About a year ago, Tucker Carlson, the Daily Caller’s top editor, joined famed conspiratorialist Alex Jones for a discussion about American society and politics. In an exchange that attracted some attention on the Internet, Jones spun one of his classic theories about how the country is changing:

The Democrats went from being the Ku Klux Klan party of race, with Sen. Byrd and all them, to literally going, ‘OK, we’re going to go race-politic with the minorities, make them the majority.’ And so basically they went from financing…La Raza, all the Ford Foundation. And that’s why you have this new race-based system where we all have been conditioned as Republicans or as Libertarians or as white people to be, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re loving, we’re not racist — yes, please, do whatever, I’m sorry I’m white, and beat ourselves with whips on the head. And then meanwhile, the Democrats have just recreated the Ku Klux Klan movement, but they’ve done it with minorities.

Presented with those thoughts (and others — Jones’s monologue was longer than the quote above), Carlson responded, “Yeah, there’s a lot of truth in that. I wish there weren’t. There’s no question that the country is more race-conscious than it was when I was a kid.”

Question: Why didn’t Carlson stick up for his party?

According to D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics spokeswoman Denise Tolliver, Carlson is a registered Democrat in the District of Columbia. His registration dates back to 2006. He has company: The District is three-quarters Democratic — some people whose politics align with a competing party register Democratic in order to assert their preferences in critical Democratic primaries.

AD
AD

The fast-talking Carlson likes to portray himself and the Daily Caller as bastions of independent thinking. And there’s some chatter to back him up on this front. After being labeled a “partisan” years ago, Carlson lashed out, telling Howard Kurtz (then of CNN and the Washington Post), “I’m the least partisan person I know. I have zero interest in party politics, zero interest. I’ve spent half of my life attacking Republicans,” said Carlson. “I’m an ideologue, truly. I have ideas that are distinct from partisan politics.”

And Democrats? He’s brutal on them. When asked last year on Laura Ingraham’s radio show to explain the Republican Party’s demographic hurdles, Carlson responded, in part, “Democrats have changed. It’s just a different population in America, from what we grew up with. Just different voters. And the truth is non-white voters don’t vote Republican. Maybe they will at some point, but they don’t now, partly because the Democratic Party’s always telling them — there’s a front-page piece in the New York Times today — explaining this — telling them, ‘Vote Republican and you’ll be lynched.’ Whipping up racial fears, that’s part of the reason.”

So independent is Carlson that he rips his own party for race-baiting.

AD
AD

What surprises the Erik Wemple Blog is that Carlson hasn’t advertised this affiliation. What better way to counter detractors? For instance, when the Daily Caller took heat for wrongly alleging that Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez entertained prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, why not counter with: Hey, folks, I’m in the same party!?

Full disclosure: Carlson called the Erik Wemple Blog “a total mediocrity and a moron and kind of a creepy, finger-sniffer-type character,” one of the more accurate things he’s said in some time.

AD
AD