On Monday night, Tucker Carlson released a much-anticipated statement about the secret racist and sexist posts of his now former top writer of three years, Blake Neff. Neff had been busted the previous Friday by a CNN report that revealed the extent of his online activity. At the time, Carlson kept quiet. Three days later, while Carlson disavowed Neff’s remarks, saying he believes in judging “people for what they do, not for how they were born,” he focused significantly more ire toward those applauding the CNN article. “The ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man, that self-righteousness also has its costs,” he said. “We are all human. When we pretend we are holy, we are lying. When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all. And we will be punished for it. There’s no question.”
Carlson did not detail for his audience exactly what Neff had said to destroy his career. (Per the CNN report, Neff maintained a thread “in which he has derided a woman and posted information about her dating life [inviting] other users to mock her and invade her privacy,” and left multiple comments promoting racist stereotypes.) And he attempted to distance Neff’s views from those of the show he wrote for. “Blake was horrified by the story, and he was ashamed,” Carlson said. “What Blake wrote anonymously was wrong. We don’t endorse those words. They have no connection to this show.”
He closed his show by announcing that he’ll be temporarily off the air for a “long-planned” vacation, the customary sign-off for Fox News hosts embroiled in a scandal (previous practitioners include Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Bill O’Reilly).
Carlson himself has long been criticized for airing rants that pander to the kinds of Americans who secretly write racist posts online. In a 2018 segment, he suggested that immigrants make “our own country poor and dirtier and more divided.” Carlson’s on-air comments have been praised by the founder of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer as “basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’” And Neff seems to have been closely involved in creating those comments. In a recent interview, Neff said that everything Carlson reads “off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me…I’ve gotten used to what he likes and what he thinks about.” In 2018, Carlson said he worked with writers for hours leading up to his show’s airtime and name-dropped Neff’s work, praising him as a “wonderful writer,” CNN’s report noted. Neff, who began working on Carlson’s show in early 2017, even slipped “easter eggs” into the show’s script to wink at fellow users in the online forum that led to his firing, as reported by CNN’s Oliver Darcy.
Carlson’s relatively milquetoast statement on Monday night was somewhat remarkable in its contrast to comments from the network’s corporate arm. Given the content and recency of Neff’s posts, including one just last month, “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down,” Fox News higher-ups wasted no time in denouncing him. “FOX News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior,” stated CEO Suzanne Scott and president and executive editor Jay Wallace in a coauthored note to network staff. “Neff’s abhorrent conduct on this forum was never divulged to the show or the network until Friday, at which point we swiftly accepted his resignation. Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.”