Lawsuits wont stop Tucker Carlson from continuing to claim that the 2020 presidential election was a “scam.”
On his Tuesday night broadcast, the Fox News host stated that “Jan. 6 is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime.”
Carlson spent most of last week airing cherry-picked, decontextualized footage from the Jan. 6 riots in the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to build a case that those responsible for the attack were nothing more than “meek and obedient” sightseers.
But the Fox host has been making headlines for a much more consequential reason: the revelation that Carlson, and many of his colleagues, knew their claims about fraud in the 2020 election were false, and aired them anyway.
Massive troves of texts, emails, and internal communications within Fox have become public as a result of Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against the network. The filings have shown that despite publicly entertaining allegations of voter fraud in the election, Carlson and his fellow Fox personalities knew that the claims were unsubstantiated.
Carlson made clear that he was willing to place the network’s ratings ahead of reality when it came to election coverage. The host implored Sean Hannity to “please” get network White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich fired after she fact-checked claims made by Rudy Giuliani on air.
Behind the scenes, Carlson himself was lambasting allegations made by Giuliani and his fellow attorney Sidney Powell. The host texted his colleague Laura Ingram to gloat that he’d caught Powell in a lie, and at one point texted his producer to complain that Trump was a “demonic force, a destroyer,” who threatened to destroy the network with his election lies. In another text exchange, Carlson agreed with an unnamed sender who states that there’s no “evidence of voter fraud that swung the election,” and that there’s “certainly no evidence the election was stolen.”
Despite privately writing that he hated Trump “passionately,” Carlson continues to carry water for the former president’s lies about a stolen election. Just last week he claimed that there were still many “unanswered questions” about the election, and sarcastically asked how President Biden got “15 million more votes than his former boss Obama? Was the 2020 election a miracle?”
While Carlson may tell viewers that the 2020 election was a “scam,” the only people having the wool pulled over their eyes are Fox’s own audience.
