Among other bigoted rhetoric Tucker Carlson has spewed for years on national television, he’s continuing the trend in his new biography, where he pointedly says that being racist isn’t a crime.
“Being racist is not a crime,” Carlson told his biographer. “Maybe [it is] a moral crime, but not a statutory crime—so if I was racist, I would just say so.”
The Guardian got ahold of the biography called “Tucker” by Chadwick Moore ahead of its release in the U.S. In it, Carlson highlights his broadcast success as well as his removal from his prime time position on Fox News.
The comments he made about racism are interwoven with the thoughts he gave Moore on why Fox was so quick to remove him from the air after the network allegedly released “a slew of behind-the-scenes emails, blog posts, and off-the-record transcripts featuring Carlson at his most free-spoken,” The Guardian reports.
“Fox told The New York Times they pulled me off [the air] because I was racist. But I’m not racist, actually. I’m not insecure about that. If I was racist, I’d just say so. But I’m not,” Carlson told Moore.
The New York Times also covered one high-profile story on a text message written by Carlson that allegedly contains racist language. While discussing footage of three Trump supporters attacking a left-wing protester, Carlson wrote, “It’s not how white men fight.”
“What I said is that’s not how white men fight, which as far as I’m concerned is true,” Carlson said. “I am a white man. I’m the son of a white man. I’m the grandson of a white man. So, if anyone’s qualified to speak on the subject, it would be me.”
Carlson also claims that his removal from Fox was part of a $787.5 million settlement the network made with Dominion Voting Systems after Dominion sued Fox for broadcasting lies about the company connected to former President Donald Trump’s fabrications about the 2020 election. Both Fox and Dominion have rejected this allegation.
In his time on air, Carlson has promoted the “great replacement theory,” purporting that immigrants have made America “poorer and dirtier,” and even asserted that a Black politician spoke like a “sharecropper.”
After Carlson’s show was booted in April, he started a new social media-based show called “Tucker on Twitter” that is now on the platform called X, formerly known as Twitter. However, Fox regularly sends him cease-and-desist letters demanding that he stop posting videos since he is still under contract.
