THE CARLSON BRAND:

A man who spent five months with Cantwell in the same unit in a medium-security prison in Marion, Illinois, said Cantwell was inspired and emboldened by the polarizing messages emanating from Fox News -- specifically Tucker Carlson. In a filing in the Charlottesville lawsuit, Cantwell specifically cites Carlson as someone with whom he shares many views.

Jarrett William Smith told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview that a group of white supremacists had banded together behind bars. They learned about what was happening outside the prison walls and the political messaging of the day from the far-right outlet.

After "the whites," as Smith called the group, finished their legal work for the day, the group would regularly go to a television room in the prison to watch Carlson's evening program.

Cantwell, Smith said, felt emboldened by the TV host's diatribes, and thought they echoed those he promoted and that helped fuel the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Those messages included ones about the "Great Replacement Theory," a white supremacist delusion based on the bogus assumption that Democrats and liberal progressives are working to replace white people of European descent with non-European immigrants.

Cantwell's affinity for Carlson is evident in a September 2019 filing in the Charlottesville case. In that document, Cantwell complains that the case "is motivated by a desire to silence not only me and my associates, but anyone who might dare to agree with us even on peripheral issues. This is evidenced by the President of the United States, and the 2nd most popular show in cable news (Tucker Carlson) being branded as 'White Nationalists' on account of sharing a small number of our views on the pressing issues of our time."

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