Tucker Carlson got thousands to share his homoerotic promo video

He's certainly insecure about masculinity, but he's not stupid. And let's not forget he's violently homophobic.

Over the weekend Twitter lit up with stunned and mocking reactions to the promo for the first episode of the new season of “Tucker Carlson’s Originals” on Fox Nation, which garnered thousands of shares and likes.

nikki mccann ramírez @NikkiMcR

I promise you are not prepared for Tucker's latest montage

A homoerotic fantasy, the video clip shows lots of semi-nude muscled male bodies, often manhandling one another and doing many manly-man things, like throwing truck tires around. The video promotes an episode obsessively focused on the loss of masculinity and what Carlson bemoans as declining testosterone levels among men.

And everyone and anyone on social media who’s gay called the video the gayest thing ever made — and they and everyone else shared it a zillion times.

Mark Harris @MarkHarrisNYC

I am sitting here next to my gay husband living my gay life reading a gay novel as research for my new gay book...and yet I am not and will never be as gay as whatever is haunting Tucker Carlson's fantasies.

nikki mccann ramírez @NikkiMcR

I promise you are not prepared for Tucker's latest montage https://t.co/8tdvYTW2cn

Later in the weekend came some of the content from the episode, in which one fitness expert who discusses “bromeopathy” told Carlson that a solution to the testosterone “problem” is “testicle tanning,” with Carlson backing him up because anything and everything must be tried to stop the testosterone level “crash.”

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 @RonFilipkowski

In his new special on how to raise testosterone levels in men, Tucker Carlson’s guest suggests “testicle tanning” using infrared light as a “bromeopathic” therapy.

Carlson then tries that one out on Kid Rock, who’s super-resistant to the idea — “Dude, stop!” But Carlson pushes him, asking, “Don’t you think at this point, when so many of the therapies, the paths they’ve told us to take, have turned out to be dead ends that really hurt people, why wouldn’t open-mind people seek new solutions?” Kid Rock gets flustered and begs to “Stop this planet and let me off” — which I’m sure we’d all be fine with if only it were a possibility.

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 @RonFilipkowski

Next guest up for Tucker is Kid Rock, who seems befuddled by the previous segment on testicle tanning. Tucker tries to get him to take it seriously, but even Kid is confused.

It all has the hallmarks of the ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and other quack Covid “cures” pushed by Carlson and the right, except that those were in response to a global pandemic of historic proportions. Whether or not long-term decreases in mens’ testosterone levels is a problem, it’s not caused the deaths of millions worldwide in the past three years. But it is causing Tucker Carlson to have a meltdown about masculinity.

And that brings us to Carlson’s brutal homophobia, which is both horrific and fascinating considering his use of homoerotic imagery to bring attention to the new season of his show, which worked like a charm. I wrote last year about Carlson’s pathological obsession with homosexuality, after we learned that, while in college, Carlson celebrated the assassination of former San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk over a decade earlier:

Last week, social media lit up with screen grabs of Tucker Carlson’s yearbook entry from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1991, which was confirmed by the college, listing the “Dan White Society” as a club to which Carlson stated he belonged.

It was a grotesque, homophobic and violent display, as Dan White was the anti-gay killer of gay civil rights leader and San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, both of whom White assassinated in 1979 at City Hall in a horrendous act of gun violence and a homophobic hate crime.

There is no Dan White Society, at least not any that any other student at Trinity listed as having been a member. Carlson also listed membership in the “Jesse Helms Foundation,” referring to the late Republican senator from North Carolina who led a crusade against queer people in the ‘80s and ‘90s, exploiting fear and whipping up hate as AIDS came into the forefront of American society, preventing LGBTQ people from attaining protections amid rampant discrimination. The fact-checking site Snopes found no other reference in the yearbook to a “Jesse Helms Foundation” either.

I also discussed how, in 2007, Carlson admitted on MSNBC to host Dan Abrams that he had bashed a man in a public restroom, claiming the man had “bothered” him. He said he had “grabbed” the man and “hit him against the stall with his head.” After outrage from viewers, Carlson responded that it was “self-defense” for a sexual advance. But it couldn’t have been self-defense since Carlson admitted he left the restroom after he was “bothered” and then went back with a friend to beat the man up. (Interestingly, after Abrams challenged Carlson’s action, Carlson went on to say, in what appeared to be a strange joke, “Let me be clear, I am not gay.”)

In 2019, Media Matters released audio clips of Carlson making racist and homophobic comments years earlier, including using an anti-gay slur. And in 2020, Carlson’s top writer was exposed by CNN as having anonymously written racist, misogynistic, homophobic comments in online forums for years, and resigned from Carlson’s show and Fox News.

Carlson has in the past two years engaged in hateful transphobic rants, including claiming that trans people “threaten the perpetuation of the species.” And in recent weeks he’s promoted Florida’s heinous “Don’t say gay” law, joining the rest of Fox in grotesquely framing it as an “anti-groomer” law.

Carlson though went one further than his Fox colleagues, saying teachers who discuss sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms should be “beaten up.”

Carlson’s expressions of transphobia and homophobia, consistently infused with violence, are as revelatory as the masculinity meltdown of the first episode of the new season of his show. His use of homoerotic images to promote the new episode — which he knew would be effective, even if revealing — is interesting only because it further illustrates his violent obsession.