With his new book, Tucker, Chadwick Moore melds hagiography to dictation. For nearly 300 pages, writer heaps praise on subject, whom he liberally quotes. Along the way, Moore lets us know that the man who was Fox News’s brightest prime-time star shuns both socks and deodorant. He also tells us how Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump shared yucks over women’s legs.
“Look at those beer girls,” Carlson recollects Trump saying, at a golf event at his New Jersey club last July. “You can’t make legs like that. That’s genetics!”
A contributing editor at the Spectator, Moore appeared on Carlson’s final Fox News broadcast. In his book, he devotes considerable attention to Carlson’s excision from the Murdoch empire.
“They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson is quoted as saying, in reference to the $787.5m deal Fox reached with Dominion Voting Systems to end its defamation suit over the broadcast of Trump’s election lies.
“They had to settle this. Rupert couldn’t testify. I think that deal was made minutes before the trial started. I mean, I know it was.”
Fox and Dominion have repeatedly said otherwise.
The reason for Carlson’s removal remains the source of much speculation. In May, the New York Times published a text sent by Carlson that the paper said helped lead to his disappearance from the airwaves. In the leaked message, Carlson confessed to initially rooting for a pro-Trump mob to pummel and kill “an Antifa kid” but to have stepped back from the abyss, adding: “It’s not how white men fight.”
Moore attempts to defend his friend from allegations of racism. Whether he succeeds is debatable. Ambivalence creeps into Carlson’s voice.
“Being racist is not a crime,” he says. “Maybe [it is] a moral crime, but not a statutory crime – so if I was racist, I would just say so.”
Moore enlists as a character witness Richard Carlson, Tucker’s father: “Tucker’s a racist? When his brother [Buckley Carlson] sees someone write that, he wants to go punch the guy out.”
So that’s how white guys are supposed to fight!
This is not the first time the Carlson boys have appeared together in print. In 2015, Tucker approved of an email sent by his brother to Amy Spitalnick, spokeswoman for Bill de Blasio, then New York mayor. Buckley derided her as “LabiaFace”. “I just talked to my brother about his response,” Carlson told Politico. “He assures me he meant it in the nicest way.”
Women and their anatomies weigh on him. Discovery in the Dominion litigation captured Carlson calling Sidney Powell, a Trump adviser, a “cunt”. According to the Daily Beast, lawyers for Dominion pressed Carlson on whether his coarse reference to Powell was a one-off, or if he had deployed the profanity to trash her on other occasions.
He equivocated: “You know I-I-I can’t know and I just want to apologize pre-emptively. I mean you’re trying to embarrass me, you’re definitely succeeding as I am embarrassed.”
Not any more. Speaking to Moore, Carlson meditates on the C-word, “one of my favorite words … super naughty, but it’s to the point. It’s ‘Break glass in case of emergency!’”
He was also busted calling a Dominion lawyer a “slimy motherfucker”. But Carlson takes less glee in dropping the F-bomb. “Fuck is so overused it’s lost all its power and meaning,” he tells Moore. “It doesn’t have the same impact anymore.”
Moore also treats the reader to Carlson’s take on Rachel Maddow. Nuance, envy and omission abound. Carlson takes credit for spotting Maddow and bringing her onboard when he was at MSNBC himself.
“I didn’t want to do the shtick they usually do, get some retarded person on,” he shares. “She isn’t a deep intellectual or anything, but I’m not either. But she’s a good debater and super nice. I always liked her.”
Unmentioned is that the first amendment has shielded both Carlson and Maddow from defamation liability. Fox and MSNBC have successfully argued that neither specializes in facts. Instead, they offer opinion and should not be taken too seriously.
“Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statement he makes,” a Trump-appointed judge held in 2020.
Moore’s biography is also a family affair. Susan Andrews, Carlson’s wife of 30 years, mother of their four children, takes a chance to needle a former Fox News rival. Expressing sadness over the hostility her husband evokes, she asks: “Why doesn’t Sean Hannity get this sort of reaction?”
Misery loves company.
“I don’t watch his show,” Andrews says, “so I don’t really know what he thinks, but it’s my understanding Tucker speaks about topics that are more, I guess, controversial.”
Hannity repeatedly shilled for Trump on the air and at actual rallies. Like Carlson, he was deposed in the Dominion lawsuit. He also pushed a lie about the death of Seth Rich, a Democratic staffer murdered on the streets of DC. In contrast to Carlson, though, Hannity has never featured a segment on testicle tanning.
In a text from 4 January 2021, revealed in the Dominion suit, Carlson expressed his loathing for Trump.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately … I can’t handle much more of this.”
Time passes. “Do I like Trump?” Carlson now tells Moore. “I love Trump. To have dinner with Trump is one of the great joys in the world. If you were to assemble a list of people to have dinner with, Trump would be in the top spot.”
Broadcasting on Twitter, in a standoff with Fox, Carlson evidently won’t go quietly. Moore seems eager to be his wingman. Their fight is not close to finished.
Tucker is published in the US by All Seasons Press
