systems and woke school boards. Carlson often speaks favorably of populism, and the comparison to Pat Buchanan here is inescapable. He talks about average, working class people having no power, and blasts the elite for their smugness and corruption.
Tucker Carlson is now considered an enemy of the state.
So, when people allege American Free Press is “becoming Tucker Carlson,” the opposite is actually true. It may have taken some time, but Carlson is basically repeating the same issues this newspaper has harped on since its founding in 2001: It’s the American middle class—not the elite or the poor—whose financial health is of the utmost importance to the future of America.
Donald Jeffries is a highly respected author and researcher whose work on the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and other high crimes of the Deep State has been read by millions of people across the world. Jeffries is also the author of three books currently being sold by AFP Bookstore.
