The Amoralists'; Tucker Carlson, Part Four; Huckster

 

As TV talking heads go, Tucker Carlson was, even before the Media Matters recordings aired, less a respectable polemicist than an exhausting archetype. His persona has long been the “debate guy.” You know the one: He’s the dude in college who liked to play devil’s advocate by defending unpopular or terrible ideas on the grounds that real philosophical inquiry demands it. But it’s actually a game to be won to him, and he takes obvious pleasure—even pride—in keeping a cool head while watching people with genuine investments get “irrationally” worked up. And he acted the part. Most of Carlson’s signature moves—the blinky open-mouthed listening, his gently patronizing “now hold on,” the chuckles at his guests’ frustration when he interrupts, the borrowed dignity with which he furrows his brows—are gestural shortcuts for reasonableness. And they’re part of a Carlsonian tool set that’s frankly pretty derivative: Carlson yells like a younger Bill O’Reilly and spars like a slower Jon Stewart, all while carefully insisting he’s “not defending” everything from Trump to Christopher Columbus to the Daily Stormer.

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The “debate-guy” persona is a fraud, but Carlson’s strategy of projecting it has mostly worked. At the heart of his success is a strategic refusal to commit to any one identity, even within the same show. He bills himself as the devil’s advocate, the just-for-the-sake-of-argument dude with no real investment in an argument’s outcome. At other times he acts like a moralizing truth teller. These identities should theoretically be at odds. That they aren’t, and that both are in any case obviously fictions, has not seemed to matter to his viewers. How did the guy who called Elena Kagan ugly and child rape a “lifestyle” successfully bill himself a defender of American families? Why has this shabby schtick worked?

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… His modus operandi is to inflame his viewers to howling heights of anger while excoriating sincerity of any kind as “preening” and insisting that nothing he says really matters. “There’s this illusion, and it’s created by the people who live here, that everything is meaningful, everything important,” Carlson told GQ. “It’s not.” This is less a humble admission of irrelevance than a deflection of responsibility, and it’s a strategy he shares with much of the far right, which has spent the past two years insisting that the things the president says and tweets don’t actually matter (except, of course, when they do).

But Carlson does have one unique gift, and it’s the remarkable sleight of hand with which he transitions from a sputtering Daffy to a rascally Bugs without letting his viewers notice the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. His sincerity (like his outrage) is a game, so he whizzes from one affect to another, and the effect is confusing enough that viewers start to see actual hate speech as coextensive with dickish jokes. So what if he says immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier.” So what if he called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” years ago—or alluded two months ago to “some obscure Middle Eastern hellhole our leaders claim we should be policing forever.” ...

Carlson is basically a rich huckster, and America loves few things more than the jolly rule bender who winks while he cheats. This figure is all over the place in American culture, from Frank Abagnale to Saul Goodman to crooked televangelists to, of course, our current president—talking people into bad decisions via confusion and charisma, bombast and speed. The huckster can turn on a dime to be surprising, funny, aggressive, demanding. He’ll tap into wells of fear and fellow feeling, find a way to earn your trust, make you feel he’s on your side, and then the con is on. Now that he’s facing criticism and losing advertisers, Carlson issued a statement: “We will never bow to the leftist mob’s attempts to silence us,” he said, the millionaire posing as an embattled Everyman. Only a practiced grifter could capably reframe his real selfish and grasping message—“my problems are yours”—into a martyr’s “your problems are mine.”

For many media types, the conventional-wisdom read on Carlson has long been that he was once a good reporter, has an interesting mind and a knack for performance, and might not actually believe what he says. The bigotry and fear mongering could just be a spectacle for ratings. After all, this is a guy who, in 2009, urged conservatives to be more careful with facts and suggested that the right-wing media should aspire to the standards of the New York Times. That this has earned him some plausible deniability—causing many to regard him more as a polemical clown whose actual ideology is hard to divine rather than a bona fide white supremacist—is a testament to just how available this grift has historically been to men predisposed to exploit it (Loofbourow 1-3).

What He’s Said

[April 2019] Tucker said Wednesday the Democratic Party’s “love” of abortion is to ensure that “women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers.”

