It appears as though one of the most prominent talking heads at Fox News may have reached the fifth and final stage of post-election grief: acceptance.
On Monday night, Tucker Carlson admitted that there doesn’t “seem to be enough” fraud “to alter the election result” and that he should be “honest and tell you that.”
The admission comes after a months-long set up by President Trump to claim that the election will be decided by fraud. This has resulted in a flurry of lawsuits and countless unfounded accusations of criminal election activity.
However, Carlson doesn’t believe it’ll change anything.
“At this stage, the fraud that we can confirm does not seem to be enough to alter the election result. We should be honest and tell you that. Of course, that could change,” he said, on his Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
The admission shows that even though right-wing pundits are doing whatever they can to keep the fraud conspiracy going, there just isn’t much there.
However, at the beginning of his show, he did cite multiple instances of unverified fraud, including the false story that a man born in 1823 voted in Michigan.
Carlson then went on to move the goalposts and change the narrative of the fraud investigations. Instead of using the allegations to delegitimize Biden’s victory, they’d now be used to preserve American democracy.
What a patriot.
“But changing the election results is not the whole point. The real point is that fraud took place, and that should horrify us. If you want people to believe that our system is real, that our system is worth say joining the military and dying to protect, then you’ve got to get to the bottom of what just happened and you’ve got to do it as quickly and responsibly as you can,” he said.
“You can’t have fraud in an election because then no one will believe in elections and then things fall apart,” Carlson continued.
“The point isn’t that we need to keep investigating until Donald Trump wins, that is not the point. The point is we need to find out what happened so that the rest of us believe the system is real. And to make that happen, Congress ought to investigate every meaningful claim of illegal voting. Every legitimate claim that is raised must be investigated,” Carlson said.
“We need facts. Transparency is the key.”
If Carlson truly cares about preserving American democracy then he should set his sights on the current president who’s been doing everything he can to delegitimize American democracy during this election cycle.
Trump has worked diligently to cause confusion about the election in hopes of taking the power from voters and putting it in the hands of the Supreme Court. Now, that real story is much more of a threat to democracy than the debunked anecdote of a 197-year-old man voting in Michigan.
