Tucker Carlson's Superiority Complex

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.    

Tuckered Out

Tucker Carlson, a stepson of the heir to the Swanson TV dinner fortune who appeals to the common man (common woman? highly implausible), will now get to live like the common man.  He just got fired from Fox News with no foreseeable job prospects in the future.  Which means he'll be filing for unemployment and  sustaining himself on TV dinners,  realizing how you can be fired without warning, just like many of his viewers who on a Friday worked at the steel mill or auto factory and was out of work by Monday. 

As Carlson has promoted the replacement theory of whites being replaced by people of color, it appears that this theory has come true in a way for himself.  Now he's the one due to be replaced in his time slot! 

Carlson, 53, was a key figure in spreading conspiracy theories that tarnished Fox News' already blemished reputation, and he's being forced out in the wake of the Dominion voting-machine suit.  In the investigation for the suit, Carlson was revealed to have said that what he said about the election being stolen was jive and professed to "hate" Donald Trump, which probably didn't sit well with Fox News viewers.  But his harassment of women on the set of his program - which has brought about a lawsuit from a former Fox News producer - and his attempts to have reporters fired for telling the truth about the big election lie likely didn't sit well with Rupert Murdoch, whose daughter Elisabeth likely has more smarts than her brother Lachlan and James put together.

Having already been on CNN and MSNBC, Carlson has no place to go except possibly for Newsmax (and maybe not even there, given the revelation of what he really thought ot Trump).  If he does move to a smaller right-wing channel, he'll have to take a big pay cut.  Or, he'll  disappear and be forgotten by historians of American media, just as Father Charles Coughlin and Walter Winchell were similarly forgotten.

Either way, Carlson's going to have to eat a lot of them TV dinners. 

Tucker and Suckers

Bowing to pressure from his far-right flank, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy turned over forty thousand hours of January 6 security tapes to Fox's Tucker Carlson, one of the very few media personalities to have been an employee at all three cable news channels.  Carlson wanted to prove that January 6 was a peaceful demonstration with a few bad apples that got all of the attention from the media, who in turn blew the January 6 riot out of proportion and claimed it was an "insurrection" rather than the peaceful protest that Carlson says it was.  

The footage showed that indeed, there were peaceful moments during the break-in of the protestors who tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden's win of the 2020 presidential election - demonstrators quietly milling about, police officers showing deference to the QAnon shaman character, and the like.  But, just as Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Peter Jackson proved with the film footage of the Beatles' Get Back sessions, you can construct two entirely different narratives from the same reality.  And the January 6 narrative Carlson presented was so obviously flawed, marshaling evidence selectively and out of context while glossing over the more unpleasant parts.  One clip apparently showed the late Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick walking through the Capitol Rotunda and apparently looking "healthy and vigorous" after having been attacked, which would suggested, as Carlson claimed, that Sicknick's death "was not the result of violence he suffered" at the Capitol. In fact, no one can tell if it the police officer in the video is Sicknick or not, and even if it is Sicknick after he's just been attacked, the effects of the attack may not have been immediate. Even victims of serious head injuries have a "lucid interval" before the effects of the injury manifest themselves. 

Needless to say, numerous members of Congress are furious at Carlson's claims that January 6 was no big deal, and many of them are Republicans.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said that Carlson depicted the riot "in a way completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol" described, referring to Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, while North Carolina Republican senator Thom Tillis called the Fox preseation BS.  Tillis was especially emphatic on Carlson's mischaracterization of the riot as a tourist outing.

What's more, in addition to the fact that Rupert Murdoch more or less agrees with folks like McConnell and Tillis, we now know, thanks to the ongoing court case from Dominion Voting Systems against Fox for defamation, that Carlson himself was sick and tired of having to lie for Donald Trump, adding that he hated him with a passion.

Don't expect any mea culpas from Fox "News," as most of their viewers wouldn't believe it anyway.  The truth is, Carlson will continue to keep lying to help Fox "News" remain America's most-watched news channel!

No evidence showing that January 6 was indeed an insurrection is going to sway Fox "News" viewers, just as no lack of evidence of an ancient Nephite civilization in the Americas can sway Mormons that their sacred book is a true historical record.  The Mormons are entitled to their religious beliefs, though, because unlike empirically verified events, religious beliefs rely on faith alone.      

