Fox News host Tucker Carlson mockingly suggested on Tuesday night that there was no evidence the QAnon conspiracy theory exists, claiming his team spent “all day trying to locate” it, learned it isn’t “even a website,” and “could not find it.”
QAnon, for those still unaware, is an unhinged and dangerous cult that believes there is a satanic cabal of powerful pedophiliac Democrats and liberals feeding off the lifeblood of young children—and that former President Donald Trump is on a secret mission to take them down.
In the wake of the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which featured a number of QAnon adherents who felt duty-bound to keep Trump in power, Carlson has repeatedly referenced the conspiracy on his program. While most of the time he’s mentioned QAnon to ridicule mainstream news’ coverage of it, insisting any concern over the cult-like behavior of its followers is overblown, he’s also rallied to the defense of QAnon supporters.
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“Your mind belongs to you, it’s yours and yours alone,” he said last month while railing against a proposed bill that would bar QAnon conspiracists from holding a federal security clearance.
During his Tuesday night broadcast, however, Carlson took his downplaying of the conspiracy to another level. Taking aim at networks such as CNN warning about right-wing disinformation and QAnon causing millions of people to increasingly lose touch with reality, Carlson insisted that mainstream media was actually the biggest purveyor of misinformation.
After accusing liberals of believing false narratives about police officers killing unarmed African-Americans, Carlson mockingly said he wanted to know “where the public is getting all this false information,” prompting him to then dismiss QAnon as a nonexistent issue.
“We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website,” Carlon snarked. “If it’s out there, we could not find it.”
He also invoked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the QAnon-friendly congresswoman recently stripped of her House committee assignments over her violent rhetoric, to make his case that evidence of the conspiracy couldn’t be found.
“Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed because we have heard she traffics in disinformation, CNN told us, but nothing there,” he sarcastically declared. “Next we called our many friends in the tight-knit intel community. Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones?”
In the end, according to Carlson, “none of the above” were “spreading disinformation to Americans.” Instead it “was cable news”—an industry Carlson has been a part of for two decades now.
“Maybe they are from QAnon,” he sneered in jest, before concluding moments later: “CNN itself has become a disinformation network, more powerful than QAnon and far more destructive.”
While Carlson repeatedly downplays the conspiracy theory that has been tied to violence, murders, and an insurrectionist riot aimed at stopping a peaceful transfer of power—and now seemingly acts like evidence of its existence is impossible to find—his own network published a comprehensive explainer on QAnon just two weeks ago.
