Tucker Carlson, wingnut chameleon
by digby
Aaron Rupar at Vox interviewed the researcher who uncovered all those gross Tucker Carlson quotes. This is someone whose job it is to watch Carlson both in the past and in his current incarnation and her view bears out my assessment that Carlson’s “ideology” is really just plain old right-wing white supremacy which he dresses up in whichever conservative cover story is in vogue at the time. And since his main affect is “snotty little twit”, he’s one of the right’s most adept practitioners of their adolescent obsession with “owning the libs.”
Aaron Rupar:
Some people have reacted to these clips by shifting part of the blame to MSNBC, because Tucker was obviously employed by them for most of these clips [Carlson joined Fox News in 2009]. Do you think that speaks to a different day and age? It’s hard to imagine prominent MSNBC hosts these days going on a radio show in Florida and staying stuff like this and getting away with it.
Do you have any thoughts on how that could have happened back then? Do you think it’s a bad look for MSNBC that they didn’t do something about this?
Madeline Peltz:
I don’t know what this says about MSNBC. I know that [from] what I’ve heard from the clips, he says in one of them, “I couldn’t have done this if I didn’t have an office.” He was like, “If I had a cubicle, I wouldn’t be able to appear on this show.” And so I think it was a fragmented audience, and I also think of course there’s not the same social media machine; the aggregation machine that would make this go viral really quickly in 2006. So I think that is a little bit different.
But I agree with what you said that if MSNBC or CNN had a similar situation when one of their top talents was uncovered defending child rape, it wouldn’t take long for them to be disciplined or fired. It just goes to show that Fox is trying to hold the line on this slug of liabilities that is their primetime talent.
And so if they were to discipline or fire Tucker, it would probably lead to a domino effect exposing the systemic rot at the core of the business model.< Aaron Rupar:
Obviously Tucker is on one of these tapes defending child rape. He makes some very racist comments about Iraqis.
Were any of these things he’s joking about or defending in these Bubba clips — are there any that seem hypocritical with the themes he promotes now on his show? Are there any major disconnects that you noticed between what he was saying then and what he’s saying now?
Madeline Peltz:
I think there’s two sides to this question. On the one hand, in these clips — 2006 to 2011, roughly — he says on the show that he’s this hardcore libertarian and he’s very anti-market intervention and very anti-regulation — you know, all your libertarian classic tropes. I think that at that time, that was the cutting edge of contrarian politics, if you think of the rise of Ron Paul and the sort of whirlwind around the ’08 campaign, which Tucker did talk about while he was on Bubba.
And now, what he’s saying on this program [today] is different in terms of, he’s raising these issues of changing racial demographics and saying that women in the workplace lead to higher drug use rates and suicide rates among men — he’s saying that immigrants make America poorer and dirtier.
These are all new talking points, but at the same time, he is just reflecting what is at the height of right-wing culture and politics at the time, which is an overt white nationalism and right-wing populism. [Carlson] knows what’s hot. But at the same time, a lot of his rhetorical turns of phrase and views that he expresses about women or immigrants or people of color are the exact same, in that he sees people who do not look or think like him as less than human.
Aaron Rupar:Was the right-wing populism part of his identity in the Bubba tapes that you listened to? That’s kind of what he’s known for these days. We did a Vox piece recently about his economic populism as a different idea for someone so prominent in that part of the right wing. Was that at all a strain of what he was saying [earlier]?
Madeline Peltz:
No, not at all. In fact, during many of the clips we produced — and I believe one that was put up by the Intercept recently — he jokes about being an elitist and being heir to this massive industrial fortune. So no, he was not pretending to be the man of people that he is today.
At the same time, his broader worldview is very much the same in terms of stoking hatred in this country; it’s just the sort of dressing around the edges has changed.
Aaron Rupar:
One thing that surprised me is how strong Tucker’s ratings are — he’s regularly crushing Chris Hayes and Anderson Cooper. As someone who watches his show a lot, what explains that? Why are his ratings so strong?
Madeline Peltz:
I think the top reason he has these high ratings is because he plays into this heightened sense of conflict where he’s trying to, quote, “own the libs” and get one over on his guest.
There’s a variety of ways that exact segment can play out. One way is he can have on one of the same people he has on every night, which include Chris Hahn or Richard Goodstein, where they have this same sort of playacting that they do every night.
Or once he had on someone from the party for socialism and liberation, and it was this older woman and she defended the North Korean nuclear regime — he’ll also sort of have these fringe people on, and that’s an example from the left, but that’s what I mean by this heightened sense of conflict.
He’ll also have Ralph Peters on from the right. So I really think it’s that — it’s this absolutely ridiculous image he projects that he’s uncompromised, very principled, and he will just debate you until you give in.
There’s only one of two ways a Tucker Carlson segment goes. One, as I described, is highly dramatized, conflict-driven argument where Tucker ends it by cutting off your mic. Or he has someone on like Glenn Greenwald or Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports, and it’s just like a lovefest, and they compliment each other until a good time is up. And you don’t learn anything from either of these types of segments. But I think it’s kind of like reality television.
I’ve just excerpted some of it. Click over to read the whole thing.
Tucker Carlson is, and always has been, a blight on our society. I’m sure he’ll survive this flap as he’s survived all the others. There is an audience in this country that can’t get enough of what he’s selling.
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