Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who recently hosted a Nazi sympathizer on his show, rolled into the Delta Center on Friday with Glenn Beck, a favorite of the far-right in Utah, in tow for his live stadium show.
The Deseret News' Brigham Tomco reports the two men shared an apocalyptic and religious message with the several thousand people in attendance.
The two conservative talk show hosts — who each at one time boasted the status as most watched person on cable television — only mentioned political parties once. But references to “God,” “scriptures” and “end times” filled Carlson’s 30-minute opening monologue, and his and Beck’s subsequent hourlong discussion, which included a prayer from Beck, before an audience of several thousand at the Delta Center.
In a conversation that ranged from lighthearted to confessional, Carlson and Beck condemned elected officials who advocate for transgender treatment for minors, support intervention in prolonged foreign conflicts and encourage the censorship of free speech, saying such leaders are not just of the wrong opinion, they are “working for evil.”
Carlson was fired by Fox News last year following the network's $787.5 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion brought the suit after several Fox personalities, including Carlson, made false claims that their voting machines were part of a plot to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
Even though Carlson lost his prominent perch on Fox, he remains a highly influential figure in Republican politics. He delivered a primetime address at the 2024 Republican National Convention and reportedly played a major role in Trump's selection of JD Vance as his running mate.
Carlson has long espoused pro-Russian viewpoints, downplaying the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this year, he traveled to Moscow for a fawning interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week, the Justice Department cited a video of Carlson marveling over a Russian grocery store in an alleged multi-million dollar scheme to tip the 2024 election to Donald Trump.
Carlson's Fox News show was frequently a platform for racist and neo-Nazi ideology, including the "great replacement" theory. The New York Times once called his program "the most racist show in the history of cable news." Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, called Carlson "literally our greatest ally." In February, Carlson interviewed a leader of the white nationalist VDARE group on his show.
Last week, Carlson once again drew outrage and condemnation by hosting podcaster and Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill the "chief villain" of World War II and shockingly blamed the holocaust on poor planning.
You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re- so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”
Carlson's co-star on Friday was Glenn Beck, a favorite of the conspiratorial right-wing in Utah, especially because of his embrace of Cleon Skousen and the John Birch Society. More recently, Beck's The Blaze network helped to hype April's bogus furry panic in the Nebo School District.
Carlson and Beck praised Utah Sen. Mike Lee during the event, which is unsurprising. Lee is a frequent guest on Beck's program and sat down for a lengthy interview with Carlson last month.
Carlson and Beck pointed to Utah’s senior senator as an example of the representation they hoped to see more of. Carlson praised Utah Sen. Mike Lee as a friend and a “wonderful, wonderful man.”
Beck responded by saying, “Quite honestly, the way the media and some leadership in this state treat Mike Lee is an abomination. He is not a radical. He is not a radical. He is a constitutionalist.”
Calling Lee a "constitutionalist" is a curious word choice as he famously played a prominent role in the plot to overturn Donald Trump's 2020 election loss.
It's possible they were referring to Lee's communications with Trump campaign legal adviser Cleta Mitchell about how to make the scheme to put the presidential election loser back in the White House within the framework of the nation's founding document.