Tucker Carlson visits Alabama non-profit for the disabled, turns optimistic
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s optimism got a boost in Alabama this week. The recently fired TV personality admits he had a tendency to go negative on his former show.
Carlson said even his wife thinks he’s too negative.
“When I got canned the other day, my wife’s like, ‘It’s not all bad.’ I was pretty depressing. ‘He needs to do a good news show.’ That’s my wife’s view.”
Carlson said the main reason for his visit to Alabama on Thursday was to support an Alabama non-profit organization that provides housing and services to adults with developmental disabilities.
Carlson spoke for more than an hour to a sold-out crowd of 1,189 on Thursday night for the annual fundraiser for Rainbow Omega at the Oxford Performing Arts Center. The speech was booked last year, long before he was fired.
Earlier in the day on Thursday, he visited the Rainbow Omega campus, a residential facility in Eastaboga that houses up to 88 adults with developmental disabilities. It has a garden center, blueberry fields and a medical facility for developmentally disabled.
“I really in a sincere way, support what they do, which is helping people, not in an abstract way but in an actual way,” Carlson said.
“I went out to the campus today and was completely shocked by it,” he said. “It’s just stunning in its beauty and in the vibe you feel when you’re there.”
Carlson spoke for more than an hour Thursday night to help raise a large part of Rainbow Omega’s more than $8 million annual budget.
“It does not feel like an institution at all,” Carlson said of Rainbow Omega. “It feels like a little village in the middle of a park. It’s incredible. There are greenhouses and blueberries. I had no idea blueberries grew this far south. I thought they only grew in Maine. That’s not true.”
Carlson said he immediately thought it must have been founded by a wealthy philanthropist.
“This just shows you what a lifetime of living in the Northeast does to your brain: I said, ‘Who did this?’ I thought immediately, it was a local billionaire, some retail billionaire, who paid for this.”
Instead, he found out it was founded in 1990 by former missionaries, Stentson and Dianne Carpenter, who had a son, Christopher, with special needs.
“He was a preacher,” Carlson said. “Really? Where did all the money come from? Just people who wanted to help. They had a son with developmental disabilities and needed help and they wanted to help other people as they helped him. People just kind of stepped up and help them. That, actually, is the way things should work. I live in a world where everyone just kind of sits around and waits for Mark Zuckerberg to show up and write a check. It’s almost like a feudal arrangement, where if the feudal lord doesn’t fix it, it remains broken. To hear that there was a couple, living on a preacher’s salary, who had a problem and decided to solve it, and by solving it solve it for so many other families, and then they gave a lifetime commitment to those kids. How many lifetime commitments do you make? To your wife. That’s kind of it. To say to someone you’re not related to, ‘I’m signing up for life, your life, no matter how long you live, we’re here for the duration.’ Who does that? Let’s check. Nobody. But this preacher did that? With no money? And then people in the community stepped up because they so believed in it, to fix it. That’s the model, right there. That’s what it looks like to help people.”
Rainbow Omega, in the mountains of northeast Alabama, took Carlson for a ride on the high road.
“Why is that so important?” Carlson said. “It’s important because helping people is the core mission of life for all of us… But it’s the opposite of what you see in the rest of the country. I hate to say that, and I don’t want to be depressing and I won’t be. I’m not going to go on some Jeremiad about how things are bad. I think you may have heard that already.”
See also: Tucker Carlson jokes about being jobless to Alabama audience