Tucker Carlson and the art of the Big Lie
This video is a discussion of an especially egregious lie told recently by Tucker Carlson. The part I’ve cued up is only about ten minutes long, and you don’t even have to watch it all to get the picture, although it really is worth watching the whole thing. Carlson’s lie is not a subtle one, but he seems for the most part to be getting away with lies this blatant:
Here’s a summary of the provisions of the Ugandan law Carlson is misrepresenting [my emphasis]:
The act prescribes life imprisonment for sex between two people of the same biological sex and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”. The latter offence includes “serial offenders”, same-sex rape, sex in a position of authority or procured by intimidation, sex with persons older than seventy-five, sex with the disabled and mentally ill, and homosexual acts committed by a person with a previous conviction of homosexuality. Further, under its provisions, the promotion (including normalisation) of homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment for up to 20 years and fines.
The bill is highly popular within Uganda according to polls, and was voted for nearly unanimously by Parliament. The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and the European Union, and several local and international NGOs have condemned it.
Tucker is a vicious liar. In this case he’s especially targeting Ted Cruz, whom he almost certainly hates because Cruz is one of those Christian Zionists whom Carlson has said he hates “more than anybody.” In the clip, Carlson also implies that Cruz’s objection to the Uganda law in question is racist.
If you don’t want to take the YouTuber’s word, or mine, for the fact that Carlson is flagrantly lying, you can check the text of the Ugandan law itself here.
Which makes Tucker’s lie especially fascinating and subtly pernicious is that he invites people to check out the law even though it contradicts his description of it. My guess is that he assumes – correctly, in most cases – that the mere fact that he suggests that people check it out means that the vast majority never will. After all, wouldn’t most people assume that Carlson would never have said to look at it for themselves if he wasn’t telling the truth about it? Among other things, he’s relying on his reputation from the past as a regular newsperson who does his research, in order to gain people’s trust for his lies now.
NOTE: Carlson has recently said he’s planning to buy some real estate in Doha, in order to prove what a free-thinking American he is.
I wonder what percentage of Tucker’s audience are actually United State’s citizens?
Where does Tucker say it “just applies to gay rape?” He does give an incomplete list of what it does apply to, but that’s not quite the same thing. It seems to there are two people here being less than honest.
Outlawing consensual homosexual acts isn’t exactly something new. Tucker isn’t putting his cards on the table, but there’s a lot of presentism in the critique.
“Lies” of this sort–extremely selective narration–are very common in journalism and in opinion. When you start digging, you start finding it everywhere.
I can’t find any point where he says that the Uganda law is only and purely concerned with “aggravated homosexuality”. He only talk about that part, true, and when he complains that Ted Cruz or the Archbishop object to the law, he doesn’t allow for their objection to the part of the law he didn’t describe. That’s Journalism 101 right there, that;s how they all do narrative.
I think an analogous “lie” to this one, that we all probably remember, is the one about Hunter’s laptop and “Russian disinformation”. What the 51 intelligence officials carefully said was that the laptop story had the “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and they and the journalists who spread it for them let everybody assume that was the same thing as saying it actually was Russian disinformation.
For example, Politico’s headline was “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say”. But they had said no such thing. The headline was a lie but the body of the story was just a selective narration of true things.
They didn’t say anything in there that was untrue. They expressed true things in a way that was intended to mislead, and then justified themselves by saying we should have read it more closely. James Clapper said “…all we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
As though he never worked with a journalist before.
Niketas:
I’ve spent the last 20 years analyzing media lies and am quite familiar with them. This particular lie strikes me as different than the run of the mill, and worse. It’s something about his fake outrage and mockery as well as his misrepresentation of the situation.
By leaving out the parts of the bill Cruz et al objected to, he is deeply mendacious. There’s also the first half of the bill: life imprisonment for a homosexual act, even a consensual one. He doesn’t even mention it.
@neo:This particular lie strikes me as different than the run of the mill, and worse.
As you like. To me it’s depressingly common.
There’s also the first half of the bill: life imprisonment for a homosexual act, even a consensual one. He doesn’t even mention it.
If he wanted to be fair, which he didn’t, he would have. A big chunk of his core audience would not find that mitigating for Cruz and the Archbishop even if he had. Even in the US homosexual acts weren’t decriminalized before 2003.
Eeyore:
You point is not well taken. Tucker isn’t just leaving things out – he is leaving out the things that Cruz and the rest find offensive, and he is pretending they are offended at (and I quote) “penalizing gay rape.”
Cruz is not against penalizing gay rape, and it is a lie for Carlson to say so. And yet that is exactly what Carlson says Cruz is saying:
This is Tucker’s deeply mendacious parody of what Cruz was objecting to. Tucker leaves out the life sentence for consensual homosexual acts, and the death sentence for more than one consensual homosexual act. In fact, in that passage I quoted, he makes it seem not only that Cruz’s objection is to the law’s penalties for gay rape and purposely giving someone AIDS, but to any penalties for those crimes.
The US makes rape, gay or otherwise, a crime, although it’s not a capital crime. But it is an absurdity to claim that either Cruz or the clergy are against penalizing those crimes, or that they think Ugandans are cannibals who will boil them in stew pots.