The Fox News host … turned up his rhetoric against abortion-rights supporters as he commented on Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams’ remarks about abortion and women in the workplace.

“This is about business, it’s about making sure that women can be obedient workers, rather than harried mothers,” … (Dicker 1).

On Jan. 2, [2019] a searing Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News resonated across every corner of the conservative movement.

“The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity,” Carlson told his audience. “Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people.”

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“Our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.”

Carlson, who is in a ratings race with both his Fox colleague Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, argued that many conservatives have scant understanding of the adversity faced by members of the working and lower middle class in America:

“The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy. Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible.”

Carlson pointed specifically to problems faced by rural white America, the crucial base of Republican voters: “Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic.” How, Carlson asked, “did this happen?”

“You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they’re not. They don’t have to be interested. It’s easier to import foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping behind.”

Despite this failing of conservatism, Carlson contended that only the Republican Party can lead the country back to salvation:

“There’s no option at this point. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” (Edsall 1-2).

[ September 2020] Fox News host Tucker Carlson equates climate change to racism saying only liberals believe they exist.

On Friday, while anchoring a segment on the wildfires affecting the West Coast, Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed Democratic politicians for turning the massive devastation into a political opportunity.

“Climate change they said caused these fires, they didn’t explain how exactly that happened… but they just kept saying it,” the host said during Tucker Carlson Tonight.

“At the hands of Democratic politicians climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can’t see it but rest assured it’s everywhere and it’s deadly and like systemic racism, it’s your fault.”

He continued, saying “The American middle class did it. They caused climate change. They ate too many hamburgers. They drove too many SUVs. They had too many children” (Dibia 1).

[October 2021] In a week in which he broadcast nightly from Budapest, the American talk show host Tucker Carlson posed for pictures with and interviewed Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and took a helicopter to inspect a Hungarian border fence designed to keep out migrants.

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For Mr. Carlson, the Hungary trip was an opportunity to put Mr. Orban, whom he admires, on the map for his viewers back home, a conservative audience that may be open to the sort of illiberalism promoted by the Hungarian leader. On Wednesday’s show, Mr. Carlson praised Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”

Mr. Carlson’s Fox News program espouses some hard-right views, especially on immigration, where he and Mr. Orban share common ground. The host has held up Hungary’s hard-line policy on rejecting asylum seekers as a model for an American immigration system that he believes is too lenient and has weakened the power of native-born citizens, an argument that Mr. Carlson’s critics say overlaps with white supremacist ideology (Novak and Grynbaum 1).

[January 2022] The film opens with soaring music, footage of white children laughing and playing, beautiful vistas of classical European architecture. Fifteen seconds in, the music turns dark. We see images of dark-skinned youth, chaos, and blood. Then there’s a foreboding black-and-white shot of a man in profile, hunched at a desk, the curvature of his nose prominent in silhouette.

He’s the one responsible for all of this, the brown assault on white tranquility. Europe, we are told, is this predator’s “main hunting area.”

This is the beginning of Tucker Carlson’s new “documentary” for Fox Nation, the right-wing media giant’s streaming service. It is titled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, and it purports to tell the story of how a plucky little democracy in Central Europe has carved out a conservative model in the face of a relentless assault by the forces of global liberalism personified by George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier.

The story is a lie. Hungary is nominally a democracy but it has made a turn toward authoritarianism in the last decade; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has painted Soros as a scapegoat whose allegedly nefarious influence justifies Orbán’s anti-democratic moves. The documentary amplifies this propaganda, treating the Jewish philanthropist as the spider at the center of a global web of conspiracy.

“It’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson & Fox invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media,” writes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (an anti-hate group). “There’s no excuse for this kind of fearmongering, especially in light of intensifying anti-Semitism.”

Neither anti-immigrant demagoguery nor whitewashing Hungary’s descent into autocracy is new for Carlson. What’s striking about the report — part of a series dubbed “Tucker Carlson Originals” — is how it uses conspiratorial, bigoted ideas previously consigned to the far-right fringe to make the explicit case that the American government should emulate an authoritarian regime.

