The top writer for Fox News host Tucker Carlson has for years been using a pseudonym to post bigoted remarks on an online forum that is a hotbed for racist, sexist, and other offensive content, CNN Business learned this week.
Just this week, the writer, Blake Neff, responded to a thread started by another user in 2018 with the subject line, "Would u let a JET BLACK congo [N-word] do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?" Neff wrote, "I wouldn't get LASIK from an Asian for free, so no." (The subject line was not censored on the forum.) On June 5, Neff wrote, "Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down." On June 24, Neff commented, "Honestly given how tired black people always claim to be, maybe the real crisis is their lack of sleep." On June 26, Neff wrote that the only people who care about changing the name of the NFL's Washington Redskins are "white libs and their university-'educated' pets."
And over the course of five years, Neff has maintained a lengthy thread in which he has derided a woman and posted information about her dating life that has invited other users to mock her and invade her privacy. There has at times also been overlap between some material he posted or saw on the forum and Carlson's show.
CNN Business contacted Neff for comment Thursday night. After he or someone acting on his behalf passed that email to Fox News spokespeople, a network spokesperson on Friday morning told CNN Business that Neff had resigned. A Fox News spokesperson said Carlson could not be reached for comment. Neff did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Neff worked at Fox News for nearly four years and was Carlson's top writer. Previously, he was a reporter at The Daily Caller, a conservative news outlet that Carlson co-founded. In a recent article in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Neff said, "Anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me." He also acknowledged the show's influence, telling the magazine, "We're very aware that we do have that power to sway the conversation, so we try to use it responsibly."
When asked in a 2018 appearance on Fox's "The Five" about the writing process for his show, Carlson said he spends hours working on scripts, but referred to Neff by name, saying he was a "wonderful writer" and acknowledging his assistance. And Carlson credited Neff in the acknowledgments of his book, "Ship of Fools," for providing research. In the acknowledgments, Carlson said that Neff and two others who helped with the book "work on and greatly improve our nightly show on Fox."
During the years that Neff wrote for him at Fox, Carlson has hosted one of the most influential shows on cable news. In the last quarter, Carlson had not only the highest-rated program in cable news, but the highest-rated show in the history of cable news. Carlson also counts President Trump among his most loyal viewers. On multiple occasions, the President has tweeted out videos of Carlson's program. Which is to say, the scripts that Neff likely helped write and shape were being shared by the President of the United States.
While working at Fox News, and while a reporter at The Daily Caller, Neff was a frequent poster on AutoAdmit. Also known as XOXOhth, it is a relatively unmoderated message board like 4chan aimed at lawyers and law school students in which racism and sexism run rampant. The board's vulgar content was previously the subject of much criticism, and two Yale students sued anonymous posters on the site in 2007 alleging they had defamed them and made threatening remarks. The Hartford Courant reported in 2009 that the lawsuit was quietly settled after some of the posters were identified. ... On the forum, Neff has also expressed bigoted views. In 2014, he joked about "foodie [homophobic slurs]." And in the same year, he started a thread titled, "Urban business idea: He Didn't Do Muffin!" He joked one item could be, "Sandra Bland's Sugar-free Shortbreads!" In August 2019, a user started a thread titled, "We should just buy Canada and kick the Canadians out." Neff commented, "Okay but what do we do with the millions of Chinese people."
More recently, in February 2020, Neff called Mormonism "an inherently cucky religion." On June 5, a user on the forum commented in a thread, "Didn't Michael Brown rob a store and attack a police officer? And wasn't [George Floyd] a piece of shit with a long criminal record? Jfc libs." Another person commented, "It doesn't matter to these people." Neff then replied, "It does. The violent criminals are even MORE heroic." On June 16, a user started a separate thread about a video showing a Black man assaulting an elderly white woman in New York. Neff commented on the thread, "And to think, if this guy got killed in some freak incident while being arrested, we'd have to endure at least three funerals in his honor."
On the Fourth of July, Neff started a thread in which he jokingly "rated" members of the community using images from a 1990s video game from the makers of "Oregon Trail" that was pulled from the market due to its racist depictions of slaves. In the game, users play as slaves trying to break free and escape north. Neff assigned users on the forum images from the game, many of which depicted Black slaves using racist stereotypes. For instance, Neff assigned one user an image of a slave catcher, to which the user replied "[thank you] massa Charles for dis."
On May 27, Neff wrote that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib known collectively as "The Squad" want to "MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES." Responding to a thread on June 27 about whether "whites fear what's going to happen to them in 10-20 yrs," Neff wrote that he has "no plans to stay" in the country "that long." In December 2019, he said that "once Democrats have the majorities to go full FUCK WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly." He argued at the time that there is a "large minority of whites who are fully supportive of a Fuck Whitey agenda" and that "there's a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin."