Tucker Carlson Promotes a Mass Shooter Apologist - Part 1
A detailed analysis of an extremist guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Tucker Carlson has a habit of promoting white supremacist ideas without openly embracing the ideology. Where some extremist voices are bullhorns of hate Carlson delivers dog whistle messages that are picked up by specific viewers.
Pushing this race related hatred in a covert way is in many ways far more dangerous than an angry bigot screaming out obvious slurs and hostile language. When Carlson elevates a dangerous idea it’s more likely to seep through moral filters and infect his enormous audience.
Last week while covering “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for this project I noticed a guest, Katherine Dee, who sparked my interest. Dee’s segment was only three minutes long and was compiled of edits from a much longer interview from Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation series “Tucker Carlson Today.”
After the segment Carlson made a blanket statement,
“So it turns out there is a connection between internet use and mass shootings, not everyone who is on the internet all the time, obviously, becomes a mass murderer but there’s still a connection and it’s interesting how so few want to explore it,” said Carlson.
I had no idea what he was talking about as Dee hadn’t really explored that in the segment. Dee hadn’t offered any data or mentioned a study. She had only made a few broad statements that were quite vague regarding the internet and culture.
I googled her name and couldn’t find much of anything besides the Substack channel Carlson had mentioned. I keep digging. She wasn’t a criminologist, a licensed therapist, a data scientist or a psychologist. From what I could tell she was a woman who had really strong opinions.
Dee was a bogus expert. I’m sure she didn’t view herself in this way but her lack of credentials eroded her credibility.
I feature a segment frequently called “Bogus Expert of the Week.” A bogus expert is someone who is invited on Fox News to speak a topic but who also lacks any expertise or education in the subject. Fake experts are commonly used in propaganda.
Most dubious experts on Fox News discuss COVID-19 but have no science or medical training.
Another common trend on Fox News is someone with a background in journalism or public relations who then writes books about climate change. The person has never even had college course in any science but they’ll pull data sets from various studies and present themselves as mavericks who interpreted the data in such a way they’ve debunked any dire predictions by climate scientists.
I’m going to tell this story a bit backward as this is how I discovered Dee and what she was promoting.
I found overlap of Katherine Dee’s ideas with hateful ideologies almost immediately. If I found this as a lone reporter, surely the large staff on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” might have seen the same thing.
I started with a podcast. This episode is publicly accessible and highly promoted by Dee herself.
Trigger warning - This episode contains dark themes and ideas around a mass shooter. White supremacy, white nationalism, homophobia and pedophilia are also briefly discussed. This is extreme content. If content like this is upsetting to you, you might not want to consume this episode.
“The Ghost of Adam Lanza Part 1” - Podcast episode
Katherine Dee - Host - Katherine Dee is an alias. I explore more about her lack of transparency in the next installment about this story.
Blithering Genius of Wayward Axoloti - Guest aka BG - This is also an alias. To avoid calling this man a genius I will refer to him as simply BG in the rest of this article.
The Podcast itself - Dee described this as My favorite thing I've ever recorded. If you want an intro to my work, it should be this.
The host starts by introducing her guest by saying she doesn’t know anything about him. Basically she openly admits that she hasn’t done any research or vetting on her main subject.
“I actually don't know anything about you, so I can't even really introduce you. You're a YouTuber and a blogger, and I follow you on Twitter, but I don't really know. I don't know what your background is or what your core interests are,” said Dee.
This was alarming as was quite reckless of Dee to invite a man on her podcast she knew nothing about to discuss a mass shooter.
“You wrote a really interesting essay called The Ghost of Adam Lanza about his YouTube channel, which had been uploaded in, I think, 2019,” said Dee.
Adam Lanza is the person responsible for the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school that resulted in the death of 20 young children, six adults and Lanza himself.
Since Dee didn’t provide any details about the man she was about to interview I decided to look him up on my own. I found an audio recording on his YouTube channel called, “The Rise and Fall of the Alt-Right.”
BG described himself as a “race realist” which most people would probably describe as racist. In his own words from “The Rise and Fall of the Alt-Right.”
Race is real. Different races behave in different ways. They produce different societies and different social outcomes. And if we ignore that, then we're just in denial of reality.
He also expressed extremely problematic views about homosexuality. Although he didn’t think LGBTQ folks should be persecuted for being gay he strongly felt that homosexuality was a form of sexual deviancy and a mental disorder.
As awful as his viewpoints were on race and the LGBTQ community BG did reject antisemitism outright.
So that is the man that Dee didn’t bother to research. I will also point out that although this man was one half of her best known work, the crew of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” either didn’t look into his background or weren’t bothered by it.
The Podcast Recording
Overall both Dee and BG spend a lot of time obsessing over the various philosophies that Adam Lanza adhered to. They also included audio recordings from Lanza’s YouTube videos. I won’t be including any clips from Lanza’s recordings. I don’t think amplifying is voice serves any useful purpose.
“But in most of them, he's presenting a system of ideas to the world. And it's a very I would say it's almost unique or a unique system of ideas. It has connections to other philosophical positions, but it is very isolated, really. I mean, it is its own thing. And he calls it Youlavism. So he's presenting this idea of Youlavism, but he also talks about how he got to this position and some of his other views about culture and, you know, other things about himself and stuff like that,”
They also played several clips of Lanza himself expressing his opinions about various subjects. Most of what they played were clips of a very self-important and self-obsessed pretentious young man wondering about the meaning of life. He sounded like most angst riddled young men.
Dee and BG presented him as some kind of great mind.
I tried to look up the various philosophies discussed throughout this piece but couldn’t even figure out how to spell them other than anti-natalism.
Anti-natalism is a philosophy that promotes the idea that human beings shouldn’t reproduce. It could be considered anti-life itself or extremely nihilistic or misanthropic.
I’m only sharing this tiny sliver of the discussion as most of it came across as intellectual masturbation. It was just two people who wanted to show off that they knew a lot about obscure worldviews that ultimately didn’t have much baring on Lanza or his crime.
“And he was part of some of those circles on YouTube to like the ethicists and the broader circle of antenatal lists. But also, I think more generally, the sort of heretical discourse space on YouTube. Like he was aware of these other points in that space.”
It was largely psychobabble. Imagine an hour of that kind of language.
Mass shooters kill for any number of reasons. The source of inspiration could be as innocuous as a super hero movie. James Eagan Holmes walked into a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” dressed as a character in the film when he sprayed the theater with bullets killing 12 and injuring 70.
I have no doubt fans of Holmes have dissected every aspect of “The Dark Knight” to try to discover why a work of fiction might inspire a man to commit mass murder.
It’s all meaningless. Figuring out a book or an obscure philosophy will not prevent or predict the next mass shooting.
Figuring out Lanza’s worldview will not help prevent another tragedy. What might help is a detailed analysis of his mental and emotional state, the nature of his family dynamics, or any abuse he may or may not have suffered in his past. Dee and BG are not qualified to discuss his medical condition so instead they fixate on philosophies Lanza himself created.
Overall their tone towards Lanza was sympathetic. You’d never know they were talking about someone who slaughtered 20 first graders in cold blood.
“But if you take just the videos and you don't know that that that Sandy Hook happens. Right. He feels eccentric in this way, that it feels really rare now. I feel like there's a lot of performance that happens and a lot of it's like easier to to get status by being kind of an Internet weirdo. So it's it's kind of hard to meet more,” said Dee.
It felt at times that Dee and her guest were trying to canonize Lanza in some ways.
“But yet Lanza comes across as being very authentic, like very concerned with what he's saying and not like not performing at all. He's not trying to be liked. He's not trying to be cool. He's not trying to make a buck. He's just telling you what he believes. Yeah. I mean, I really wish I could have talked to him because he you know, he presents a very interesting character and a very tragic character, obviously, but that’s in retrospect,” said BG.
Again if you breakdown that statement he only added the “very tragic character” at the end of the phrase. The rest of the wording appears to hold up Lanza as a likable or admirable character.
He’s not trying to be liked
He’s not trying to be cool.
He’s not trying to make a buck.
He’s just telling you what he believes.
I really wish I could have talked to him.
