Tucker Carlson’s chief writer at Fox resigns
Blake Neff exposed for racist, sexist posts
After an inquiry from a reporter, it took less than a day for Fox News to receive the resignation of Tucker Carlson’s chief writer, who was exposed for the racist and sexist messages he had been covertly sharing on an online forum.
Among his posts, Blake Neff had smeared Black people as lazy and criminal, said that he would not get medical care from an Asian doctor, used homophobic slurs and repeatedly mocked a female college acquaintance by reposting her Facebook messages and photos for several years.
Top newsroom officials called Neff’s posts “horrendous” and “deeply offensive” in a memo to staff Saturday, a day after they were exposed in a CNN story. “FOX News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior,” said the memo from Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, the chief executive and the president of Fox News, respectively. “Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.”
But the years Neff spent spewing toxic sentiments online while at the same time penning Carlson’s provocative TV commentary raises questions about the culture of cable news’s mostwatched show and the philosophical underpinnings of one of the conservative movement’s most prominent voices.
While Carlson himself has decried racism, his views on race and immigration — excoriating the Black Lives Matter movement and bemoaning demographic change in the United States — have won praise from far-right and white-supremacist groups. And some of the rhetoric on Carlson’s show sounds like a more polished version of the commentary on AutoAdmit, the underground chat forum where Neff held forth pseudonymously.
“Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country,” Carlson told viewers in July 2018. Last week, he praised as “brave” the California couple who painted over part of a Black Lives Matter street mural, which he called “graffiti” that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. He has called the Black Lives Matter movement a “terror organization” and likened it to a pandemic, calling Minneapolis, where George Floyd died at the hands of police, “our Wuhan.”
Carlson has been the subject of repeated advertising boycotts. In December 2018, he said that the immigrants coming across the southern border were making the country “poorer and dirtier,” after which dozens of advertisers boycotted the show. In August 2019, Carlson said white supremacy was “a hoax” of an issue, leading to another exodus of advertisers.
But Carlson has enjoyed the protection of the Murdochs, who control Fox News’s parent company. During the first boycott, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch personally offered support to Carlson. During the second episode, Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan’s father, reassured Carlson, according to people familiar with their exchanges.
Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Carlson did not respond to text messages seeking comment. In their statement, Scott and Wallace said Carlson would address the matter onair on Monday.
Last year, Carlson came under additional scrutiny after the Fox watchdog group Media Matters unearthed comments the host made as a guest on Bubba the Love Sponge radio show many years ago. In appearances on the show beginning in 2006, Carlson variously referred to Iraqis as “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and described “a culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks.”