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“In 2015, Soros got to play a role in transforming the continent of Europe,” Carlson intones. “Soros lobbied European leaders directly to get them to open their borders to impoverished people from around the world, and they did.” He points to “leaked documents” showing a $600,000 investment in pro-refugee public advocacy by an unspecified Soros-backed organization as evidence. (It is evidence — that Soros invests in pro-refugee public advocacy.)

It’s the imagery that gives away the game. Soros, shown repeatedly in stark black-and-white, is painted as that most hoary of villains — the Jewish financier pulling the strings attached to the world’s leaders.

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But one thing we keep learning and re-learning about America is that there is a real constituency for this sort of thing. And that is something worth worrying about (Beauchamp 1-3, 7).

Fox News host Tucker Carlson celebrated the firing of hawkish White House national security advisor John Bolton on his show Tuesday night, having reportedly urged the president to remove him.

Carlson hailed the firing as "great news for America."

"Especially for the large number of young people who would have been killed in pointless wars if Bolton had stayed on the job," he said.

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During his show, Carlson went on to attack the hawkish former adviser, who served in the administrations of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush, calling him "a man of the left."

"If you're wondering why so many progressives are mourning Bolton's firing tonight, it's because Bolton himself fundamentally was a man of the left," said Carlson.

"There was not a human problem John Bolton wasn't totally convinced could be solved with the brute force of government. That's an assumption of the left, not the right.

"Don't let the mustache fool you. John Bolton was one of the most progressive people in the Trump administration."

He went on to accuse Bolton of promoting "Obama loyalists" within the National Security Council (Porter 1-2).

In addition to being a critic of GOP hawkishness, [July 2017] Carlson is also an apologist for Donald Trump on the Russia scandal. On Tuesday, before his showdown [interview] with Ralph Peters, he called the furor over Donald Trump Jr.’s willingness to accept anti-Clinton information from the Russian government a “new level of hysteria.” Trump Jr., he insisted, had merely been “gossiping with foreigners.” If that “now qualifies as treason … you ought to think about that before you allow an exchange student to live in your house.”

Carlson’s attempts to dismiss the Trump-Russia scandal aren’t just absurd. (Helping a foreign government subvert an American election isn’t merely “gossiping with foreigners.”) They also undermine his perspective on foreign policy. In his interview with Peters, Carlson said it’s “hard to see why” Putin is “a threat to us.” He told [Max] Boot that “the idea that Russia is in the top five” threats to America “is absurd.”

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When it comes to Russia, America’s overriding interest lies in ensuring that Putin doesn’t threaten our democracy. By comparison, Syria is an afterthought. Carlson’s argument about the need for priorities is important. But his defense of Trump wildly distorts his understanding of what those priorities should be. The number one goal in American foreign policy today should be to deter Russia from attacking America’s next election. …

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Tucker Carlson can be a provocative, necessary voice on foreign policy. Or he can be an apologist for Donald Trump. He can’t be both (Beinart 1-2).

[January 2022] Republicans running in high-profile primary races aren't racing to defend Ukraine against a possible Russian invasion. They're settling on a different line of attack: Blame Biden, not Putin.

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Carlson has had a profound effect on how Republican candidates talk about the Russia-Ukraine issue, according to GOP operatives working on primary races.

GOP offices have been fielding numerous calls from voters echoing arguments they heard on Carlson's 8 p.m. ET show. Carlson has been telling his viewers there is no reason why the U.S. should help Ukraine fight Russia.

Even Democratic offices have been fielding these calls from Carlson's viewers. Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) tweeted that he got "calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we're not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia's 'reasonable' positions."

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Carlson has noticed the changes in how Republicans talk about Russia specifically and foreign intervention in general, but he thinks the party isn't changing fast enough.

"I just want to go on the record and say I could care less if they call me a pawn of Putin," Carlson told Axios. "It's too stupid. I don't speak Russian. I've never been to Russia. I'm not that interested in Russia. All I care about is the fortunes of the United States because I have four children who live here."

