GLAAD Applauds 17 Advertisers for Pulling Ads from Fox News’ ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ and Shines Light on History of Anti-LGBTQ Statements

NEW YORK – GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, today praised the 17 companies and advertisers who have pulled down their television ads after Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said defaming statements about immigration during a broadcast of this show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, last week. 

Carlson stated: “We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” And followed up with: “Immigration is an act of atonement. Previous leaders of our country committed sins. We must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans.”

Media have reported that 17 advertisers pulled ads following these remarks. Advertisers that pulled ads include:Ancestry.com, Bowflex, CareerBuilder, Chase United MileagePlus Explorer card, IHOP, Indeed, Just For Men, Land Rover, Minted, Nerd Wallet, Pacific Life, ScotteVest, Smile Direct, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, TD Ameritrade, Voya Financial, and Zenni.

“There’s no mistaking it: Tucker Carlson’s words were ugly, inaccurate, and un-American, and advertisers did the right thing by ending support of him and his show,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO of GLAAD. “Current and future advertisers must also remember Carlson’s pattern of peddling misinformation about and frequent attacks on other marginalized communities, including LGBTQ Americans. Fox News should take action and other advertisers should stand with marginalized communities by ending support of this derogatory programming.”

GLAAD today catalogued the many times that Carlson cravenly attacked the LGBTQ community, including disgusting remarks made about the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in May 2018. Earlier this year, Pulse survivor Brandon Wolf, who Carlson personally attacked, and Blair Imani, a queer Black Muslim activist who was also attacked by Carlson on his show, appeared onstage at the GLAAD Media Awards to call out Carlson’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fBLCsQoemU

See below for a list of Tucker Carlson’s anti-LGBTQ record.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: Tucker Carlson’s Horrific Anti-LGBTQ Record
 

• Once said of trans people: “If a person voluntarily undergoes castration, that is totally different. That is an act of a crazy person. That’s like setting your hair on fire or blinding yourself. You are unstable if you voluntarily castrate yourself simply because you feel uncomfortable in your own sex and I don’t want a person that unstable teaching my kids.”
   
• Issued another slur against trans people: “…just because you’re castrated and have a fake set of boobs does not make you a woman.  It makes you a castrated man with a fake set of boobs. I don’t know why they’re sending him to women’s prison, but I guess that’s the rule.”
   
• Insisted that pro-LGBTQ curriculum deliberately hides the “unhappy facts” about LGBTQ people: “It’s propaganda. It’s lying. Whenever a school system is mandated by law to teach happy news, non-controversial, complimentary facts about a group of people, they are, by definition, excluding the unhappy facts and they are therefore lying. That is propaganda…This is a bill that would do exactly what Mr. Leno says he doesn’t want to happen which is it would teach kids politically charged facts that are not the whole story. It would lie to kids. It would prevent schools from teaching things that somehow reflected poorly on a group that has political power.
   
• Sneered: “I would love to see an ‘SNL’ sketch making fun of transgender bathrooms”
   
• Began crudely anti-trans segment with claim that transgender people are “contrary to common sense and thousands of years of consensus among all prior humans ever to live.”
   
• Mocked ideas surrounding gender identity. 
   
• Insisted pro-LGBTQ curriculum is both “weird” and an effort to indoctrinate: “It sounds weird but California public schools could soon be required to teach kids about the sex lives of historical figures.  It‘s all part of an effort to force kids to approve of homosexuality.”
   
• Invoked a gay stereotype when criticizing the founder of Media Matters for America, David Brock, saying that Brock was “a professional Hillary [Clinton] throne sniffer” who is “worshipping her like Judy Garland.” 
   
• Hosted a guest from the anti-LGBTQ American Academy of Pediatricans to peddle debunked untruths about transgender people.
   
• Said it’s “fascism” to expect a baker to serve gay couples equally to straight couples. 
   
• Multiple LGBTQ guests, including a Pulse survivor, said appearances on Carlson’s show wherein he derisively belittled their issue and/or lives led to death threats against them.
   
• Bragged about beating up a gay man in a bathroom: “I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the–you know–and grabbed him and hit him against the stall with his head, actually. And then the cops came and arrested him.”
   
• Defended Family Research Council, one of the most viocusly anti-LGBTQ activist groups in the nation
   
• Insinuated that a transgender candidate “can get away with many, many things” because of “transgender privilege”
   
• Dismissed the repeal of the military’s homophobic Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy as a “stupid issue” and “totally a sideshow issue”
   
• Harassed guests over trans people’s fair bathroom access.
   
• Rejected the idea of LGBTQ safe spaces in public schools because: “It‘s not a safe place for students whose belief systems specify that homosexuality is wrong.  If I‘m an observant Muslim or a Mormon or an evangelical Christian and I think homosexuality is a sin, your classrooms aren‘t a safe place for me to express my beliefs, are they?”
   
• Suggested LGBTQ themed film Moonlight only won because of “political correctness.”

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