In reality he was a troubled young man with a mother who was in deep denial about his many emotional and mental problems. She ignored all the warning signs and gave him easy access to extremely dangerous weapons.
Tens of thousands of young men might be living with the same pathologies that Lanza had but will never act out towards anyone in a violent way.
If someone spent this much time and focus on a dozen mass shooters they certainly wouldn’t find that all them shared the same ideas. Even if they all made YouTube videos where they pondered the great questions of life they wouldn’t line up. It’s not as if mass shooters pick up a manual or adopt a single doctrine.
“Now. It's not it's not as one sided as Lanza views it. But, you know, he he was making valid critiques of somewhat one sided of culture, human nature, etc.. He was not crazy. He was not just, you know, saying, I hate life. He wasn't just saying life sucks and, you know, whatever, like,” said BG
Why does any of this matter? Lanza took the life of 26 people including 20 young children. Why would anyone care about the quality of his ideas, his intelligence or his world view? It just felt like Dee and her guest were elevating this young murderer in an extremely dangerous way.
“Most people never ask the questions that Lanza asked. You know, like they never ask the question, what is the purpose of life or is life good? Right. And ephalists. Ask that question. Youvalism is asking the question, right? Well, it gives an answer to it as well. But, you know, most people don't even ask the question,” said BG
Youvalism is a philosophy Adam Lanza created for himself. I have no idea what ephalists means and I honestly don’t care. I found that section to be downright comical. Had this man ever sat in a commons area in any college campus? This is exactly what young people do. Asking deep questions is hardly unique to any mindset or philosophy.
Now things are about to get much darker in this recording.
I also want to point out again that this podcast was produced by a woman that Tucker Carlson basically called a genius in his hour long interview with her. Tucker Carlson, or at least someone from his staff, has to know that this recording exists. How could they not?
Maybe they don’t. If they don’t then they are not vetting their sources.
I’m sharing so much detail from this recording because I really wanted to get across how disturbing it was and how it seems to cater to at risk young men like Lanza. Why would Tucker Carlson want to increase the audience for someone like Katherine Dee? Why would he want to elevate such disturbing content?
“You know, especially as points about pedophilia. This is something that I think like sort of like less wrong style. You know, people, you know, get in trouble for it to this day. This is it wrong or have, you know, have we bullied people into assigning trauma to certain events? I'm you know, just to be clear of a disclaimer, I'm I obviously believe it's wrong,” said Dee.
Her guest, BG continued down this disturbing path.
“His sexuality or whatever is not part of the arguments. Yeah. I mean, he he did seem very concerned about that issue. And mostly it was because yeah, in his view, this was just culture. This was just an arbitrary value that was imposed on people. And people were being punished for, you know, acting on their feral values,” said BG.
Both Dee and BG couldn’t figure out why more people hadn’t explored Lanza’s videos or online footprint. They couldn’t see why exploring his content in such a reverent way could be problematic.
Is there's some acknowledgment of his his personality. I mean, not not at the videos, that's for sure. But there's some acknowledgment of his worldview. But it's I don't think people are very, very interested in it for some reason. I think they're kind of committed to thinking of him as just a crazed killer, where there's no explanation. And I get it. I find them, like, very hard to understand. Do you read his chat logs? And he has this very sort of like of the era, like, you know, kind of like ‘Rah, I'm so random XD XD.” Like weboo kind of humor, which contrasts the videos, which contrasts with his like Hybristophilia or whatever was going on there,” said Dee.
Near the very end of the broadcast the discussion skids off into the absolute worst of humanity, worse even than fixating on a man who murdered 20 children in cold blood.
“When these subcultures are acknowledged they get the Neo Nazi label or whatever kind of immediately but that’s not really the move. We never get a full picture of what’s exactly is going on there and what are the mechanisms and what’s the average person like. It’s always who’s the ‘edgecase” that does something very horrific and what can we learn from them.”
Most people might react when a conversation starts to go down the “But what about the misunderstood Nazis” path but Dee and BG did not seem concerned.
How would this not be an issue for anyone at Fox News? I don’t have proof that someone at Fox listened to this and greenly the interview.
