Tucker Carlson has returned from the vacation he took right after horrifying decent people with his claim that white supremacy is a “hoax” but the advertisers he lost did not return with him.

You may recall that Carlson called white supremacy a “hoax” and “actually not a real problem in America” three days after the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas by a guy who quacked an awful lot like a white supremacist.

According to Media Matters, the Tucker Carlson Tonight Show lost at least five advertisers — HelloFresh, Nestle, SteinMart, Calm and SoFi — while Carlson was gone and “many more have quietly distanced themselves.” Long John Silver’s was reportedly “so frustrated that it removed its ads from the network entirely.”

But as The New York Times noted, this was just the latest wave of advertiser flight:

The first wave of desertions came in December, when dozens of companies, including IHOP, Ancestry.com and TD Ameritrade, said they would stop advertising on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after he said that the arrival of certain immigrants “makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.”

More companies removed their ads from the show in March, when Media Matters for America, a liberal advocacy group, published years-old excerpts from the “Bubba the Love Sponge” shock-jock radio show featuring Mr. Carlson making offensive comments about women.

Although Carlson’s show remains popular, advertisers remain spooked. More from The Times:

A total of 218 companies had commercials during episodes of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” during last year’s second quarter, a group that included Liberty Mutual, Capital One and Subaru, according to the ad-tracking firm Kantar Media. For the same time period this year, the number of companies whose ads ran during the show was down to 107. The average amount of paid commercial time during episodes of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has also declined.

But while I am certainly not sorry to see Carlson’s poison contaminate Fox’s bottom line, I remain skeptical about the overall usefulness of advertiser boycotts. For one thing, The Times notes that many of the companies that fled Carlson have “stuck with the network,” meaning they have merely moved their purchases to other shows.

More importantly, there is a good chance the advertisers will not be gone for good. Last year, you probably recall Fox’s Ingraham Angle lost advertisers after host Laura Ingraham mocked Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg. “Since then, the percentage of advertising revenue from her show has increased,” The Times reported.

(Carlson image via screen grab)