Tucker Carlson’s Biggest Controversies, Explained

Warning: The following post contains discussions of racist and nativist comments.

In a Truth Social rant last week, President Donald Trump claimed former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has become “totally irrelevant.” Proponents of social justice likely wish that were the case.

During his years at Fox News, Carlson created “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news,” The New York Times reported in 2022, and these days, the conservative commentator still has an outsized presence in the news cycle and influence with the American public. His podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show, is currently the second-highest-rated news podcast on the U.S. Spotify chart.

He’s still often championing anti-immigration rhetoric, as he did recently in his manifesto for a new U.S. political party, as Axios reported. “Carlson is undoubtedly the most listened-to pundit the anti-immigrant movement in America has ever seen and is regarded as a heroic figure to white supremacists and other admirers of fascism,” the Southern Poverty Law Center says in its profile on Carlson. “Outside of Trump himself, arguably no single figure has proven to be more influential in radicalizing the right in the 21st century.”

The controversies involving Carlson are plentiful, but here are our picks for the biggest.

2018: Advertisers boycott Carlson after he says immigrants make the U.S. “poorer and dirtier”

More than a dozen companies stopped advertising on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight in December 2018 after comments Carlson made about immigration, per BBC News. “Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this,” he said on air. “We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Carlson later defended those remarks, saying he would not submit to “enforcers scream[ing] ‘racist’ on Twitter.”

2019: Carlson’s offensive comments about women, Iraqis, and gay individuals resurface

In March 2019, the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America put a spotlight on comments Carlson made on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show years prior. Those transcripts showed Carlson using the C-word and the term “pig” to describe women, calling rape shield laws unfair, and casting doubts about the seriousness of underage marriage, according to The Washington Post.

In a second batch of transcriptions Media Matters released, Carlson said Iraq was a “crappy place filled with a bunch of … semiliterate primitive monkeys” who “don’t use toilet paper or forks,” the Post reported separately. He also used homophobic slurs in the recordings.

Carlson opted not to apologize for the comments, the Post added. Instead, he said, “I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”

2020: Carlson’s Black Lives Matter remarks cause advertiser exodus

On Tucker Carlson Tonight in June 2020, Carlson criticized the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality following the killing of George Floyd. “This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through,” Carlson said on air. “But it is definitely not about Black lives, and remember that when they come for you. And at this rate, they will.”

As advertisers pulled their dollars from Carlson’s program, Fox News said the host was referring to Democratic leaders and not protesters when he said “they,” according to The New York Times.

2020: Carlson sparks outrage with his Kyle Rittenhouse comments

Two months later, Carlson drew heat again when he said that Kyle Rittenhouse, a then-teenager who killed two men at a protest against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “decided [he] had to maintain order when no one else would.”

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was one of the people who spoke out about Carlson’s comments, saying Fox leadership would be “complicit in Tucker Carlson’s racist, murderous rants” if they didn’t take action against him, according to the Associated Press.

2021: Yearbook entry — showing Carlson’s apparent affiliation with Harvey Milk’s murderer — goes viral

In April 2021, a screenshot of Carlson’s entry in Trinity College’s 1991 yearbook went viral, as it listed the future pundit as a member of the “Dan White Society,” per The Wrap. Dan White is the name of the man who killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, in 1978.

2021: Carlson makes quickly-debunked claim about COVID-19 vaccine safety

The following month, Carlson set off fact-checkers’ alarm bells when he said on his show that “3,362 people apparently died after getting the COVID vaccine in the United States” since late December 2020. As PolitiFact pointed out, Carlson was citing unverified and unreliable self-reported data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and improperly implying causation.

“It is exceptionally irresponsible for this man to claim that all these are causal associations. It’s wrong,” Dr. Paul Offit, the chair of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told the site. “He puts people’s lives at risk with bad information during a pandemic.”

2021: Carlson’s Patriot Purge series convinces two Fox News contributors to quit

That November, two longtime Fox News contributors resigned from their jobs with the news organization in protest of Carlson’s three-part Patriot Purge series on the network.

As Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg explained to NPR, Patriot Purge cited fabrications and conspiracy theories to defend pro-Trump participants in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “It’s basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country, and this is the War on Terror 2.0,” Goldberg said. “It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw.”

