James Carville Calls Fox News Audience ‘A Giant Monster That You Have to Feed Every Night’

Democratic strategist James Carville said Fox News hosts were looking for someone other than Donald Trump to blame so they could continue to appease their audience in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, calling its audience “a giant monster that you have to feed every night.”

Carville said conservatives “needed an alternative story” so they tried to blame the insurrection on Antifa, “an organization that doesn’t exist.” Fox host Tucker Carlson then focused in on Arizona man Ray Epps, who has now brought the latest defamation suit against the network after Carlson suggested Epps was an agent provocateur for the government trying to stir up violence on Jan. 6.

“They should have just stuck with Antifa, which doesn’t exist — only in their mind,” Carville continued. “But once they went to an individual, that’s a little different. That’s not a general thing.”

MSNBC’s Ari Melber said the truth didn’t work with the Fox audience.

“They couldn’t stick to the truth, so as you said, they had to actually start blaming other people for what we all know was a Trump rally that turned into a Trump insurrection,” he said.

“They were desperate to have an answer,” Carville responded. “It was bad optics of people beating up policemen and breaking into windows, all right? And that audience desperately needed another explanation. If they were going to keep their audience, they had to supply it. The Antifa thing fell apart, so Mr. Epps was the remainder man. And that audience, they just can’t let it go. They have to—it’s a giant monster that you have to feed every night. And that’s what happened, of course, with the Dominion. It’s what’s going to happen with Smartmatic, and it’s probably going to happen with Mr. Epps. That was an expensive diet they were on feeding that monster.”

Watch the MSNBC clip above.