Tucker Carlson has reached the last line of defense in justifying the Republican Party’s constantly growing intertwinement with the QAnon conspiracy theory: straight-up pretending it doesn’t exist. Moreover, he’s basically blaming Democrats and news media outlets for making it all up.
On his show Tuesday, Carlson attacked CNN over a segment the network ran on rightwing disinformation. As he sees it, the real conspiracy is all these media outlets talking about conspiracy theories in the first place. Carlson is trying to claim that if that weren’t happening, maybe the disinformation wouldn’t even exist, as if the media invented QAnon by shining a light on it.
Tucker’s big proof of this theory is that when he had his staff try to find information on QAnon—which he is pretending he didn’t know anything about until yesterday—they had a hard time finding the source. QAnon, team Tucker learned, “is not even a website.”
This is the same guy who thinks Antifa has, like, monthly dues and hierarchal leadership, but sure.
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) February 24, 2021
“If [QAnon’s website] is out there, we could not find it,” he added.
Tucker Carlson: “We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it” pic.twitter.com/mLESlsxURO
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) February 24, 2021
It is true that QAnon is not a website. I would also like to know what Carlson thought the “Anon” part stood for when he started looking for some definitive primary source for the conspiracy—you know, beyond the message board threads that have been widely reported on by all those news platforms he has decided not to trust.
Carlson said he and his team also checked the Twitter accounts of vocal conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones and couldn’t immediately find any information on QAnon, and again, took that as a sign that it must have been invented by news outlets.
“We checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed because we have heard she traffics in disinformation–CNN told us. But nothing there. Next, we called our many friends in the tight-knit intel community. Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones?” Carlson said with mock incredulity that, to be honest, is almost hard to tell from his constant affectation of fake incredulity.
“Who is lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other and certain to destroy our core institutions?” he continued.
“Well, none of the above, actually. It wasn’t Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was cable news. It was politicians talking on TV. They’re the ones spreading disinformation to Americans. Maybe they’re from QAnon. You be the judge,” he said before cutting to a montage of Democrats talking about the epidemic of police officers murdering Black Americans, which he used as a precursor to—you guessed it—suggesting that wasn’t real also.
Tucker Carlson’s approach to QAnon and other conspiracy theories isn’t just lazy journalism. (Although, to be clear, it definitely is that. Taking one day to do Google searches and presumably just look for the word “QAnon” in a couple of people’s Twitter feeds rather than understand how spiraling, fringe conspiracies like the ones Greene peddles can be tied back to a central hub of rightwing disinformation–that is not journalism. Not that Carlson is even pretending to be a journalist anymore.)
It’s also a deliberate foundation to support the wide-ranging argument that the media is lying about everything that Tucker’s viewers might find unsavory or personally insulting. And we know that those viewers tend to see references to racism and conspiracy theories as personal attacks. Which says a whole lot more about them than it does about, say, CNN.
(image: screencap)
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