Tucker Carlson began this week by going to bat for QAnon, a deranged, cultish movement that worships Donald Trump, as part of his crusade against cancel culture. On Wednesday night the Fox News host took this sentiment a step further, opening his program by defending an infamous right-wing troll. In response to the Department of Justice filing charges against far-right influencer Douglass Mackey, better known on Twitter as “Ricky Vaughn,” for allegedly interfering in the 2016 election, Carlson implied that the supposed “conservative journalist” was a victim of the new Democratic administration’s Maoist plot to get revenge on its political opponents and proceeded to ignore Mackey’s known racist views.
“It looks like this is the part of the revolution where they start throwing their political opponents in jail. Wow, that was fast,” Carlson seethed. “It was just a week ago they were telling us about unity…. Unity meant oligarchy. Oh, Doug Mackey learned that the hard way this morning.” Mackey, whom Carlson portrayed as simply a “conservative journalist” being charged because of the “online mockery” he directed at “powerful Democrats,” was arrested at his Florida home on Wednesday morning. The 31-year-old stands accused of violating 18 U.S. Code Section 241, or conspiring to participate in a “coordinated” misinformation campaign to suppress the votes of Americans in the 2016 general election, which “often took the form of memes.” (For example, his efforts allegedly included spreading a lie that voters could text in their ballots.)
Carlson went on to call CNN the “lynch mob channel” and accused the network of “telling us…that [his] views are a crime. He is a criminal. Lock him up. Give him a longer sentence than we give to rapists.”
As “Ricky Vaughn,” Mackey amassed tens of thousands of pro-Trump and explicitly far-right followers, using the platform to spread anti-Semitic and white nationalist agitprop along with viral content in support of then candidate Trump’s campaign. While Mackey initially ran an entirely anonymous account, his identity was revealed in association with the racist tweets in a 2018 HuffPost report. So Carlson could have easily shared Mackey’s true leanings rather than obfuscating and asserting that Mackey was being persecuted by “Joe Biden’s Justice Department” because he “hurt their feelings.” Instead, the host insisted, “We have no idea what Doug Mackey’s views are.”
Of course, Mackey is a far more sinister actor than Carlson would have his viewers believe. Mackey previously advocated for the formation of white-only communities, condemned interracial relationships as an attack on “our unique culture and racial heritage,” and repeatedly pushed the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory suggesting that Jews are puppet masters using the media to control society. In 2016, Mackey became fully committed to his support for the Trump campaign and shared xenophobic content aligned with Trump’s call for a universal ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Despite Mackey’s later attempts to distance himself from white nationalism, he maintained that he was a self-described member of the “alt-right” not long before HuffPost revealed his identity in 2018.
Carlson has a long history of ties with closeted white nationalist media figures, as the website he cofounded, the Daily Caller, was exposed several times for hiring or featuring writers who were eventually caught with white supremacist ties or espousing racist views in online posts. CNN revealed last summer that a former Daily Caller reporter and the head writer of Carlson’s Fox News show, Blake Neff, had secretly been sharing racist views under an online alias. The host responded by describing the views of his longtime employee as “wrong” before quickly criticizing the “self-righteousness” of the “ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Embedding With Pentagon Leadership in Trump’s Final, Frenzied Days
— Donald Trump Refused to Take ‘No’ From Women—And Then From America Itself
— How Trump’s COVID Chaos Drowned the FDA in Junk Science
— Inside the Epic Bromance of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump
— After Wrecking the Country, Jared and Ivanka Plot Vacation Plans
— Can Trump’s Cult of Followers Be Deprogrammed?
— Trump Makes an Exit With His Brand in Tatters
— From the Archive: How Donald Trump Turned Palm Beach Against Him
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.