Texts sent by Tucker Carlson in the hours after the January 6, 2021, insurrection contributed to a string of events that played a part in the former Fox News host’s firing, The New York Times has reported.
Describing a video of a group of men he called supporters of former president Donald Trump violently attacking “an Antifa kid”, Carlson wrote: “It’s not how white men fight.”
The message concerned the Fox board, whose members saw it a day before the news outlet’s trial against Dominion Voting Systems began and worried it would become public.
Fox News last month settled a defamation case brought by Dominion over claims the network had peddled lies about the validity of the election results of 2020, when Mr Trump lost his re-election bid.
Dominion had asked for $1.7 billion and Fox settled for more than $787 million.
Fox fired Carlson shortly after the settlement on April 24, stunning viewers and ending the six-year run of the network's most popular show, Tucker Carlson Tonight.
The show fed on and fuelled America's culture wars and came to define the Republican Party's talking points.
Carlson frequently touted conspiracies including the “great replacement” theory that posits non-white people are being brought to the US with the goal of eventually outnumbering the white population.
In 2018, he sparked outrage when he said immigrants made the US “poorer and dirtier”.
Carlson's text message, obtained by The New York Times, reveals a man grappling with the tribal and violent impulses his own show had long helped foster.
“I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it,” he wrote in the text that was part of the Dominion lawsuit but which had been redacted in court filings.
“Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be.
“The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering.”
He went on to say: “If I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?”
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