In a comment to NPR, Carlson said Hayes and Goldberg’s departure “will substantially improve the channel.”

2022: Carlson’s nods to the Great Replacement theory leads to calls for his deplatforming

In May 2022, The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and its Stop Hate for Profit campaign called for technology companies to deplatform Carlson for being “a key promoter of the extremist Great Replacement theory.” Popular among white supremacists, the theory proposes that political elites — and Democrats, often — are attempting to replace white Americans with non-white people through immigration and other means, as PolitiFact explained that month, when Carlson claimed on air that he was “still not sure ure exactly” what the theory was.

An April 2022 New York Times analysis of 1,150 Tucker Carlson Tonight episodes showed that in more than 400 of those episodes, Carlson “amplified the idea that Democratic politicians and others want to force demographic change through immigration.” The Times investigation also found Carlson attributed falling birth rates and a perceived downfall of masculinity to femininity and gender nonconformity. “You see the creation of the white male victim in Tucker Carlson’s show,” Dr. Nicole Hemmer, a Columbia University historian, told the newspaper. “It’s absolutely core to extremist circles.”

2023: Carlson calls transgender ideology “a cancer on the country”

Carlson criticized the push for transgender rights in America in a March 2023 episode of his Fox News show, per the Southern Poverty Law Center. “The ideology leads to the castration of children, and therefore it’s bad,” he said. “It’s a cancer on the country. Of course, that’s true.”

Then, on the Fox News airwaves the following month, Carlson said transgender activists and allies make up “the most dangerous extremist group in the United States.” He also made the transphobic claim that “trans women are not women” and that anyone who disagrees is “delusional.”

2023: Carlson is fired from Fox News amid producer’s lawsuit

Fox News announced Carlson’s abrupt departure from the network in April 2023, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Fox Corporation executives, including then-Chairman Rupert Murdoch, decided to remove the anchor in a decision related to a then-pending lawsuit from Abby Grossberg. In that suit, Grossberg alleged she was bullied and subjected to antisemitic comments while working on Tucker Carlson Tonight. She also alleged that company lawyers coerced her into giving misleading answers in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News, an allegation the network denied. Grossberg told MSNBC that Carlson made her life “a living hell,” and Fox News eventually paid $12 million to settle her suit, per NPR.

The following month, The New York Times reported that one day before Fox was set to defend itself in the Dominion trial, board members were alarmed by the discovery of one of Carlson’s text messages. In a text to a producer, Carlson recalled seeing a video of “Trump guys” assaulting “an Antifa kid,” and the anchor opined the attack was “not how white men fight” but said he still “really wanted them to hurt the kid.” That text message, the Times reported, played a role in Fox’s decisions to fire Carlson and to settle with Dominion for $787.5 million.

2024: White House condemns Carlson’s podcast for “giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier”

In a September 2024 podcast of his podcast The Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson hosted amateur historian Darryl Cooper, who claimed on Carlson’s show that the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews was unintentional.

The Biden administration slammed Carlson for giving Cooper a platform. “Giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over 6 million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism, and to every subsequent victim of antisemitism,” then-senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement to CNN.

2025: Carlson accused of antisemitism over Charlie Kirk eulogy

For his comments at a September 2025 memorial service for Charlie Kirk, Carlson drew accusations of suggesting the activist was assassinated for his criticisms of Israel. In his eulogy, Carlson linked the assassination of Kirk to the crucifixion of Jesus. “Jesus shows up, and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing you can do, which is tell the truth,” Carlson said, per The Hill. “And they hate it, and they just go bonkers. And they become obsessed with making him stop.”

Carlson added that he could “picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about, ‘What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us. We must make him stop talking!’”

In a response, the ADL said, “Carlson’s remarks dangerously reinforced the belief that Jews killed Jesus and that Jews have been a malevolent force throughout history. This antisemitic myth has led to expulsions and murders of Jews for centuries. Even today, too many people still believe this.”

2025: Carlson’s podcast chat with Nick Fuentes draws rebukes

A month later, Carlson stoked antisemitism accusations again — and even angered some Republicans — when he hosted the white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his podcast. In that episode, Fuentes complained about the influence of “organized Jewry,” per The Guardian.

“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry’, and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil,” Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, said of Carlson at the time.