Everyone knows that Tucker Carlson is a liar. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. His audience definitely knows it. Watching him get away with telling big ol' whoppers every night is part of the thrill they get in watching him. Carlson's lawyers know it. In a 2020 lawsuit, the Fox News legal team argued in court that Carlson cannot be held liable for slander, because his audience doesn't actually believe the stuff he says. Instead, they argued, it's "non-literal commentary." (Up there with Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" in the pantheon of Republican euphemisms for "lies.") If there was a person left in America under the mistaken impression that Carlson is anything but a proud liar, they were disabused of that notion by leaked texts showing Carlson demanding a reporter be fired for correctly stating that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
"We're all pretending we've got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to digest," Carlson wrote in a text message sent just two days before the Capitol riot. In the recently released text, part of an ongoing document dump as part of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, Carlson went on to make this damming admission: "There isn't really an upside to Trump."
