There has been some discussion about whether Fox News, which has carried water for Donald Trump for his entire presidency, is drifting away from him now that he has lost the presidential election to Joe Biden. While the news side might be less Trump-friendly right now than it had been before the election, Tucker Carlson is continuing to try to undermine American democracy by supporting Trump’s election conspiracy theories.
Tucker started out the Monday episode of his Fox News show with a 23-minute rant about how we have to take every baseless and bad-faith claim of voter fraud seriously and investigate everything related to the election that any Republican might dream up.
“In case you haven’t noticed, it’s hard to trust anything you hear right now. We’ve heard you. We’re grateful that you trust us and we will try to be worthy of your trust,” Tucker said, even though a judge recently ruled that Tucker is not someone who should be trusted. “We want to begin by assessing some of the things no doubt you have heard about last week’s presidential election.
“There are conflicting versions of virtually every part of that story, but as of right now here’s what we think we know: for much of election night Donald Trump seemed to be leading in a number of key swing states, then early Wednesday morning he began to fall behind. That trend continued, more or less, for several days. On Saturday, the media declared Joe Biden the president-elect. Biden quickly accepted that judgment. The Biden campaign now has something called the ‘office of the president-elect.’ It sounds official, which of course is the point of setting it up.”
Tucker then told his viewers that he will only accept the results of the election if every nonsensical and empty fraud accusation is addressed.
“We’re Americans first. We want what is best for this country. We want our system of government to continue. Whether it does continue, though, depends in part on how we proceed from here,” Tucker said, implying that accepting the true results of the election are somehow a threat to democracy.
“As of tonight, tens of millions of Americans suspect this election was stolen from them. That means we now live in a country where a large percentage of our population no longer believes that our democracy is real. That is sad,” Carlson said, even though he regularly spreads misinformation and attempts to undermine his viewers’ faith in American elections. “It is also dangerous. It could easily get worse. What we’re doing in response is hardly the solution. It is making our country much more volatile. It is setting us up for something bad.”
Tucker then said that all questions about the validity of the election are valid regardless of whether there is any basis or evidence that inspired those questions.
“In a democracy, you cannot ignore honest questions from citizens. You’re not allowed. You can’t dismiss them out of hand as crazy or immoral for asking. You can’t just cut away from coverage you don’t like. You can’t simply tell people to accept an outcome, because force doesn’t work in a democracy. That’s dictatorship,” Tucker said, disregarding the fact that Donald Trump is currently president.
“In a free society, you have to convince the public of your legitimacy. You have to win them over with reason. Democracy is always a voluntary arrangement. Telling voters to shut up is never enough. So, in this case tonight, there’s only one way to lower the national temperature and unite the country. We need to find out exactly what happened in this election.”
Joe Biden won the election.
You can watch the quoted portion of Monday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in the video embedded up at the top of this article.