Once upon a time, Tucker Carlson was looked upon as a dweebish, if somewhat abhorrent, nerdy conservative type who resembled William F. Buckley, Jr. and wanted to follow in Buckley's footsteps. He came across as a fool. He came across as a spoiled rich kid. He came across as the sort of fellow who would have his butt kicked if he ever took a walk in New York's East Village. He did not come across as a white supremacist.
But once he failed to be the "conservative conscience" at CNN or MSNBC, he found himself at Fox News. And even though he could have played the role of Buckley wannabe with aplomb there and let Sean Hannity play the role of arrogant snot-nose (while Laura Ingraham played the role of the upper-middle-class neighborhood bitch who complains about the kids playing street hockey in front of her house), Carlson saw an opportunity for TV stardom by engaging in conspiracy theories, such as the idea that immigrants are coming to replace white people, or that wokeism is a form of mind control, or that January 6 was not an insurrection.
It turns out that a text he sent to someone at Fox on January 7, 2021 is the reason Fox fired him. Carlson texted that he was watching a bunch of insurrectionists ganging up on and jumping an Antifa protester and found himself loving it.
"Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable, obviously," he wrote. "It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn't good for me. I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?"
At first glance, Carlson sounds genuinely remorseful, and he probably was. But there are three obvious and obviously huge problems that make his remorse insincere at best, heinous at worst. First, he implied that a gang of toughs jumping a guy is not how white men fight but how men of color fight, and he believes white men are supposed to be superior to non-white men. Carlson obviously never walked along an active waterfront at night populated by drunken sailors. Second, Carlson admits he would still hate the Antifa protester personally if he knew him, but in fact, he doesn't know anything about him; this protester is just an anonymous person to him. Third, Carlson assumes that leftists - and, most likely, leftists of color in particular - are inferior to him because he believes all left-leaning people reduce their opponents to politics. It's as if he thinks his privileged upbringing makes him morally superior to this Antifa protester, yet Carlson is so elitist, he doesn't see how expecting black or brown men to fight like animals without rules makes him inferior to . . . well, anyone with a brain. Or a heart. Or courage. Carlson sounds like someone who needs to see the Wizard of Oz for all three of those things.
Carlson allowed himself to become a white supremacist as well as an arrogant elitist who believes his upbringing and his conservatism make himself morally superior to anyone else. His remorse didn't come from any sense of humanity. It came from his view of himself as an intellectually and morally superior person - with his intellect and his superiority he believed to be birthrights of his whiteness and maleness.
Although Carlson was eleven years old when the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back premiered, I doubt he saw it, as he obviously never learned the moral of that movie when he started out to pursue fame and fortune by indulging in his worst prejudices. And so, once he started down that dark path, forever did it dominate his destiny.
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