I have no evidence either way. It does seem odd though that someone wouldn’t have checked this out first considering Dee has this pinned on her Twitter account, featured on her Substack account and it’s basically the first thing that comes up when you search for her on the internet.
“There isn’t much about anti-natalism as a philosophy and stuff like that like if you contrast it with white nationalism and men’s rights those got a lot more attention and provoked a much bigger backlash than something that literally says we should go extinct. It’s just interesting that you know I want a homeland for my race or can we at least openly discuss race differences is the epitome of evil whereas the human race should go extinct or all life should be annihilated should be just meh.”
He’s basically saying this obscure philosophy is worse than white nationalism. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an armed militia filled with anti-natalism adherents, but armed groups of racist extremists have been a problem in the United States for decades.
Race related hate crimes are a real thing that happen. There’s also been a history of crimes that are related back to the extreme hatred of women that is often enflamed by men’s rights activist groups.
Racially motivated hate crimes often have nothing to do with mass shooters. To compare a deeply disturbed young man acting out on an invented philosophy he created in his own mind with white supremacy makes absolutely no sense.
There might be a few anti-natalists who exchange ideas online but there’s no evidence of a history of death and destruction linked to that mindset, the same cannot be said for white supremacy. Tens of millions died during the Second World War in many ways due to the adoption of white supremacy as nationalist dogma.
“Let’s just say I don't want whites to disappear as a race. Well now that’s the epitome of evil and it’s not just because it’s biased or whatever it’s because that view is in opposition to humanist values. Whereas ephalism and antinatalism are kind of aligned with those values so they are kind of observed as an extreme version of the left, well I guess that’s true of all left wing movements as they are not perceived as very threatening,” said BG.
I think BG should probably listen to Fox News talk about socialism some time, or The Squad, or progressivism, or social justice, the network portrays all of those concepts as quite dangerous and threatening.
Dee’s ultimate conclusion was that Lanza might have pull himself out of his downward spiral if he had just found religion. I could list several thousand instances of human beings going on killing rampages in the name of any number of Gods but the idea that someone would attach a twisted philosophy to a religion just did not seem to occur to her.
“I wondered in listening to Adam Lanza's YouTube videos like is this someone who would have been served a few is better served by just finding God? Would He have eventually found God? Was that totally off the table for him due to just what he he believed to his core? You know, could he have even in a detached way, embraced a tradition and used that to get through it?” said Dee.
Notice how she didn’t say that maybe he needed therapy or medication but that somehow a belief in God would have pulled him out of this. That works for some folks but obviously it doesn’t work for everyone. Some mental illnesses can really only be treated with medical intervention, not prayer.
I searched through the transcript of this recording for the words gun, firearm, rifle, and weapon and none were ever mentioned. The word victim was used exactly once and it was not in reference to the victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The easy access to high powered firearms was not even considered a factor here.
There was also never a discussion about why mass shootings like the one Lanza committed are seemingly only an American phenomena. Mass shootings and school shootings occur in other countries but nowhere near as often as they do in the U.S.
The episode ended with a quote by Lanza about school.
This entire endeavor felt like a philosophical entry level course for future mass shooters. I can see why an episode like this would be popular as content about mass shooters, serial killers and true crime in general have a large audience. There’s also a morbid subculture that is obsessed with killers like Lanza.
I honestly couldn’t tell if Katherine Dee had a dark motivations or if she was so detached and obsessed with theories that she couldn’t see what she was tacitly promoting. In the case of this podcast it was her guest who made most of the disturbing comments not Dee herself.
At the same time she didn’t seem troubled or bothered by anything he said.
Why would Tucker Carlson want to elevate a voice like this? Why is something this sinister and twisted featured on “Tucker Carlson Today?”
I cannot see inside the mind of Carlson or his motivation but I suspect featuring Katherine Dee may have been a nod to his more extremist fan base.
Coming up…
The next installment of this series should drop tomorrow. I break down Dee’s full length appearance on “Tucker Carlson Today”.
You claim to be some 'expert' or arbiter or truth but I just don't see. I mean do you even have a job my guess would be know. AM I right, you cat lady Karen?