And no, “Outlawing consensual homosexual acts isn’t exactly something new.” No one says it is. It is something old, but life imprisonment or the death penalty for such acts hasn’t been the case in the US for a long long time (see this) and were seldom enforced even when on the books. If Tucker wants to come out in favor of the Ugandan law that’s his prerogative, but don’t lie about other people’s objection to it.
Niketas:
Decriminalization vs criminalization is not the issue. The issue is life imprisonment and the death penalty. That hadn’t been the law in most of the US for a long long time, and it wasn’t enforced for years before it was taken off the books.
Old laws lingering but not being enforced are a different thing from the passage of a new law.
From Wiki:
@neo:Decriminalization vs criminalization is not the issue. The issue is life imprisonment and the death penalty.
For you I am sure this is the case. Other people have a different scale of moral values. There are Americans in Carlson’s audience who would approve a law like Uganda’s even had he represented it to them fairly, and would not think better of Cruz or the Archbishop even knowing the true grounds on which they objected.
Uganda is not even the only African country with such laws. I don’t plan on moving to any of them soon.
Tucker’s delivery and that weird phony ass cackling laugh have always been very off putting to me. He could be reciting my own beliefs and I would still have a dislike for him.
And he has been doing this selective facts thing for years only in the past his views were not quite as crazy/dangerous as they are now.
Fox News clearly made a very wise move in dropping him when they did.
I ignore posts from Carlson and his ilk.
We cannot persuade sheep to resist being shorn by Carlson and company. Object to them when we can, to raise awareness among the unshorn sheep. And not buy wool!
Uganda (and other African states) is hewing to Biblical truth even as the formerly Christian nations of Western Civilization are trying and succeeding to reverse it. Christianity is the force that facilitated the development of the Western hemisphere, which is now committing social suicide by permitting and worshipping a variety of idols, more and more often pornographic.
Transgender relationships, including homosexual, are transsocial, not criminal in the minority. Evolutionary dysfunction is a concern. Certainly nothing to celebrate. That said, abortion to terminate a “burden” is prosecuted with liberal license following progressive principles in secular societies, a wicked solution, with Diverse precedents.
Some people here missed that neo’s main purpose in making this post was not to dissect the Ugandan law but to point out that Carlson is a barefaced liar.
I never said Tucker was being honest; quite the reverse. But I don’t think the narrator here is wholly honest either. If you attack what someone says, quote. Don’t paraphrase in your preferred manner.
And it does no good to denounce with a general assumption that the laws are wrong. That needs to be proven. But libertarians/classical liberals never actually do that. The only living one I’ve seen try to engage opposing arguments, instead of caricatures, is Michael Anton. And he ends up conceding most of the traditionalist case. Every other case I know of ends up with a charge of totalitarianism. You speak as though any divergence from your view is diabolical.
And just the fact that Tucker is a jerk doesn’t change that. I object to what amounts to underhanded stealth insertion of liberal assumptions, here as elsewhere.
Polymarket.com – looks like we have a winner!!!!!
2026 Anti-Semite of The Year:
Tucker Carlson – 77%
Bryce Mitchell – 14%
Stew Peters – 11%
https://polymarket.com/event/2025-antisemite-of-the-year/will-tucker-carlson-be-named-stopantisemitisms-2025-antisemite-of-the-year?tid=1765637242974
And we have a new photo of neo! An early Christmas present!
I like the photo, Neo!
@Eeyore:I never said Tucker was being honest; quite the reverse.
I agree Carlson is being unfair and deceptive. But it’s Journalism 101 “lying” and this is done practically every day. We’ve all seen it a thousand times. There’s a law that does thing X and thing Y. Republicans oppose the law, and the headline is “Republicans oppose X”. Comes from our side of the fence too.
One example out of thousands: “Republicans take aim at subsidies that help tens of millions of women: Conservatives have long desired to slash programs that help with healthcare, food, housing and transportation”
We all know how much Republicans and conservatives hate women, healthcare, food, housing, and transportation, don’t we? That must be why they oppose the programs, right? Take that headline, swap out “Republicans” for “Ted Cruz” and “programs that help with healthcare, food, housing and transportation” with “Ugandan law that criminalizes gay rape” and you have the tl; dr version of Carlson’s video.
But I don’t think the narrator here is wholly honest either.
He’s also over-the-top. His suggestion that Carlson should be sued is absurd. Does the law criminalize gay rape? It does. Does Ted Cruz oppose it? He does. There’s nothing actionable there. The law does not require that people be fair or present all the relevant facts. I’m sure it’s infuriating to be the target of things like that, it raises my blood pressure to read it about someone else, but it’s not something you can do anything about by suing.
I guess the question is whether grotesque and intentional MISREPRESENTATION of a public official within a purportedly serious journalistic effort (i.e., not satire or parody) is actionable.
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+ Bonus:
Doha, eh?
(Talk about some bizarre “relationships”…)
“Tucker Carlson and the Qatar First Republicans are sabotaging Trump;
“Americans fawned over the emirate at the Doha Forum love fest for the home office of Islamist terror. They’re setting the president up for a fall as well as fueling antisemitism”—
https://www.jns.org/tucker-carlson-and-the-qatar-first-republicans-are-sabotaging-trump/
And so, cui bono?
(And to what end…?)