Is Tucker Carlson OK?

For the second time in just a few months, the former Fox News host-turned-independent media star has spread a bizarre conspiracy theory about the sexuality of a Democratic politician. This time, the target of Carlson’s musings is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an openly gay man.

In a recent episode of his show, Carlson referred to Buttigieg as “supposedly gay.” He went on to recount how one of his producers, who is gay, told him that Buttigieg “is not gay.” Carlson says he believes his producer because “gays all keep close track of that stuff.” 

“My producer goes, ‘It’s totally a pose. He was dating women just a few years ago. It’s totally fake. He’s not gay at all,’” Carlson adds. “So, I said that on the air and people got all offended. I thought it was kind of hilarious.”

While there’s no reason for people to get “offended,” it is a baseless thing for Carlson to suggest and an irresponsible use of his vast platform and influence. 

There is zero actual evidence that Buttigieg is faking being gay. A gay producer’s theories and perception, nothing more than a hunch, do not constitute anything close to enough basis for a responsible journalist to make such a grave allegation against an elected official. After all, you’re essentially accusing him of having built his entire career and persona around a falsehood, of being a fraud to his very core. 

Buttigieg is married to a man and has been since 2018. They have children together. He came out back in 2015. If this is some grand conspiracy to bolster his identity politics points to help his career, Buttigieg sure has committed to the bit and planned it over a decade. 

It is true that Buttigieg did not come out of the closet until age 37. But the most likely explanation for this is that in deep-red Indiana he simply didn’t feel comfortable doing so until then, especially given his career as first a member of the military and then an elected official. For context, though it increasingly may seem that no one cares if someone is gay, that’s an extremely recent development, and even as recently as the early 2010s it still would’ve been difficult to come out, especially in heavily Republican, rural states such as Indiana. 

While it’s also possible that Buttigieg’s delayed openness about his sexuality is actually rooted in a grand conspiracy, such serious allegations demand serious evidence, not gossip and conjecture. 

For years, Carlson has, often rightly, criticized establishment media outlets and liberal journalists for throwing spurious and unsupported accusations against Republicans. But here he is doing the same thing against a Democrat, and it’s not the first time. 

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Carlson similarly spread strange conspiracy theories that former President Barack Obama is gay on his show last year. He did an entire interview with a man who claims to have slept with Obama in 1999. But Carlson never mentioned that the man, Larry Sinclair, failed a lie detector test and has an extensive criminal record involving fraud, forgery, and deceit. Nonetheless, Carlson bizarrely describes the theory that Obama is gay as “obviously true.”

Carlson seems to have a soft spot for conspiracy theories about the sexuality of Democratic politicians. In spreading these baseless claims, he’s becoming everything he always railed against in the legacy media — and doing his audience a massive disservice, to boot. 

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.