"I really hope that Republican primary voters are ruthless about this," Carlson told Axios, and vote out any Republican "who believes Ukraine's borders are more important than our borders" (Swan and Solender 1-3).

Works cited:

Beauchamp, Zack. “Why Tucker Carlson’s Special on Hungary and Soros Matters.” Vox, January 29, 2022. Net. https://www.vox.com/22904444/tucker-carlson-hungary-soros-fox-nation-documentary-special

Beinart, Peter. “Tucker Carlson Is Doing Something Extraordinary.” The Atlantic, July 13, 2017. Net. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/tucker-carlson-is-doing-something-extraordinary/533586/

Dibia, Emeka. “Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Says Only Liberals Believe Climate Change and Systemic Racism Are Real.” Yahoo, September 13, 2020. Net. https://www.yahoo.com/now/fox-news-host-tucker-carlson-221000211.html

Dicker, Ron. “Tucker Carlson: Abortion Ensures 'Women Can Be Obedient Workers'.” Huff Post, April 18, 2019. Net. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucker-carlson-abortion_n_5cb83f39e4b096f7d2dc6f43

Edsall, Thomas B. “What Does Tucker Carlson Know That the Republican Party Doesn’t?” New York Times, February 6, 2019. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/tucker-carlson-republicans-democrats.html

Loofbourow, Lili. “Tucker Carlson and the ‘Debate Guy’ Racket.” Slate, March 22, 2009. Net. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/tucker-carlson-comments-debate-outrage-fox-news.html

Novak, Benjamin and Grynbaum, Michael M. “Conservative Fellow Travelers: Tucker Carlson Drops In on Viktor Orban.” New York Times, updated October 4, 2021. Net. https://ghostarchive.org/archive/74UNj

Porter, Tom. “ Tucker Carlson Took a Victory Lap over John Bolton's Ousting, after Reports He Lobbied Trump To Fire Him.” Business Insider, September 11, 2009. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-hails-trump-john-bolton-firing-great-for-america-2019-9

Swan, Jonathan and Solender, Andrew. “Tucker Carlson-Fueled Republicans Drop Tough-On-Russia Stance.” Axios, January 27, 2022. Net. https://www.axios.com/tucker-carlson-fueled-republicans-drop-tough-on-russia-stance-7311d46f-49fc-47b5-af46-f365c4e7809d.html

The Amoralists; Tucker Carlson, Part Three; Trump

Tucker Carlson will take over for Megyn Kelly on Fox News next week, the network announced Thursday [January 5, 2017].

Carlson, a conservative commentator and founder of The Daily Caller web site, is well-known to Fox fans. His two-month-old show "Tucker Carlson Tonight," an out-of-the-box ratings success at 7 p.m., will move to the 9 p.m. hour.

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Ever since the show debuted on November 14, Carlson has shown a knack for selecting topics of interest to conservative viewers; hosting fiery debates with liberals; and criticizing Fox's rivals in the mainstream media.

At the end of every show, Carlson says his broadcast is "the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink."

Many of his segments and fights have gone viral. A sampling of recent headlines from the show: "How liberals are slowly killing colleges," "Journalists exposed by WikiLeaks to cover Trump White House," and "Tucker vs. student who says Trump shouldn't be given chance."

[Roger] Murdoch said in a statement that "Tucker has taken cable news by storm with his spirited interviews and consistently strong performance."

Donald Trump's election has contributed to a ratings surge at Fox News, and Carlson has been able to capitalize on it. At 7 p.m., he has averaged about 2.8 million viewers, and more than 500,000 in the advertiser-friendly 25- to 54-year-old demographic.

Unlike Fox's 8 p.m. host Bill O'Reilly and 10 p.m. host Sean Hannity, Carlson does not have a friendly relationship with Trump dating back decades. He said in a January 2016 column that "Trump might not be my first choice for president."

But he is open-minded about Trump and doesn't have the antagonistic relationship that Kelly had with him.

Online comments and emails to Fox showed that some Fox loyalists turned against Kelly after Trump publicly ridiculed her in late 2015 and early 2016. Kelly's ratings remained high, but the anger was palpable (Stelter 1).

