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‘Beyond Horrific’: Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Producer Is an Out Gay Man Helping ‘Ramp Up’ Hate Says LGBTQ Journalist

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Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson, whose nightly show frequently has the largest reach of any on cable news, regularly attacks the LGBTQ community with fear-mongering and hate-filled segments about gay people, transgender people, “groomers” and the latest target: “drag queen story hours.”

His senior executive producer, who oversees Carlson’s media empire at Fox News, is a married, out, gay man named Justin Wells, according to veteran journalist and SiriusXM Progress host Michelangelo Signorile, who is calling it “beyond horrific to think a gay man has helped to shape and widely disseminate a message of hate against LGBTQ people.”

Last week, in the wake of the horrific anti-LGBTQ hate crime mass shooting Carlson hosted a guest, the head of the so-called “Gays Against Groomers,” who told Fox News viewers the attack on LGBTQ people at a gay bar in Colorado Springs was “predictable” and warned that these hate crime massacres will continue, “until we end this evil agenda” of gender-affirming care.

Carlson has repeatedly hosted Jaimee Mitchell, the Gays Against Groomers founder who fear mongers against LGBTQ people, with the apparent consent of Wells, who “helped promulgate the kind of hate that leads to violence,” says Signorile.

READ MORE: Watch: Chasten Buttigieg Says Tucker Carlson Is Focusing on ‘Hate’ After Host’s Latest Anti-Gay Attack on His Husband

“It’s unlikely that any narrative would get broadcast by Tucker without significant buy-in from Justin,” Angelo Carusone, President and CEO of media watchdog Media Matters, told Signorile.

Indeed, referring to the Colorado Springs mass shooting massacre, Signorile noted it is “the same kind of nightclub at which Wells, in years past, danced the night away in Miami Beach and elsewhere, liberating himself from the world outside and surely never imagining he’d be shot dead.”

“Now he’s aided the extremists who deny that sense of safety and liberation to every future generation of queer people,” says Signorile, explaining that “Wells runs the entire Tucker Carlson operation, and is responsible for imprinting the Tucker Carlson brand, which is all about emboldening white heterosexual male grievance, furthering the racist conspiracy of ‘replacement theory’ and pushing an increasingly virulent anti-LGBTQ agenda.”

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson Serves Up 12-Minute Long Homophobic Hate-Filled Rant Attacking Pete Buttigieg Over ‘Equity’

One of Carlson’s frequent LGBTQ targets is Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who he has called an “unqualified ‘kid’ who ‘breastfeeds,’ and has no business running the agency,” as Mediaite reported.

“And as Carlson further pushed white nationalism, attacked transgender people and embraced Hungary’s authoritarian leader Victor Orban,” Signorile reports, “Wells, in 2021, was named a Vice President at Fox News, in charge of all Carlson product that airs on Fox News TV as well as on Fox’s streaming network, Fox Nation.”

Signorile says, “it’s quite stunning that Wells would work for Carlson, who has a well-known history of visceral homophobia. That’s something that came to light again last year when it became known that Carlson had offered a tribute to Dan White, the assassin of San Francisco supervisor and gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk, in his college yearbook back in 1991, as well as to the late vociferously anti-gay Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who whipped up homophobia during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.”

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson Once Allegedly Bragged He Belonged to a ‘Society’ Named After the Man Who Assassinated Harvey Milk

“I wrote about those jarring revelations when they surfaced last year,” he continues, “as well as about what I dubbed Carlson’s ‘pathological obsession with homosexuality’ throughout his career. Carlson has expressed revulsion at homosexuality, and in one incident he reveled in a violent response. In a TV interview in 2007 he described having smashed a man’s head ‘against the stall’ in a public rest room, after the man ‘bothered’ him.”

“Wells, as a gay man, only emboldens Carlson further,” Signorile concludes. “He gives him permission to launch the ugly attacks and helps Carlson validate, for himself (and likely for executives at Fox News), the vitriol he espouses. That makes Justin Wells’ presence as the powerful gay man behind Tucker Carlson all the more newsworthy. And all the more dangerous.”

Signorile notes that his reporting is not an outing.

“This story is not, however, about a warped closet case, tormented by self-loathing, hiding his true self while bashing those like him. And thus, this story is not an outing, which involves exposing someone who covers up their sexual orientation while publicly presenting as heterosexual — though it certainly may be a startling revelation to a great many. It is, rather, about connecting the dots regarding a reality that seems to have been hiding in plain sight.”

You can read Signorile’s entire report on his Substack newsletter.

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Trump Disavows Prediction Markets — His Family Has Financial Ties to Them: NYT

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President Donald Trump on Thursday told reporters that he was “never much in favor” of prediction markets. “I don’t like it conceptually. It is what it is. I’m not happy with any of that stuff.”

“Well, you know, the whole world unfortunately has become somewhat of a casino,” Trump, a former casino owner, told reporters. “And you look at what’s going on all over the world, in Europe and every place they’re doing these betting things.”

