OXFORD – Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson made his first public appearance in Oxford on Thursday night just under two weeks after being fired from his prime-time TV post and a day after reports about text messages from him that have been widely interpreted as racist.
Carlson was in town as a guest speaker at the annual fundraising event for Rainbow Omega, a faith-based nonprofit that provides vocational and residential programs to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities .
The organization had hired Carlson in the fall of last year before the latest controversies began to swirl around the conservative TV host. Ticket sales had been slow until his firing last week, prompting a surge in ticket sales that led to a sold-out venue at the 1,200-seat Oxford Performing Arts Center.
Rainbow Omega CEO Tim Hodge said Carlson was contacted the day after his firing was announced and he responded that he would maintain his commitment to the organization.
It was more sparks than fireworks, as Carlson didn’t directly address the issues surrounding his firing during his hour-long address, instead beginning his remarks by jokingly alluding to his current job situation .
“I’m probably the first unemployed person you ever invited to speak,” Carlson said to laughter from the audience. “It’s fun. I rarely do speeches because I’m working and when I accepted this speech six months ago I didn’t realize how much free time I would have. You never know, it does.”
Carlson said he accepted the invitation “because I love Alabama. It has everything I love.”
“It’s got really nice people — Christian people. It’s got amazing food and I have the worst eating habits in the world and there’s no judgment on that. And I think physically it’s beautiful,” she said.
Carlton said people in the Northeast, specifically New York, used to look down on Alabama.
“I haven’t heard [those disparaging remarks] in a while I admit, I haven’t been to New York in a while and I’m never going there again,” he said in another veiled reference to his firing. “No one makes fun of Alabama anymore because they realize that’s how it’s supposed to be they have to live Do people move to Alabama? oh yeah Great moment.”
He said the main reason he came was “in a sincere way, I support what Rainbow Omega is doing.”
“They help people not in an abstract way but in a natural way,” Carlson said, calling his visit to campus Thursday afternoon “not depressing, but uplifting.”
“The unmistakable message is that we don’t just care about the land, we care about the people who live here,” he said. “This is an institution with 88 people living there, but it doesn’t feel like an institution at all.”
Carlson said that when he looked into the face of a young girl on campus, he thought, “God thinks a lot more about her than he thinks about me, and I mean it. There was something about that girl’s face that it just radiated. What a beautiful moment it was for me.”
He said that helping people “is the basic mission of life.”
“But, it’s the opposite of what you see in the rest of the country,” he said.
Carlson then began to lean towards more difficult subjects and his main targets were the government and the media; however, he never mentioned any specific media with one exception during his presentation.
“American politics is supposed to be designed to make people’s lives better, but in reality, what’s the point?” he asked. “I’ve been doing this for 32 years, and I haven’t spent much time thinking about what the point of American politics is. We spend billions of dollars to get the attention of 350 million Americans so someone can have power? This it’s not a worthy goal.”
“The whole point of the exercise should be to help people and especially to help them help themselves,” Carlson said. “If you treated your children the way the federal government treats our population, they would all be in rehab.”
“If you want to help someone, restore that person’s self-esteem and make them as independent as you can,” he said. “This is not a right-wing talking point. It’s just an observation about people that seems very obvious. It doesn’t seem like a partisan point at all.”
Carlson said he is beginning to believe that the divisions in society are “virtually manufactured.”
“Obama’s first term was how we were going to get through the race. I didn’t vote for the guy, but everyone I knew was excited and so was I,” Carlson said. “We’re electing a man I don’t agree with, but we’re getting to the point where we stop picking at the scab and move forward as a single country, why wouldn’t it be for that? As a Christian, I was all for it.”
Carlson said in Obama’s second term, “Suddenly we’re not post-racial. All we’re going to talk about is race and being hated by race.”
“I have to say I don’t travel much, but when I do no one ever comes up to me and even mentions race of any color. It seems like it’s being exaggerated,” he said. “No one has ever come up to me and attacked me in racial terms. I don’t think most Americans hate each other. I just don’t see it. I don’t think there is widespread racism in the country. I have never seen him, not once. A lot of it is a lie designed to distract people and I think it’s manufactured by the media.”
Carlson believes that “the vast majority of stories that news organizations cover have no bearing on people’s lives.”
“If the real cost of things is rising faster than your wages, what’s bigger than that? If our country is on the brink of nuclear conflict with the country with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, for why don’t we talk about it? he asked. “Why are we inventing a racial conflict that doesn’t exist?”
“If you’re doing it every week for ten years, maybe there’s a reason you’re doing it,” Carlson said. “If you don’t cover any of the stories that really matter and instead focus on the ones that are sure to increase division in your population, it can’t be wrong. I don’t think I’m a conspiracy nut. Why don’t they address the issues that matter, but do their best to ignore them?”
“At some point you have to tell it like it is and that’s lying,” Carlson said. “Lying has a very specific purpose and that is to take your attention away from the things that matter. This is not news coverage. This is classic propaganda.”
Carlson said all of this has an effect on democracy.
“The whole idea of democracy is based on the understanding that the people who vote will have some understanding of what they’re voting for and what the real issues are and what the facts are,” he said. “We can discuss what the facts are. No one has a monopoly on the truth. As soon as someone tells you they have the truth and everything else is misinformation, that person is by definition lying. This is why we have at our disposal an unlimited variety of perspectives: an unlimited amount of facts about what is happening in the world and what we think will happen in the world. The First Amendment guarantees it.”
He called lying “the default setting of the media.”
“The scariest thing is the exclusion of the facts,” Carlson said. “You read a story that might be true, but it misses the point. So, are you being lied to? Yes, they are, but not in a legal sense. When all the media does it, people go crazy. It’s very disconcerting. It’s a form of chaos.”
He said intelligent and educated people are now willing to “entertain theories that seemed outlandish three years ago.”
“These are the so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ who are telling us we should be afraid,” Carlson said. “Actually, conspiracy theorists have a much better record of accuracy than The New York Times. Don’t judge. When everything is fake or looks fake, and you can’t believe anyone in power, why wouldn’t people come to those conclusions? They can’t even tell you the truth about a communicable disease that’s killing people. They’re flat-out lying to you about it.”
“And not just lie to you,” he continued, “but lie to you with the knowledge that you have to know you’re being lied to. That’s the scary part. They know we know, but they don’t care and they keep lying anyway ways”.
Carlson said his understanding of democracy is that it is a system “whereby the government represents the will of the people, maybe not precisely.”
“Who is closer to democratic ideals: you or the people accusing you of a crime?” he asked. “Probably you and that’s what scares me. What they’re saying is the exact opposite of what’s true. He’s not just a shadow in the mirror image. That’s what scares me. He’s sociopathic.”
Carlson said the answer to the problems he addressed is “trying to help real people.”
“That’s why I came tonight,” he said.
Carlson left immediately after his speech and did not take any questions from the audience.
City officials said they received “many calls” related to Carlson’s visit, but no threats were reported.
There was an increased police presence around the venue, but there were no protesters at the scene, and there were no interruptions from the crowd, except for some supporting points Carlson was making.
A more detailed account of Carlson’s comments will appear in the print issue of the weekend edition of The Anniston Star.
Writer Brian Graves: 256-236-1551.