He may have played it safe on Dancing with the Stars, going with a classic “cha-cha” routine, but when he’s behind the desk with a camera in his face, he goes much harder, saying things that have white supremacists cheering him on.

“How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national model, please be specific as you explain it,” said Carlson. “Can you think, for example, if other institutions, such as marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are. Do you get along better with your neighbors or coworkers if you can’t understand each other? Or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.”

Among the 91% white audience tuning in to Fox, a few stand out—as a Vox explainer first noted. First, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke. He’s tweeted his support for Carlson numerous times. Duke’s called Carlson a “hero” for exposing white ethnic cleansing, and he even has a nickname for his favorite host: Tucker ‘Knows’ Carlson.

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With viewership like that, it’s not surprising that the president also tunes in. A source close to Trump said, “They aren’t personally close. He’s not getting strategic advice from him directly the way he might from a Hannity. But they do chat on occasion, mostly Trump complimenting a segment here and there. He definitely likes him, and…it’s not unusual for him to be exposed to issues through Tucker’s show and others.”

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In 2016 Carlson wrote, “About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair, I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day saying, “It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy than you do.’” The future president hung up.

Carlson has since argued this assumption.

Interviewer: “How many women have you had sex with in your life?”
Carlson: “A lot. Hundreds… It was a short window, but I packed it full… Carpet bombed” (Levine 1).

He’s one of Donald Trump’s most vociferous backers. But Tucker Carlson has told multiple people that he voted for pop star Kanye West last year instead.

Shortly after the presidential election, the Fox News host started telling some program guests that he had cast his ballot for West, according to two people familiar with those conversations. Given Carlson’s fierce on-air commentary in favor of Trump, the guests were left wondering if Carlson was serious or merely joking.

“It’s his way of saying that he’s not just another Trumpette at Fox News like Sean Hannity,” one of the sources said, referring to Carlson’s fellow prime time opinion host and reputed internal rival.

Other Carlson associates said the affinity between the two men — one a longtime conservative commentator who once wore a bowtie and moved seamlessly within liberal political and media circles, the other an eccentric music celebrity whose tumultuous relationship with Kim Kardashian recently ended in divorce — is real.

Prior to the election, Carlson said he would vote for West, according to a third person who knows Carlson. “He and Kanye get along. They both regularly find themselves in the cross hairs. They’re both pro-life,” this associate said.

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An outspoken populist whose eponymous program has become the most popular show on cable news, Carlson won credit on the left for helping persuade Trump in early 2020 to not attack Iran. He’s also been critical of some of Trump’s policies, such as criminal justice reform. But his remarks on racial issues and immigration have earned him widespread condemnation by liberals who accuse Carlson of spreading toxic, divisive ideas (Lippman 1-2).

Fox News host Tucker Carlson called former President Donald Trump, then a real-estate mogul toying with a presidential bid, the "most repulsive person on the planet" and "so horrible" in a 1999 post on the website Slate.

Carlson, then an early-career conservative writer and commentator, made the judgment in an exchange with fellow Slate blogger, Evan Smith, who first labeled Trump a "repulsive" character.

"I'd love to add something even meaner to your description of Donald Trump — he's the sort of person I want to keep kicking once he's down–but I don't think I can," Carlson wrote in his exchange with Smith. "You've said it all: He is the single most repulsive person on the planet."

But Carlson acknowledged that Trump, who was considering a 2000 run as a Reform Party candidate, was more "interesting" than many others in politics.

"That said, I still plan to write about him some time. I don't think I'll be able to help it. Horrible as he is (or perhaps because he is so horrible), Trump is interesting, or at least more so than most candidates," he wrote, adding that the Trump and the Reform Party lacked any political "ideology" and were "just a bunch of wackos with a Web site and federal matching funds."

The Washington Post resurfaced Carlson's comments in an investigative piece published Wednesday exploring his history of pushing white grievance politics and opposing efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

Carlson, who later became a key Trump ally, couldn't have predicted in the 90s that his career as a right-wing TV personality would thrive under a Trump presidency. His Fox News primetime show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," debuted shortly after Trump's election in 2016 and has become the most-watched cable news show in the country.

