Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who was ousted by the network this spring, took aim at colleagues of his former employer for not stepping up to defend fringe conspiracy-monger Alex Jones.
On the latest episode of his show on X (formerly Twitter), Carlson hosted Tristan Tate, who along with his brother Andrew Tate was arrested in March 2023 by Romanian authorities. They were charged in June on rape and human trafficking offenses — both deny the charges — and were released from house arrest last week.
Carlson and Tate were discussing free-speech issues, and Tate brought up the case of internet platforms like YouTube banning Jones, thefar-right conspiracy figure who was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billionto families of Sandy Hook victims over his lies about the 2012 deadly massacre.
“You don’t have to agree with everything Alex Jones says. I like Alex Jones,” Tate said on Sunday’s episode of “Tucker on Twitter” (via Mediaite) — to which Carlson interjected, “I do, too” — “but I don’t agree with everything Alex Jones says, and you don’t have to.” Tate continued, “But Bill Maher, famously, and credit to him, said when Alex Jones got banned [by YouTube in 2018], he said we shouldn’t be banning people. He said, I hate Alex Jones, but Alex Jones should be allowed to talk, everyone should be allowed to talk in the town square,” calling Jones “a warrior.”
“No one defended him,” said Carlson, speaking about Jones getting kicked off YouTube for violating the platform’s hate-speech rules. “I was on vacation that day. I was fishing out of the country. The company that I worked for, which is supposedly in favor of free speech, said not one word in his defense.” Tate responded, “And it’s like, first they came for Alex Jones… it’s the old adage.”
Note that services like YouTube are not subject to regulation under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment free-speech protections, which applies strictly to government censorship laws.
Jones called the Sandy Hook mass murder a “giant hoax” perpetrated by “crisis actors,” and that “no one died” and he falsely accused the parents of the children killed at the elementary school of colluding with the U.S. government in an imagined plot to curtail gun rights. Jones also has said that NFL players protesting during the national anthem were “kneeling to white genocide”; has accused the U.S. government of being behind the 9/11 attacks; attacked transgender and Muslim people; and called David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., high-school shooting, a Nazi.
In 2018, in addition to YouTube, Facebook, Spotify and Apple Podcasts banned Jones and Infowars from their platforms, citing violations of their hate-speech policies. Jones has been called “almost certainly the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Carlson launched the talk show on Elon Musk-owned Twitter (now X), a little over a month after he exited Fox News, where he had been a fixture for more than a decade. PvNewpreviously reportedthat a Fox Corp. board member had told Carlson that his being sidelined by the network was a condition of Fox News’ $787.5 million settlement of the defamation case filed by Dominion Voting Systems. (Both Fox and Dominion denied this.) In June, Fox News sent a cease-and-desist letter to Carlson after he launched “Tucker on Twitter”; since then, he has released 13 additional episodes.