Latter Days

At the annual Nuremberg rally - er, Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Trump revealed the Coming of the Apocalypse by declaring to be the "warrior, justice and retribution" of all those patriots and defenders of the state who have been sinned and libeled against by the radical left.

Also, at the same underattended conference, 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley, speaking to a bunch of empty chairs,  made a statement that was as well reported as the conference was attended.  She said that "wokeism" is a virus more deadly than a zoonotic virus of any pandemic.  This is going on while anti-abortion governors crack down on abortion pill distribution.  Walgreens has already decided not to offer abortion pills in at least twenty states. 

And though black women like April Ryan and Zerlina Maxwell say it's up to the sistas to save America, Fani Willis, the one sista who could actually do that by indicting Trump for illegal interference in the 2020 Georgia presidential electoral college vote, might not get that chance.  A bill quickly circulating through the Georgia state legislature will give the state government the authority to remove district attorneys like Willis for abuse of power, defined as "black women who investigate and obviously hate white men."  This racist bill will allow Trump to escape indictment in the one slam-dunk case against him, although he says he will continue running for President if he's indicted to fulfill his promise of destroying the bleeding-heart liberals who want to make us give up our American way of life.

This is happening as the Florida state legislature may consider a bill "canceling" the Florida Democratic Party for its support of racism . . . in the 1850s and 1860s - while Ron DeSantis continues to ban black history from being taught in schools . . . even in February. 

And in Tennessee, the governor has singed a bill outlawing drag shows, which will likely punish cable providers with fines and imprisonment for their corporate officers if they air "RuPaul's Drag Race" in the state.  (Yeah, and maybe they'll ban Hillary Clinton from visiting Tennessee for being a drag king - those pantsuits!)  The RuPaul program, a celebration of drag-queen culture, is a favorite of New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who, to the Make America Great Again crowd, is an obvious obstruction to their agenda, and she is clearly un-American for her solidarity with transsexuals and for her environmentalist agenda, and of course every true-red MAGA Republican knows what a threat to the Republic AOC and Jennifer Lopez are as Puerto Rican women for their solidarity with undocumented immigrants as well as J-Lo's anti-American, pro-migrant, indecent 2020 Super Bowl halftime show performance, the likes of which are likely to be banned in Tennessee if the Super Bowl is ever held in the state. 

I just have one question . . .

When did this country suddenly become Utah?

The last days are here.  Blow your trumpet (or your harmonica), son. 

Faux News

I suppose it makes sense that in a county where rap is accepted as music and in which comic-book movies are accepted as cinematic masterpieces,  the Fox News Channel would be accepted as a news channel.  In fact, the Republican-propaganda channel, despite having some excellent reporters like Jacqui Heinrich (more about whom soon), has so stained the word "news" that it's no wonder that MSNBC goes by now-meaningless initials and CNN, which used to stand for Cable News Network, doesn't stand for anything anymore.   

The extent to which Fox News is a propaganda machine centered on profit came to the fore in recent days when text messages between Fox executives and on-air hosts revealed that, despite telling viewers that the 2020 election was in fact stolen from Donald Trump and that Joe Biden's election to the Presidency was illegitimate, they never believed a word of it.  This revelations were made thanks to court filings from Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News for defamation of the voting-machine company's reputation for falsely implicating that it allowed the software in its voting machines to flip pro-Trump votes to Biden.  Text messages between Fox News bigwigs revealed that they thought that Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, Trump's two top point people on the election fraud charges, were blooming idiots and incredibly insane.

Rupert Murdoch and the unholy trinity of Fox News's prime-time op-ed lineup - Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson - at first resisted the urge to go along with Trump, but when it became apparent that Trump was encouraging his supporters to change the channel to Newsmax, which is more conservative than Fox in the same matter that the Omicron COVID strain is more dangerous than the original Wuhan strain, Murdoch & Co. went along with the lies in public.

Except for Fox News' actual reporters, who subscribed to the idea that, in journalism, facts matter.  Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich (below) fact-checked a Trump tweet asserting electoral fraud and tweeted herself that the Trump tweet itself was a fraud.  According to the briefs filed in the Dominion lawsuit, Tucker Carlson, already committed to the scam, blew a gasket.    