A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment, but pointed Insider to a 2016 Politico column Carlson wrote in which he calls Trump "imperfect" and stops short of endorsing him for the GOP presidential nomination, while simultaneously lavishing praise on his populist politics (Relman 1-2).

Suddenly you’re digging him. At least a little bit. I know, I’ve seen the tweets, read the commentary, heard the chatter, detected the barely suppressed cheer: Hurrah for Tucker Carlson. If only we had more brave, principled Republicans like him.

Right out of the gate, he protested President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian military commander, noting that it didn’t square with the president’s determination not to get bogged down in the Middle East and warning of the possibility and horror of full-blown war. Your pulse quickened. You perked up.

He sounded that same alarm on his next show and the show after that. Every night at 8 p.m., he worried about the bellicose itch of our leaders. When all around him on Fox News were playing their usual roles (indeed, his usual role) as masseurs for the president’s tender ego, he administered slaps, hard ones, the kind that leave angry red handprints. Ouch — and don’t stop.

You rejoiced. It’s one thing when Democrats challenge what looks like a rush to war by a Republican president. It’s another when typically fawning members of his own party do.

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Carlson to the rescue!

Oh, please.

… In lieu of a normally functioning White House communications department or a press secretary who holds actual press briefings (what a thought!), we have “Fox & Friends” in the morning and Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s shows in the evening.

They don’t chronicle this presidency. They shape it, not just in terms of the volume of their applause for Trump, who craves the loudest possible clapping, but in terms of actual interactions. Carlson — like Hannity and another Fox fixture, Lou Dobbs — has in fact advised him behind the scenes.

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Carlson, mind you, has not disavowed Trump. In fact he performed semantic acrobatics to denounce America’s military maneuvers against Iran without precisely blaming Trump. Those slaps I mentioned landed more forcefully on the administration in general than on the man-child at its apex, who is, in Carlson’s tortured rendition, a gullible marionette, his strings pulled by inveterate, habitual warmongers. If these profiteering elites would just let Trump be Trump and train his wrath on Mexicans instead of Iranians, a great presidency would get its groove back.

During his Tuesday show, Carlson performed political jujitsu and held two of the president’s principal Democratic adversaries responsible for exacerbated tensions with Iran. Referring to the Washington establishment and singling out Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, he said, “These are people who have been basically advocating for a kind of war against Iran for an awfully long time.”

“It’s infuriating,” he added. “It’s because of Schumer and Pelosi and people like them that we got into Iraq in the first place.”

Come again? A Republican president, George W. Bush, urged and oversaw the invasion of Iraq, and while Schumer authorized it, Pelosi voted against it, as did many more Democrats than Republicans.

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Carlson remains true to Carlson: selective with facts, slanted with truths and — this is the most important part — committed to his vision of America as a land imperiled by nefarious Democrats and the dark-skinned invaders they would open the gates to if not for sentries like him and Trump.

… in the mind-set of Carlson and many of his fans on the far right, energy spent on missions in another hemisphere is energy not spent on our southern border. …

… Carlson asked his audience, “Why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our own country in favor of jumping into another quagmire?”

Carlson is defined not by a bold willingness to check Trump’s excesses or ugliest impulses but by his indulgence — no, his fervent encouragement — of those impulses as they pertain to racism and immigration. …

Carlson repeatedly uses variations of the word “invasion” to characterize migrants from Central America. He insists that “white supremacy is a fiction, a hoax. He has used language that buys into and promotes “replacement theory” — a far-right fixation on the idea that declining birthrates among whites will cause a nonwhite takeover — and recently castigated immigrants for litter along the Potomac River (Bruni “Tucker” 1-3).

… He’s the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott. Certainly not Ted Cruz.

Those other men are vying merely for Trump’s political mantle, with the occasional side trip to Cancún.

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Moving to fill the empty space created by Trump’s ejection from the White House, his banishment from social media and his petulant quasi-hibernation, Carlson is triggering the libs like Trump triggered the libs. He’s animating the pundits like Trump animated the pundits.

