Tucker Carlson’s Code of Whiteness

His most successful on-air persona, perfected on Fox after the departure of Bill O’Reilly, has been a volatile mixture of upper crust and salt of the earth. Whiteness was the glue that held the package together, and in this text you can see it coming unstuck, even as Carlson tries to work through some inherent contradictions.

At stake is not the life or safety of the anonymous “Antifa kid,” but rather Carlson’s own perception of himself. “This isn’t good for me,” he finds himself thinking. That phrase, a syntactic echo of “it’s not how white men fight,” establishes the stakes, which are not so much Carlson’s ethical probity as his racial superiority. Watching the beating, he becomes aware of what Kipling called “the white man’s burden” — the duty to subjugate the supposedly lesser races without sinking to their level.

The race of the man being beaten isn’t specified in the text, but his otherness — his debased status relative to both his attackers and Carlson — is repeatedly emphasized. “The Antifa creep is a human being,” he writes. This is not exactly an upwelling of compassion, and even so Carlson rushes to qualify it. “Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him, personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it.” The “shoulds” indicate that Carlson isn’t really bothered — is still actually gloating — but is aware that this reaction poses a problem.

It’s a problem because he imagines that the glee he feels at the man’s suffering aligns him not with those inflicting the suffering, but with the man himself. If he takes pleasure in watching an Antifa creep get pounded, that makes him as bad as the Antifa creep. Because that guy reduces “people to their politics.”

How can Carlson be sure of this? Isn’t this just projection? Yes, but it’s also another way of insisting that this isn’t how your side behaves, even as you prove the opposite. Reducing people to their politics is what the enemies — the others, the savages, those without honor — do. Making a point of not doing that, even when it’s clearly what you’re doing, is what sets you above them.

“How am I better than he is?” That question isn’t rhetorical, it’s existential, and it presents Carlson as both the hero and the victim in this story. To borrow a phrase from Elvis Costello, this is someone who “wants to know the names of all those he’s better than.” Not because of personal insecurity, but as a matter of racial and ideological principle. That’s how white men fight.