Out gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg isn’t really gay, according to anti-LGBTQ+ former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who is also expected to speak at this week’s Republican National Convention.

In a recent episode of Carlson’s show — hosted on X, the social media platform owned by transphobic right-wing billionaire Elon Musk — Carlson called Buttigieg “supposedly gay” and said that one of his show’s gay producers told him that Buttigieg “is not gay.” “Gays all keep close track of that stuff,” Carlson said, offering no real proof of his absurd claim. 

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“My producer goes, ‘It’s totally a pose. He was dating women just a few years ago. It’s totally fake. He’s not gay at all,’” Carlson said. He added that he once said this previously on the air and “people got all offended. I thought it was kind of hilarious.”

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Carlson has previously described Buttigieg as effeminate and told viewers that Buttigieg “breastfeeds” his adopted twin babies. Buttigieg responded by saying, “I guess he just doesn’t understand the concept of bottle-feeding.”

Carlson’s 1991 Trinity College yearbook lists him as a member of the “Dan White Society” and the “Jesse Helms Foundation.” White is the person who assassinated Harvey Milk, the groundbreaking out politician who urged gay people to “come out.” Helms, the late Republican senator from North Carolina, was notoriously racist and viciously anti-gay.

In 1990, Carlson wrote in his college newspaper that homosexuality was“unnatural and unhealthy.” In 2007, Carlson went on MSNBC Live to brag about the time he beat up a gay man in a bathroom.

In a 2020 slander case, Fox News’s lawyers said that Carlson is not a journalist and that his words should not be “taken by reasonable listeners as factual pronouncements.” He has also repeatedly pushed white supremacist talking points, and his comments have been re-broadcast in Russia to support the country’s anti-LGBTQ global aims.

In his 2023 book Network of Lies, journalist Brian Stelter said that Carlson was dismissed from Fox News in April of that year because “Carlson’s escalating toxicity, which included an undercurrent of white supremacy and a penchant for demeaning women and minorities, led Lachlan Murdoch, the then chief executive of Fox Corp, to [fire Carlson],” The Guardian reported. Carlson said he was let go for telling the truth too boldly on his Fox News show.

In a social media post noting Carlson’s departure from Fox, consumer rights watchdog Public Citizen President Robert Weissman called Carlson’s departure “flat-out great news,” writing, “Anything that reduces the reach of this purveyor [of] hate, racism, reaction, and authoritarianism is a positive step for America and the world.”