Tuckered Out
Today Fox announced it has parted ways with American Freakshow barker and Fox “News” personality Tucker Carlson. Was he fired? The most-watched cable-man in the country didn’t seem to know he was leaving, signing off on Friday with a “see you Monday,” leading to reasonable speculation that he was sacked. Foxologists will have the inside scoop shortly.
While we wait for details, let’s recall this man’s role in making the Greatest American Political Freakshow Of All Time.
Carlson is the most successful of the progeny of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes, OGs who understood that no one ever went broke picking the scabs of American racism and sexism.
On the contrary, one could get very, very rich indeed.
Tucker Carlson was first enabled by CNN, which gave him and his bowtie kid conservatism a perch on its debate show, Crossfire in 1999.
Fox hired him ten years later. Enabled by Murdochs and advertisers, a caricature of frat-boy privilege in khakis and navy blazer, adept at twisting his baby face into grimaces of shared outrage, almost never called to account for anything, Tucker evolved from being a standard-issue misogynist DKE in a bowtie to a master of ceremonies of Freakshow politics, a FOX megastar white supremacist and misogynist.
There are so many egregious and disgusting aspects to the rise of Tucker and Tuckerism in the diseased American body politic. We don’t have world enough or time to address them all.
A few issues rise immediately to the top.
Tucker Carlson Tonight was the the highest-rated show in cable “news” in the country, with 3.5 million viewers, leading the network to beat CNN and MSNBC for years. His show consistently “delivered” hundreds of thousands of viewers in the 25-54 demographic group - “most valued by national advertisers” as Forbes put it, in a report on his stellar capacity for attracting eyeballs.
Where were the boycotts? The most successful effort came after the George Floyd protests, during which Tucker told his nearly all white audience “ This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives. Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.” Advertisers ran for the hills. But Fox didn’t blink, and eventually, the smell of money to be made brought enough back around.
Enabled by Trumpism and MAGA, Tucker tested the limits of what could be said about black people. He did his part to re-label decency and tolerance among the races as woke-ism. And for that he reeled in millions of resentful whites who, as when they watched Trump, shivered with joy while shrieking, “Can he really say that?”
I would argue that Tucker’s popularity with this crowd was further bolstered by rank sexism. As a caricature himself, he went after the low hanging fruit of the caricatured angry feminist which, like communism, has been a favored bogey trope since the 1950s.
“Who laughs less than feminists?” he brayed.
“To be a feminist, you could cut your hair really short. You have to really angry about something.”
“Most of the time you can beat a woman in an argument”
In what will go down as Tucker’s Fox grande finale, last week he aired his interview with Elon Musk.
Among the topics the two men boned - I mean bonded - over, was the problem with contraception as a barrier to the male prerogative to procreate and make more mini-Tuckers and mini-Musks.
Musk blamed “birth control, abortions, and whatnot” for the coming end of the world, Carlson egged him on noting that the “urge to have sex and to procreate” has been “subverted.” Musk complained that yeah, the ways women can avoid forced pregnancy and birth allow them to “still satisfy limbic instinct but not procreate.”
After AI, the E-man apparently sees The Pill as a challenge to the future of the entire human race.“We haven’t yet evolved to deal with that,” he said.
Having established himself as THE GREATEST racist, sexist broadcast impresario who wasn't Alex Jones, Tucker needed to fill his freakshows with Freaks. So, even though he didn’t like her, he hosted all the acolytes of Sydney Powell, the loony lawyer whose lies about voting machines led to the lawsuit that exposed Tucker’s hypocrisy and ultimately cost Fox $787.5 million.
Thanks to email discovery in that lawsuit, we know that Tucker believed loser Trump caused and could have stopped the January 6 insurrection.
But as his viewers chose denial, he followed the audience, not the news - going so far down the rabbit hole, that he became the chief purveyor of the notion that the Deep State, and not Proud Boys and middle class white people with money to fly to DC, actually fomented the attack on the Capitol.
But he was shameless long before the insurrection: he gave Kyle Rittenhouse, the 18-year-old who shot two men at a Wisconsin BLM protest, his first prime time interview, days after a Wisconsin jury acquitted him.
“What a sweet kid. I think that comes through loud and clear,” Carlson cooed to Fox News viewers during a break in the interview. “Imagine putting that kid in jail.”
First interview with Kyle Rittenhouse
Carlson gently bantered with the man-boy radicalized by MAGA media into believing he needed to buy an AR-15 and patrol Kenosha against black people.
“Did you know how dishonest media coverage of events could be?” Tucker asked. Kyle, in the very first round of his tour as a right wing media silo hero, averred that he had not understood the capacity for media lies before his ordeal, but that he sure did now.
Oh Tucker, so do we. Keep the khakis, the navy blazer and the smug, never-been-challenged smirk. It won’t be long before we see you bellowing from the dirty door of another Freakshow tent.