Fox News host Tucker Carlson has produced yet another contentious monologue, alleging Tuesday that white supremacy is not a threat to America and the real risk of national destruction stems from cat cafes and The Atlantic magazine. The conservative commentator’s claim that the domestic terror threat was a lie prompted a scathing response from an old friend and new target: Atlantic staff writer David Frum.

Carlson sparked the backlash while traveling his well-worn path of attacking a vague class of elites.

“In real life, they understand perfectly well what actually threatens America. They’ve seen it up close: It’s the culture that produced them,” Tucker said. "It’s the decadent rich people from their class at Harvard. It’s the gender studies department at Cornell. It’s the cat cafes in Austin and Ashville.”

His next section, however, set its sights on a target that was willing to fight back.

“It’s the Monday editorial meetings at The Atlantic magazine, where David Frum is treated like an important intellectual rather than some dopey middle-aged Canadian Twitter celebrity whose life goal is to force Americans into yet another unwinnable pointless war,” Carlson said.

The allegation that Frum was among “the people who actually detest the county, the ones working through the night to destroy it” sparked a 10-tweet-long response from Frum.

It pointed out that Carlson had supported both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, employing racialized language by calling Iraqis “semi-literate primitive monkeys” according to radio recordings unearthed by Media Matters.

While Frum was sympathetic to the idea that people could change their opinions over time, he said that Carlson simply lacked ideals altogether, parroting whatever position media mogul Rupert Murdoch requires.

Carlson’s racial rhetoric has earned increased attention lately, with a segment airing on his show pushing the racist and factually dubious “great replacement” theory imported wholesale from white supremacist propaganda.

Carlson, 51, has increasingly made traditionalist figures on the right the target of his attacks, consolidating the hold of the alt-right as senior party members face the choice of either bowing to Donald Trump’s platform or stepping aside altogether.

Social media has gone on the attack against Carlson in 2021. In late April, his college yearbook at Trinity College sparked controversy. It showed that he was part of the “Dan White Society,” presumably referring to the man convicted of manslaughter in the killings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California.

On Wednesday, a video from 2004 resurfaced on Twitter of Carlson's butting heads with former "Daily Show" anchor Jon Stewart. In mid-March, comedian John Oliver devoted an entire segment on Tucker that generated over 10 million views on YouTube from his HBO show, "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver."

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