"Please get her fired. Seriously . . ..  What the fuck?" Carlson wrote in a text to Hannity and others, according to the filing. "I'm actually shocked. . ..  It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."

The fact that Carlson - at Fox News only because he'd already bombed out at CNN and MSNBC - was concerned about the company's stock price makes it clear once and for all that the channel is more interested in making money than in practicing honorable journalism.  Texts released due to the lawsuit show Fox News employees referring to their viewers as "good people," but they went ahead and spread the lies about the 2020 election to draw more eyeballs and, thus, more advertisers.And more money.   And the good people who trusted Fox News to tell them the truth believed the lies so much it led to an insurrection.  (For the record, Heinrich deleted her tweet before security could show her the door.)

The story of Fox News knowing that Trump's election-fraud claims were lies is getting reported throughout the media.  But one news outlet isn't reporting anything about it - no prizes for guessing which one.

Of course, even if Fox News viewers did learn about how much their favorite and most trusted news personalities lied to them, they would insist that the texts were taken out of context (meaning that viewers would have a pretext) and say that the private comments of Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson were exaggerated and slanted in a way to make them look bad.  I don't see how you could take such evidence of journalistic malfeasance and not make Fox News commentators look bad, but that's just the point.  Fox News viewers are so sure that their version of events is the truth that no amount of evidence to the contrary can persuade them otherwise.

Thus, while it may be so that Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch are the emperors who have no clothes, nudity has become quite acceptable among a large number of Americans.      

Idiot's Delight

I'm beginning to think that the COVID pandemic will never end in America.  Because we let too many people who know nothing about public health speak out on public health issues.

Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are the latest major impediments to progress toward getting out of COVID.  Rogan, a comedian best known to network-television viewers as the savant electrician in "NewsRadio," now has a podcast, while Carlson . . . er, you know about him.  Anyway, Rogan recently said on his podcast that anyone young person who's healthy, eats right, and works out shouldn't have to get a COVID vaccine.  Rogan - who was not the most entertaining cast member of "NewsRadio" - doesn't get it.  It doesn't matter how healthy you are; an airborne coronavirus can infect anyone.  Take it from someone who twice got the flu because he didn't get vaccinated.  The only different between that coronavirus that causes the flu and the SARS CoV-2 virus is that the flu virus is a lot less likely to kill you.  

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson said the most outrageous thing in his career since Friday.   He sais hat anyone who sees a child wearing a face covering (FC) ought to call the child abuse hotline and, I assume, have the parent arrested, because of the psychological damage the wearing an FC will cause for children that will last for the rest of their lives.  Look, I get it.  I don't like wearing an FC. I don't like looking at people wearing FCs.  I even listened to President Biden's address to Congress on the radio last night because everyone expect President Biden had to wear them and the thought of seeing that on TV made me queasy.  But we have to wear them until the pandemic ends - nay, we have to wear them to make it end - and there are three very good reasons why children should:

• Children can get COVID and spread it.  
• The British variant is now dominant and can kill any child that gets it.
• A first-grader in Minnesota died of COVID.

Not having to wear a face covering may spare psychological damage to a child for the rest of his or her life, but the kid isn't going to live very long.

As to the suggestion that warning an FC does cause psychological damage . . . well, my paternal grandfather was ten years old when the Spanish flu pandemic hit.  He grew up in Philadelphia, one of the worst-hit cities during the Spanish flu scare.  He must have had to wear a face covering.  He went on to study physics at the University of Pennsylvania, graduate in the upper half of his class, work for RCA designing television sets, and own and operate affordable-housing rental units.  Oh yeah, and in between, he sired seven children.  That's not the life of a psychologically damaged pandemic survivor.

What's really scary is that Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in America and Tucker Carlson is one of the most popular cable-news commentators in America.  They have influence.  Their "advice" can lead not only to an interminable pandemic but to more needless deaths.

I may be wrong about Carlson's remark being influential, as it's so ludicrous, even conservatives wouldn't take it seriously, but Rogan's take on vaccinations is much more serious because there's already vaccine hesitancy to deal with. So far, such hesitancy isn't having a negative impact on vaccinations.  Vaccines were being administered at about three million a day about a week ago; now it's 2.7 million people a day.  But that's still 2.7 million people more who've been vaccinated today than there were last week.  As long as the overall number of  vaccinated Americans keeps going up, there isn't a problem.

