Last Week Tonight did its usual thing with John Oliver whipping through topics with ease and landing joke after joke before gliding into the show’s main segment. This week, the transition happened with both glee and regret. At around the 9:00 mark, Oliver announced, “Our main story tonight concerns, I’m sorry to say, Tucker Carlson, the man who gives Tuckers an ever worse name than they already have.”
From there, everyone had to know that the rollercoaster ride would begin. After all, there’s no love lost between Tucker and Oliver with the latter going to town over the former’s Dr. Seuss outrage (over “cancel culture”), his Elmo tantrum (over Black Lives Matter), and his preposterous defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. All of this builds up to the most “dangerous” way that Tucker manages to be (in Oliver’s words) a “terrible person,” which would be Tucker’s status as a white supremacist, despite pretending not to know what a white supremacist is:
“Of all the things that Tucker is, a conspiracy theorist, a misogynist, an Islamophobe, a troll, one of the most dangerous is that he is one of the most prominent vessel in America for white supremacist talking points. And I already know what Tucker will say about this because whenever this topic comes up, he has the exact same reaction: ‘What does that even. mean?'”
Oliver’s also got a few new nicknames here, too, including the following:
— “Oh f*ck off, Tucker, you relentlessly indignant picket fence.”
— “What are you talking about, you performatively outraged wedge salad? He’s packed a lot in there, from transphobia, to weirdly extolling the masculinity of China’s navy, to his completely misplaced outrage at Joe Biden over those flight suits.”
The latter nickname, of course, refers to Tucker’s recent takedown of female soldiers angered top military officials after he declared, “Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. military.” This led to a deluge of backlash from conservative and liberal circles alike, including names as varied as Joe Walsh (who tweeted, “Every woman in the military I’ve ever met could absolutely kick Tucker Carlson’s ass”) and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (who actually told Tucker to f*ck off before reheating her criticism of how he questioned her patriotism).
With so many people opposed to Tucker Carlson’s vitriol, though, is anyone on his side? A lot of people, actually. Oliver points out that Tucker scores over 3 million viewers each evening in various age groups, and there have been rumors that he’s mulling over a 2024 presidential run. He’s also won the praises of countless well-known white supremacists, including David Duke, and that’s why Tucker Carlson can’t be ignored — because of his countless on-air sentiments like this: “Maybe I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing like the one I grew up in. Is that bigoted?” Yes, he’s said that and much more, which leads Oliver to this point:
“The point is, when you know how Tucker speaks when he speaks freely, the filter through which he processes the world for his audience becomes painfully apparent. Because he’s smart enough to not openly say into a camera that certain races are more deserving of scorn or less worthy of respect. He will just heavily imply that depending on who he’s talking about.”
As Oliver puts things, Tucker “couldn’t be more ethnically white than if he jizzed mayonnaise.” He breaks down Tucker’s misogynistic and perverted remarks to Bubba the Love Sponge and Tucker’s bow-tie adorned, racially-charged statements during the O.J. murder trial days when he wore a bow tie and made racially-charged statements, and so on. Then there’s his disrespect for Britney Spears, and his utmost respect for Pat Robertson, along with his stances on immigration and his wide-eyed wonder at whether affirmative action is actually racist. Not to mention his perspective that Democrats hate and want to dismantle America and his empathy for insurrectionists.
And yep, these sentiments reach millions of Fox News viewers every weekday night, so it’s no wonder that Oliver is unhesitatingly using the word “dangerous” to describe Tucker Carlson. Watch the full Last Week Tonight clip above.
