Geraldo Rivera said on Wednesday that Tucker Carlson’s “perverse” conspiracies about the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection were “bullshit,” kicking some dirt on his ex-colleague’s proverbial grave following the primetime star’s ouster from Fox News.
While Rivera publicly called out the far-right nationalist host, his network has largely pretended Carlson doesn’t exist since firing him. Following the network’s announcement of Carlson’s exit on Monday morning, his name has only been uttered a handful of times on Fox News airwaves—and briefly at that.
“I don’t wish ill on anybody, but there is no doubt—as I said at the time—Tucker Carlson’s perverse January 6 conspiracy theory was ‘bullshit,’” the Fox News correspondent-at-large tweeted. “Having lost the election President Trump incited an insurrection that sought to undermine our Constitutional process.”
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Rivera, who is one of the rotating “liberal” co-hosts of Fox’s most-watched show The Five, has spoken out in the past about Carlson’s attempt to portray the Capitol riots as a “false flag” orchestrated by the federal government.
When Carlson debuted his Patriot Purge docu-series in late 2021 that claimed the Jan. 6 attack was being used by the government to launch a war against “legacy Americans, Rivera told The New York Times that Carlson was peddling “inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated” rhetoric in order to be “provocative.” He also tweeted at the time that the “false flag” claims were “bullshit.”
While Patriot Purge eventually led two longtime Fox News contributors to quit and prompted internal complaints from the “hard news” division, Carlson only became more emboldened in downplaying the Capitol insurrection. In fact, his sympathetic portrayal of violent rioters seeking to overthrow an election as nothing more than “sightseers” resulted in House Speaker Kevin McCarthy giving him exclusive access to the Jan. 6 video footage.
Carlson, meanwhile, has continued to baselessly assert that the FBI incited the riots, pointing to MAGA activist Ray Epps as an agent provocateur. Epps has since demanded a retraction and apology, and the FBI has stated that Epps is not a bureau employee or source. A day before Carlson was fired by Fox, Epps told 60 Minutes that the far-right host was “obsessed” with him and had ruined his life.
Former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, who worked on Carlson’s show before she was fired last month, told MSNBC this week that her former boss was “intent” on proving that the FBI was behind Jan. 6. According to Grossberg, Carlson wanted to pin the blame on the feds rather than on Fox News for telling Trump supporters that the election had been stolen, even as lawyers of Capitol rioters were telling him to “stop” because his conspiracies were “dangerous.”