“I’m not happy with any of these sites,” Trump said. “They have predictive markets — it’s a crazy world, it’s a much different world than it was.”

And yet, Trump and some of his family members stand to benefit financially from those very markets, according to The New York Times.

“The president’s publicly traded media company unveiled its own prediction market product last year,” the Times reports. “And the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has ties to two of the industry’s top firms, including Polymarket.”

READ MORE: ‘Now Do Hanging’ Republican Demands After DOJ Announces Firing Squads for Executions

Ethics experts the Times consulted say Trump’s public statements directly contradict his family’s financial interests in the industry.

Despite Trump’s admonition, new regulations are not expected. Last year, the Trump administration “backed away from enforcement efforts against Polymarket, and it is unclear whether regulators will adopt any new oversight measures.”

The Times reports that the White House “has warned staff not to wager on government decisions, but his family’s involvement with these firms undermines the president’s message.”

U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) who is sponsoring legislation to ban government officials from betting on prediction markets using classified information, has raised concerns about national security risks. Chances that the bill would pass through a GOP-majority Congress are uncertain.

“It’s too politically dicey,” she said. “There is not a single important issue of the day where I don’t feel the shadow of Trump and his sons.”

READ MORE: Trump Believes He’s a ‘Savior’ Sent by God and Will Never Cede Power: Stoddard

 

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‘Now Do Hanging’ Republican Demands After DOJ Announces Firing Squads for Executions

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A Republican member of Congress is calling for death row prisoners to be hanged after the U.S. Department of Justice announced it will move to expedite death row executions, including — for the first time in federal civilian history — by adding firing squads. The DOJ also said it will readopt lethal injections.

Declaring that it has a “solemn duty to seek, obtain, and implement lawful capital sentences,” the DOJ said in a statement that it will work to clear the way for the Department to “carry out executions once death-sentenced inmates have exhausted their appeals.”

The Department called the executions critical steps “to deterring the most barbaric crimes, delivering justice for victims, and providing long-overdue closure to surviving loved ones.”

The DOJ said it “has rescinded the Biden-Garland moratorium on federal executions and has authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.”

Before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life in prison.

READ MORE: Trump Believes He’s a ‘Savior’ Sent by God and Will Never Cede Power: Stoddard

“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”

“Now do hanging,” demanded U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee.

Burchett last year suggested that House Republicans might offer convicted sex trafficker and Epstein partner Ghislaine Maxwell the possibility of a reduced sentence in exchange for her testimony.

In 2023, after the mass shooting deaths of three nine-year-olds and three adults at a Nashville Christian elementary school, Burchett told reporters nothing could be done.

“We’re not gonna fix it. Criminals are going to be criminals,” he told reporters.

READ MORE: Trump Found His New Favorite Reason to Void 2020

 

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Trump Believes He’s a ‘Savior’ Sent by God and Will Never Cede Power: Stoddard

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President Donald Trump has little intention of leaving the White House says veteran political analyst A.B. Stoddard, arguing that he believes he is a “savior” and will either try to find some way to run for another term, cancel the election, or do something else radical.

“I don’t think he has any intention of leaving,” Stoddard told columnist Bill Kristol.

She believes there are “two paths” for Trump.

“He does not want to fall apart in public,” Stoddard said, adding that he will be forced to “make a calculation at some point.”

Asking if Trump can “serve and walk across stages, make speeches, be as visible as he wants to be, which he really needs?” she noted that the president “needs to be on camera as many days a week as he can.”

“I think he will make the calculation that he cannot run again if he’s feeling that he’s aging too quickly” for another term, she said.

READ MORE: ‘What Evil Looks Like’: Columnist Says Trump Presides Over a ‘Circus of Death and Chaos’

“He has no intention, I believe, of having any kind of successor that’s not in his family. So he’s either going to find a way to try to run for [another] term, or cancel the election, or do something very radical,” which is “not beyond him,” she said.

Stoddard says she could see Trump trying to pass his presidency off to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his son, Donald Trump Jr. or his daughter, Ivanka Trump — but not Eric Trump. And he’s not going to walk away from the money he is making now — the most he’s ever made in his life.

It’s “absolute lunacy” to think that he is going to walk away from “the two things that soothe his demons,” which are “adulation and money.”

“I genuinely believe, Bill, that he believes that he is some kind of, you know, savior,” Stoddard declared.

“I mean, it’s always about how he was brought here by God,” she continued. “I don’t know that he has [the] specifics down, but he certainly believes he is special, and he craves that, that central, you know, all the attention has to be on him.”

She also said that had Trump lost the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton and never been president, he would have “just sat on Fox three days a week, just bashing her.”

She concluded that she cannot see Trump just going off “like an old man into the sunset.”

READ MORE: Pope Leo: Church Should Focus More on Justice and Less on Same-Sex Blessings

 

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