Meet the Gay Man Fueling Tucker Carlson's Anti-LGBTQ+ Program
A gay man is one of the forces behind Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson and his poisonous anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.Justin 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,” Michelangelo Signorile wrote this week in his Substack column, The Signorile Report. “Wells is Senior Executive Producer of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ and also holds the title of Vice President of Tucker Carlson Digital Products.”Wells has been with Fox News for 14 years.
He was field producer on Greta Van Susteren’s On the Record from 2008 until 2016, then was the inaugural executive producer on Tucker Carlson Tonight when it started in 2016.
He was promoted to senior executive producer in 2018. He is one of the most powerful producers at Fox News, former colleagues told Signorile.Carlson’s show has a well-documented history of homophobia and transphobia as well as racism and sexism.
Signorile provided a few recent examples. On his first show after the November 19 mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Carlson offered “a perfunctory condemnation of the violence,” then went back to some of his usual tropes, condemning drag queen story hours and alleging that transgender minors undergo “genital mutilation,” which is inaccurate as genital surgery is almost never performed on minors.The next night, he hosted Jaimee Mitchell of Gays Against Groomers, who blamed the victims for the Club Q shooting.
