On Friday Blake Neff—the top writer for Tucker Carlson Tonight—resigned after years of his racist, sexist, and homophobic Internet posts were exposed.

As a result, Tucker Carlson now has an opening for a new top writer who is better at hiding their secret racism. But maybe that assessment isn’t fair. After all, Carlson isn’t like the rest of Fox News.

Sure, he earns millions of dollars a year telling his viewers to be afraid of Democrats because if they get into office “people who supported Donald Trump will be punished” and that “there’s never been an American political party as radical and as angry as the Democrats are now.”

He even tells his viewers that the Republican Party is “the only institution still open to the rest of us, to Americans who want to live as they did just 15 years ago … without being harassed and harangued by self-righteous lunatics who mean them harm.” And yes, Carlson is the son of a wealthy heiress and an ambassador/international propagandist ,yet he somehow claims to be critical of “elites.”

Tucker: What we’re watching is class war disguised as race warwww.youtube.com

But Tucker Carlson is different from all the other wealthy fear mongers at Fox News who serve the Republican party and pretend to hate “elites”—because Tucker Carlson understands the plight of the common man. He recognizes that the promise of America—that each new generation will live better than the one before it—has eroded for a huge portion of the population.

He understands parents’ fears that their children will never be able to achieve the economic stability required to raise families of their own. And he understands that those with the most influence in this country benefit from infighting within the working and middle class—that solidarity is the only way to claw back some of the wealth and the freedom that has been funneled upward over decades of power consolidation.

Solidarity for Who?

But who does Tucker Carlson really want to include in that solidarity? Who deserves the benefits that come with that fight? If we rebuild that American promise, will it be portioned out in equal shares to every American? Or does it only belong to the people who had it before—the straight white cis men?

That’s certainly the way it seems when Carlson describes Black Lives Matter protesters as “angry, suspicious, tribal” and insists that voters don’t support politicians like Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana—who recently introduced a bill to limit the qualified immunity that makes it so difficult to prosecute police who kill unarmed civilians.

According to Carlson, we must not “get caught in pointless debates about whether or not this is a racist country,” when (according to Carlson) “clearly it isn’t.” While that may be a hard pill to swallow for Americans who are disproportionately policed, prosecuted, and excluded from our nation’s wealth—who never really got to enjoy the heyday of the American dream and “just 15 years ago” had never seen a President who wasn’t a white man—maybe that’s not Tucker’s fault.

At first blush his insistence that we can live in “a colorblind meritocracy” as long as we just ignore race and get rid of affirmative action programs that attempt to correct historic racial imbalances may seem like the exact opposite of solidarity—like a man encouraging white Americans to view themselves as the victims of marginalized groups striving for equality. But that can’t be true.

Tucker Carlson Makes Racist Comments in Newly Unearthed Audio | NowThiswww.youtube.com

After all, Tucker hates the elites who stoke division and “keep the population at one another’s throats” for their own benefit. So wouldn’t he encourage his overwhelmingly white audience to listen to the perspective of Black Americans who—shockingly—actually know better than Tucker Carlson what their own experiences have been and how much racism has affected them?

Wouldn’t he encourage his viewers—in the spirit of solidarity—to do the bare minimum research to understand how historic and ongoing systemic racism in the U.S. has maintained deep divides in terms of wealth, education, and access to opportunities.How advantages have accumulated across generations so that even low-income white Americans—who are admittedly struggling right now and deserve to be treated better by our society—still have more wealth than middle-income black Americans?

Surely, the white protesters who have shown up in support of the Black Lives Matter movement since the horrific killing of George Floyd represent a clearer path to achieving cross-racial solidarity among working and middle class Americans than does a wealthy white man on TV telling his white audience that BLM’s complaints are baseless…

Unless Tucker Carlson agrees with Blake Neff that some white people are “fully supportive of a F**k Whitey agenda” and that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin” (a view which seems to echo the perspective of banned YouTuber Black Pigeon Speaks). Does he really want all struggling Americans to be on the same team, or only white Americans?

Can it be that Tucker Carlson is exactly the kind of elite he rails against—sowing division and resentment among people with less power so they don’t question his position?

No. The only explanation is that Blake Neff—that diabolical secret racist—was planting these dog-whistle messages in Carlson’s broadcasts.

Now that Neff has been revealed and Carlson has seen that his former writer was going on a law school forum known as AutoAdmit and using the pseudonym “CharlesXII” to assert that “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down”—the Fox News host must be questioning everything.

Prior to these new revelations about Neff, Carlson had referred to him as a “wonderful writer” and even acknowledged Neff in his book, Ship of Fools, both for helping with the book and for “greatly improv[ing] our nightly show on Fox.” Neff himself has claimed to be at least partially responsible for everything Tucker Carlson reads off a teleprompter.

So how could someone as not-racist as Tucker Carlson have allowed himself to be a mouthpiece for a man like Neff? A man who recently responded to the posted question, “Would u let a JET BLACK congo n*****r do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?” with “I wouldn’t get LASIK from an Asian for free, so, no?”

Clearly Neff’s attitude is incompatible with Tucker Carlson’s stated goal of colorblindness. He must be doing some intense soul searching right now and asking himself if maybe America is in fact a racist country. Surely this will result in some major soul-searching…

Along with his racist commentary, Neff reportedly mocked various women as “shrews,” used homophobic slurs in multiple posts, and claimed that freshman congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, and Rashida Tlaib (collectively referred to as “the Squad”) want to turn the U.S. into “A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD S**THOLES.”

Carlson has not made a public comment on Neff’s conduct since his anonymous activity was revealed, but the Fox News leadership released an official statement claiming that “Neff’s abhorrent conduct on this forum was never divulged to the show or the network until Friday, at which point we swiftly accepted his resignation. Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.”

Carlson is scheduled to address the revelation of Neff’s bigotry and his firing on Monday night’s broadcast, during which he will no doubt announce a new era of Tucker Carlson Tonight. An era in which he operates with more humility, nuance, and engagement with other perspectives. If his old approach led him to embrace the perspectives of such a hateful person, then he must surely want to adjust his methods.

If Tucker Carlson’s purported values are sincere, he will question both his and Fox News‘ role in stoking racial resentment, consider the possibility that he was unfairly demonizing progressives who expressed concern for social justice, and bring more diverse opinions into his writing staff to challenge the orthodoxy that allowed someone like Blake Neff to thrive.

Unless this isn’t the first time this has happened to Tucker Carlson…

This isn’t the first time this has happened to Tucker Carlson

If Carlson has previously hired someone who was secretly an avowed racist to produce content for him, then maybe there’s a pattern here. Maybe Tucker Carlson is lying about his own views, and actually seeks out people who will sublimate racism and other forms of bigotry into dog whistles and covert hatred. Hmm…

In 2010 Tucker Carlson launched the conservative news site The Daily Caller. Last month Carlson announced that he had sold his stake in the site after years of scandal involving multiple contributors, along with deputy editor Scott Greer, being outed as devout white nationalists.

Greer used the pseudonym “Michael McGregor” to work as the managing editor of white nationalist Richard Spencer’s publication Radix Journal, where Greer expressed anti-Black and anti-Semitic views.

When this was revealed, Carlson’s partner at The Daily Caller, Neil Patel, issued a statement remarkably similar to Fox News‘ comments on Neff, saying, “We won’t publish him, anyone in these circles, or anyone who thinks like them. People who associate with these losers have no business writing for our company.”

Weird coincidence that one man in a country that “clearly isn’t” racist just happens to keep associating himself with so many secret racists…