But when the daily vaccination rate plummets to 100,000 people a day, then we have a problem. And we'll know whom to thank for that.

Covidiots

 

Forty-seven percent of Trump supporters won't get the COVID vaccine, nor will forty-nine percent of male Republicans.

One in four members of Congress won't get the vaccine either.  Including U.S Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who said that since he had COVID, he has antibodies. Antibodies which, I'm sure will wear off by the time we may have a fourth wave, and then the noted white supremacist Johnson might get it again.

Tucker Carlson is calling the energy authorization of the vaccine a "guinea pig" experiment on Americans and is dissuading people from getting it - even though Trump and his wife did.

All of us are in danger from these folks who won't get a shot because, if they don't, the virus could spread and mutate into variants that could evade the vaccines available and force us to wait interminably for vaccines that will work against them.

And we'll have to walk around looking like bank robbers and ninja warriors longer than we should. 😠

Martin O'Malley Takes a Run To Fox . . .

. . . and hides himself away.

Martin O'Malley, the Democrat other Democrats love to ignore, has disappeared from MSNBC of late, but he's still on TV.  But it doesn't look the same . . . the way it did before.

That's because O'Malley has been going on Fox News.    

The would-be 46th U.S. President has been spending the last couple of weeks debating and defending his specialty topic, immigration, with the likes of Tucker Carlson, who rejected as stupid the idea that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were refugees on their flight to Egypt, and Martha MacCollum, who tried to inject the case of Kate Steinle (who was accidentally killed by an immigrant) into the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals issue. O'Malley is a skilled, knowledgeable politician who can give as good as he gets, but he's wasting his time trying to argue with preppie snobs like Carlson and bottle-blondes like MacCallum.  He'll get the TV exposure that MSNBC no longer seems to be giving him (did Phil Griffin tell his talent at MSNBC not to waste precious air time talking to him because he's yesterday's news?), but his argument will always be cast in a negative light by the conservative pundits over at Fox, and he won't win any converts; no one watches Fox News to get their minds changed by a former Democratic governor.

Okay, okay, okay, he thinks he's got a pretty good case.  But going on Fox News is out of place.  He looked all right before, trying to persuade fellow Democrats and fellow liberals to consider him for the Presidency, which, even for him, is definitely easier than trying to get Fox News's right-wing audience to agree with him.

I've heard it all before . . .

I hope O'Malley recognizes the folly of hanging out with Carlson and MacCallum and goes back to his place - MSNBC, where he can build himself support for 2020.  Because at Fox, they, they, they don't wanna know his name.

Even less so than the liberal pundits who made fun of him before.

Factored Out

We have O'Reilly on our radar.

Bill O'Reilly, the abrasive and rather nasty Fox News commentator, was forced off the conservative news channel when it turned out he had been accused of sexual harassment by seven women and that he and Fox had paid out more than $13 million to settle lawsuits from five of them. 

Among the more nauseating details of his harassment history . . . he called a black female intern "Hot Chocolate."

And of course, these allegations must be true, because why would Fox pay so much money to keep things nice and quiet?  

Liberals are applauding this move, as they should, and some of them think this marks the end of the dominance of right-wing news commentary, as O'Reilly's show "The O'Reilly Factor" was the highest-rated show on the highly-rated Fox News Channel.  Indeed, it's being called a turning point in how harassment is being dealt with.  Well, let me dispel all that by pointing out a couple of things . . .

Tucker Carlson replaced Bill O'Reilly is his old time slot and delivered ratings numbers just as high as Bill's.

O'Reilly is getting a golden parachute of $25 million - a payout almost twice that of the sum paid out to those previously mentioned five women.  When a black man like Bill Cosby sexually harasses - nay, rapes - women, he is deservedly made to pay for it.  O'Reilly should also be made to suffer, so why is getting twenty-five million bucks for bad behavior?

And if the popularity of right-wing commentary is fading, why is Sean Hannity - who makes O'Reilly look like Eric Sevareid  by comparison - still on the air?

O'Reilly's departure from the TV airwaves treated a symptom of the disease plaguing American civilization.  The disease itself goes merrily on.