Tucker Carlson Is Taking a Little Vacation From Fox News After Getting Super Racist on the Air

Tucker Carlson: big white nationalist. Not much more to say! Every night on his immensely popular Fox News show, Carlson gets up there and openly espouses white nationalism. After his latest racist rant, during which he said white supremacy was a “hoax” like the Russia panic, Carlson announced at the end of his show last night that he’s taking a vacation. It’s certainly convenient timing!

Per CNN:

Facing mounting controversy for declaring the very real problem of white supremacy in America to be a “hoax,” Tucker Carlson announced at the end of his Wednesday night Fox News show that he will be taking a vacation.

“By the way,” he said, “I am taking several days off — headed to the wilderness to fish with my son.” Carlson added, “Politics is important, fishing with your son, sometimes more important. So I’m doing it.”

Since the mass shootings in El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH, the former of which was explicitly motivated by white nationalism, Tucker has been on a real kick of wildly defending the ideals of virulent, violent racists. This is par for the course for him, but his rhetoric has been even more explicit recently. Here he is getting a few last words in last night before his fishing trip:

According to CNN, Fox News maintains the whole thing was pre-planned and definitely isn’t a forced leave of absence:

I spoke to a Fox News spokesperson shortly after Carlson announced that he was heading out on vacation. The Fox spokesperson said the vacation had been in the works before Carlson had made his controversial remarks. The spokesperson added that Carlson will return back on the air from his vacation on August 19.

And yet, no one at Fox’s leadership really wants to talk about this:

Darcy’s piece points out that Fox has a long history of sending anchors on vacation for a cooling off period after they get a little too racist on air and start to alienate advertisers. Maybe Tucker’s latest shows were just an open attempt to get some paid time off? I have no idea what Fox’s PTO policy is like, but if you have to embark on a years-long personal crusade to defend and promote white nationalist policies just to get a week off for a fishing trip, it can’t be great! The other option, of course, is that Carlson is living his intensely racist truth and has a massive platform to spread it, but needs to be off air for a week while the mass shooting directly inspired by the ideology he espouses fades out of the news cycle. You know what, it’s probably just that.