When your first grade teacher makes a public statement that your story is the “most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard”–after teaching fantasy-prone first graders–that’s saying something.
But that’s exactly how Tucker Carlson’s first grade teacher described his recounting of his grade school experience. In a 2018 book, Carlson wrote that his first grade teacher (whom Carlson referred to as “Mrs. Raymond”) was prone to wearing Indian-print skirts, sobbing at her desk and abandoning traditional education.
Carlson wrote that even at that delicate age, all he wanted was for her “stop blubbering and teach us to read. . . . Mrs. Raymond never did teach us; my father had to hire a tutor to get me through phonics.”
He didn’t mention that the tutor Carlson’s father hired was Marianna Raymond, Carlson’s first grade teacher at the tony La Jolla Country Day School in a wealthy California community, which was very white and very privileged. Apparently, Carlson wasn’t a very good student, even back then.
In a lengthy Washington Post profile, Tucker Carlson comes across as an out-of-touch elitist unable to connect with even the most basic emotions. A child of a Nixon-era political appointee who married the heiress to the Swanson frozen food fortune after his mother abandoned him, Carlson has gone from elite grade school to elite prep school (which expelled him) to a prep-school extended college. His attempt to join the CIA after college failed; the CIA rejected him. And then he found a niche as a white kid who would write about racial grievance–white racial grievance–for the Weekly Standard after a stint at the Heritage Foundation. A habit of wearing bow ties set the brand.
From there, he became the conservative poster boy for complaining about how oppressed whites–particularly white men–are. While working at CNN, Carlson took a trip to Africa with Black cultural and religious leaders to tour historic sites where slaves were confined before being shipped like cargo to the United States.
Carlson showed no emotion whatsoever while touring the actual cells African ancestors here held in and a replica of a slave shipped they were transported in. After the trip, Carlson said the Black American leaders attempted to make him feel guilty about the acts of white slave merchants when the Rev. Albert Sampson put his arms on Carlson and said, “I love you, man.”
“He did not cry,” Sampson told The Washington Post in his first interview about the encounter. “He did not have any intellectual response. He didn’t give any verbal response. It was a total detachment from the reality of the event.”
Carlson wrote a piece about the experience for Esquire magazine. Commenting that he thought Sampson “was going to bite me,” Carlson wrote, “Sampson was trying to make me feel guilty. It wasn’t obvious to me at the time. The idea that I’d be responsible for the sins (or, for that matter, share in the glory of the accomplishments) of dead people who happened to share my skin tone has always confused me. Racial solidarity wasn’t a working concept in my southern-California hometown.”
Since arriving to some level of fame (and infamy) at Fox News after failed television shows at PBS, CNN and MSNBC, Carlson has used his position to bolster his “forever aggrieved” viewpoint, which has captured the emotions of his audience. No one knows for certain if he believes his claims or if he’s just propagating ideas that he knows his fans want to hear.
He’s also using his show to help his son, Buckley Carlson–yes, probably the second whitest name in the US, after Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson–get ahead in politics by booking Buckley’s boss, Republican Indiana Congressman Jim Banks on the show to discuss Critical Race Theory, a new pet target for Fox News rage. (Carlson never disclosed his son’s employment by Banks.)
“How could a book like this — really filth — wind up on a naval reading list?” Carlson said of the book “How to be an Antiracist,” by acclaimed writer Boston University Professor Ibram X. Kendi, which is on a recommended reading list for naval personnel. Kendi, who is Black, has never spoken to Carlson or been invited on his show, likely because Carlson knows that he’d be wiped across the floor by the person he’s trying to demonize.
Maybe some more tutoring could help.