Presidentvalet 2020

Carlson went off on anyone who has said "diversity is our strength" with the chyron on the screen blaring the question: "How exactly is 'diversity' our 'strength'?"

For years, Carlson has been criticized for stoking the racial anxieties and fears of his largely white male audience. He has called white supremacy “not a real problem” and a “hoax” and attacked the idea that diversity is a strength. He has called Omar a “living fire alarm” and “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country”. He has fretted that Muslims are transforming Europe, and he has given Steve King, the congressman rejected by Republicans for his racist views, airtime to describe the importance of protecting “western civilization”. In December 2018, Carlson said that admitting Central American immigrants “makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided”.

Carlson has on-air guests, but more than what the guests have to say, the show is about how Carlson reacts to what his guests say. He often wears a baleful expression, a kind of hostile befuddlement, and he is quick to anger. Accused by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman in 2019 of scapegoating immigrants, Carlson exploded, in leaked footage that Fox News has declined to air: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain!”

The heart of Tucker Carlson Tonight is a nightly monologue by the host, in which Carlson picks an outrage from the daily news and emotes about it, inviting his audience to share his anger, and to see themselves as also under attack – from immigrants, from the left, from the media, from Democrats, from an unseen malignant conspiracy.