New York Post Refers to Tucker Carlson as 'Nicotine-Pouch Salesman' in Report Over His El-Sayed Support
The New York Post did not put Tucker Carlson on the opinion page.
It introduced him, in a news story, as a “nicotine-pouch salesman and onetime conservative pundit.”
That sentence is the story.
Staff writer Ryan King used it while reporting that Carlson had all but endorsed Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and called El-Sayed “obviously right” about 9/11, the New York Post reported.
Carlson’s Friday newsletter said El-Sayed “did not celebrate airplane hijackings or cheerlead Al-Qaeda.” He said the Democrat merely objected to how America answered the attacks.
El-Sayed’s 2021 line was that 9/11 “scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people.” He added that Americans “often fail to center them.”
Republican candidate Mike Rogers called that attitude disqualifying. Carlson called Rogers the problem.
The Western Journal already covered the same newsletter, including Carlson’s swipe at the Fox News audience he once held.
None of that required a new job title.
The pouch line is not invented. Carlson co-owns ALP, a nicotine brand Reuters reported is expanding across Europe.
He is a businessman. He is also the man who spent years as the biggest prime-time conservative on television.
The New York Post chose which half to lead with.
That is how institutions mark an exile. They stop saying “former Fox host” first. They say salesman. They add “onetime” the way a paper adds “disgraced.”
Carlson’s defenders will call it a smear from the same Murdoch shop that once employed him. They will say he is only attacking endless war and a GOP he thinks sold out.
His critics will say the pattern is older than one Senate race: Israel as the organizing grievance, Democrats as occasional allies, 9/11 recast as a story about American guilt.
Both can be true at once. A man can hate stupid wars and still spend the 25th anniversary of a massacre telling voters the Democrat who wants to “center” foreign dead over American dead is the serious one.
What the New York Post’s news desk decided is that he is no longer inside the conservative tent.
Plenty of his old viewers hoped the last year was a phase. The El-Sayed note is not a phase. It is a choice about which coalition he wants to help in November.
He still has an audience. He still has a company. He still has a camera.
He no longer has the presumption that a right-of-center paper will introduce him as one of their own.
“Nicotine-pouch salesman and onetime conservative pundit” is rude. It is also the cleanest summary of how a large piece of the movement now files him.
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