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1. In 1991, the 22-year old Tucker Carlson described himself in his college yearbook as a member of the Dan White Society. White was the homophobe who in 1978 assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
2. I'm afraid we're in for another tedious round of Cancel Culture discourse with the Creepy Contrarian Crackpot Pettifoggers giving us 10,000 word substack essays with the usual apologia (he was just a 22 year old child! Another era! "As a gay man I see nothing wrong...")
3. To start with, cancel culture is besides the point here. As @jackshafer shrewdly noted, Fox makes its money from subscribers as well as advertises & Carlson is too important to them. We've already seen them brush aside many comparably bad Carlson comments.
4. I think Carlson's comments are best seen not as a biographical fact about Carlson (who really is too much a worm to care about) but rather a political fact about the American right. Carlson's celebration of Harvey Milk's assassin is not an outlier.
5. I suspect that you think that the assassination of Moscone and Milk was a horrible crime. But it's important to understand that many on the right don't feel that way. Milk as first openly gay California lawmaker represented a threat to right.
6. After the assassination, there were cops in San Fransisco that wore "Free Dan White" t-shirts. This was written in police locker room in large letters: FREE AN INNOCENT MAN WHO WAS FOR THE PEOPLE. FREE DAN WHITE.
7. The fact that Dan White got a ridiculously light sentence (voluntary manslaughter rather than murder) for shooting 2 people dead was symptomatic of the homophobia that had an implicit sympathy for the killer.
8. As a child of a very right wing family (his imbecilic younger brother is even named Buckley Carlson), Tucker Carlson surely read American Spectator & National Review in 1980s, which were filled with derision for Harvey Milk. Here's one example from American Spectator in 1983.
9. More on the need to understand Tucker Carlson's homophobia not as a personal flaw but as a political phenomenon here (along with other, happier, posts): https://jeetheer.substack.com/publish/post/35509017
