Two of the white nationalist movement’s most popular podcast hosts agree that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is repeating their talking points “for an audience of millions across the country.”
Last month, Carlson opened the December 14 episode of his primetime Fox News show with a segment in which he said that immigrants make American “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided,” and advertisers have been dropping out of his show in response. As we published this article, at least 25 companies publicly stated that they would no longer advertise on Carlson’s show, or that they had suspended their advertising on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
White nationalist podcast hosts Joseph Jordan (“Eric Striker”) and Mike Peinovich (“Mike Enoch”) responded to news of advertisers leaving Carlson’s show on the December 18 episode of “Strike and Mike.” Their show is hosted on “The Right Stuff,” which is the alt-right’s most popular podcast network and home to shows chock-full of racism and antisemitism.
“Tucker Carlson has been saying that immigration makes America dirty for years—like two years now, straight, and he hasn’t had that much problems with the advertisers,” Jordan said, adding that he thinks Carlson is actually suffering ad boycotts at this time because of his coverage of Israel.
“The trigger word there was ‘dirty’ and I think that first of all, [immigrants] are objectively dirty and like anything, theoretically you’re not supposed to say that,” Peinovich said. “When I saw that segment, I was like, ‘Finally!’, because this was doing, like, what we are talking about here, [but] for an audience of millions across the country—most popular white talk show host in the country speaking to white people.”
As of September 2018, Carson’s prime-time cable program was averaging 2.8 million viewers per night—just under the 2.9 million drawn by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Meanwhile, though, shows hosted by The Right Stuff should not be discounted, given their reach onto the devices of an audience that is driven by white nationalist passions. The channel’s shows collectively glean hundreds of thousands of visits from podcast listeners. Metrics for the podcast channel’s web home page show more than one million visits to the site in November 2018.
Peinovich added, “What they don’t want is millions of people saying this to their congresspeople or saying this on Twitter or saying this to their buddy at the local bar or whatever.”
