Fox Contributor Slams Tucker Carlson, Compares Him to 1960s Conspiracy Theorist Who Was ‘Excommunicated’ From the ‘Respectable Right’

Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen took a swipe at ousted Fox opinion host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday after a right-wing activist argued Carlson was once “a successful coordinating mechanism for the Right.”

Christopher Rufo commented on the infighting within the right on X and wrote, “When Tucker had his primetime slot on Fox, he served as a successful coordinating mechanism for the Right. He set the agenda with his monologue, shaped the bounds of discourse, and brought in new voices to illustrate specific lines of argument. It will be interesting to see if Tucker, or Fox, can reprise this role, or if it has fragmented online in a more fundamental way.”

Thiessen joined the conversation and added, “Tucker wasn’t the William F Buckley Jr of the modern conservative movement, who provided the successful coordinating mechanism of the right. He was the Robert Welch who Buckley excommunicated from the respectable right.”

In the late 1950s Welch co-founded the John Birch Society and went on to spread wild conspiracy theories claiming things like President Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist sympathizer or even an operative. Welch, decades later, would spin conspiracies claiming that an even more sinister force than Communism was threatening the U.S., arguing that wealthy families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds were a part of some “Master Conspiracy” with the Illuminati. William F Buckley Jr and most of the GOP leaders of the time openly denounced Welch and kept the John Bircher Society out of the mainstream of the party.

Thiessen replied to his tweet, taking one more swipe at Carlson and his recent pro-Putin posturing. “And I say that at risk of offending the memory of Robert Welch who, for all his many irredeemable flaws, at least hated the KGB thugs in the Kremlin rather than fawning over them,” Thiessen wrote.

Rufo expanded on what he saw as the current threat to the conservative discourse in his tweets about the ongoing battle within the right, which largely focused around rising Christian nationalism, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy theories.

“Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting, extreme conspiratorialism, etc. None of these are right on the merits and they are a threat to a functional, popular conservative movement,” wrote Rufo in reply to his own tweet.

Gregg Re, a former writer for Carlson’s Fox News show, also replied and took aim at his former boss for sinking into the fever pits of X, writing, “you can’t be a successful coordinating mechanism of anything if all you do is interviews on twitter (minus the anti-trump guests like @emeriticus). it’s a baffling decision to pivot his entire programming to that, and the results have been tough to watch at times.”