Case in point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.

“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse.”

What lunatic hyperbole. What ludicrous histrionics. And what timing. Carlson shares Trump’s knack for that — for figuring out precisely when, for maximum effect, to pour salt into a civic wound.

His free-the-children bunk played on the weariness of more than a year of coronavirus vigilance. It came just as Americans were puzzling over the need for masks once they’re vaccinated or when they’re outdoors. It was juiced by arguments about what degree of caution remains necessary and what’s just muscle memory or virtue signaling.

And it was helpfully succinct and tidily packaged so that other commentators could tee off on it. Carlson understands what Trump always has and what every practiced provocateur does: You don’t just give your detractors agita. You give them material. That way, everything you say has a lengthy half-life and durable shelf life.

Several shows on MSNBC covered Carlson’s rant. Several shows on CNN, too. “The View” waded in. So did Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. When you’re the subject of late-night comedians’ monologues, you’ve really made it.

Just two and a half weeks earlier, another of Carlson’s soliloquies — in which he peddled the far-right paranoia about a Democratic Party scheme to have dark-skinned invaders from developing countries supplant white Christian Americans — became its own news story, making him more of an actor in our national drama than a chronicler of it.

It was hardly his first lament about immigration, and he had dabbled in the “great replacement theory” before. But this time around it was more helpfully succinct, more tidily packaged, more honed. “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” he fumed. “I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.”

He made voters sound like Mazdas and America like a car lot.

…

To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host — ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow — and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.

…

… we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.

Trump’s dominance was so profound from early 2016 through early 2021 that there’s now something of an obsession with naming his successor, even though it’s not at all clear that he’s willing to be succeeded. All the men I mentioned earlier covet that crown. But not all of them fully understand that Trump’s métier wasn’t politics. It was performance.

Carlson gets that. If advancing arguments was his exclusive or primary goal, he wouldn’t allow for so much confusion regarding the flavor of his invective. But debates about whether he’s genuinely making points or disingenuously pressing buttons might well be a ratings boon. To keep people guessing is to keep people tuned in.

I’m not saying that he’s Trump’s doppelgänger. He’s neither orange nor ostentatious enough. He can be as verbally dexterous as Trump is oratorically incontinent, as brimming with information as Trump is barren of it. Carlson reminds you of a prep school debate team captain all puffed up at his lectern. Trump reminds you of a puffy reality-show ham — what he was before he rode that escalator downward, a harbinger of the country’s trajectory under him.

But both barge through the contradictions of being both populists and plutocrats. Both pretend to be bad boys while living like good old boys. Both market bullying as bravery.

…

Then came television and then high-decibel duels on television and then Trump, the shark to Carlson’s pilot fish. Carlson, who flattered him, got the time slot on Fox News that had belonged to Megyn Kelly, who feuded with Trump.

And now? The pilot fish has grown his own mighty jaws, and the ocean’s only a little bit safer (Bruni “New” 1-4).

Works cited:

Bruni, Frank. “The New Trump? Easy. It’s Tucker.” New York Times, May 1, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/opinion/sunday/tucker-carlson-trump.html

Bruni, Frank. “Tucker Carlson Is Not Your New Best Friend.” New York Times, January 11, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion/sunday/tucker-carlson.html

Levine, Samm. “WHO IS: Tucker Carlson?” nowthisnews.com, October 24, 2019. Net. https://nowthisnews.com/politics/who-is-tucker-carlson

Lippman, Daniel. “Tucker Carlson Told Associates He Voted for Kanye, Not Trump.” Politico, July 1, 2021. Net. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/01/tucker-carlson-kanye-west-2020-vote-497654

Relman, Eliza. “Tucker Carlson Called Trump 'the Single Most Repulsive Person on the Planet' and a 'Wacko' in 1999.” Business Insider, July 14, 2021. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-called-trump-the-most-repulsive-person-on-the-planet-in-1999-2021-7

Stelter, Brian. “Fox News Picks Tucker Carlson To Take Over for Megyn Kelly.” CNN, January 5, 2017. Net. https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/05/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-megyn-kelly/index.html