That’s their new line. Rightwing, celebrity, superstars are attacking the “well-heeled” powerful forces who hate freedom:
Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Friday night suggested that the “goofy” pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol in January were a much less dangerous than what she called “Biden’s insurrectionists.”
In a bizarre comparison during her Friday night program, the conservative news host took aim at President Joe Biden — calling him “the real threat” — while dismissing notions that a mob of former President Donald’ Trump’s supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 posed much danger.
“America’s most dangerous insurrectionists aren’t the goofy QAnon people in fur and face paint,” Ingraham said. “The real threat to our future is Biden and the well-heeled powerful forces who want us to lose sight of what made America great in the first place. It’s not our diversity. It’s our freedom.”
Right. Because as everyone knows, those two things are in direct conflict. If we value our diversity then white people aren’t as free to be racist pigs and celebrated for it. Natch.
Ingraham’s effort to reimagine Capitol rioters as nonthreatening, while painting Biden and unnamed “powerful forces” as the true danger, reinforces the narratives advanced by Republican lawmakers who have sought to recast the events of Jan. 6.
In an effort to divert attention from the aftermath of the Capitol attack, some GOP lawmakers have insisted that they had not feared for their safety while their congressional colleagues hid under desks as rioters stormed the Capitol earlier this year.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), for example, has said that he held little fear on Jan. 6, as Capitol rioters invaded the complex– but would have felt imperiled had those entering the Capitol on that day been supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said of the thousands that gathered on Jan. 6, which included many of the rioters who later stormed the Capitol.
And then there’s this phony “populist” letting his little, white, fascist, slip show:
Mainstream US journalists are “cowards”, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Friday, without naming any such reporters whom he also called “cringing animals not worthy of respect”.
The primetime host also called others in his chosen field “small-minded, status-obsessed, insecure, not that bright, just not impressive”.
“It just makes me sick,” he said. “I really hate them.”
Carlson was speaking to Outkick, a sports and pop culture website. His complaints included that mainstream journalists’ work was not “aimed upwards”.
“I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he said, “not simply by the details of the lying of the medium, but disgusted by the emphasis. The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class, the bodyguards for Jeff Bezos. That’s the opposite of what we should have.
“I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”
Carlson has been broadly supportive of Donald Trump in and out of power, last October famously hosting a bizarre interview after the then president recovered from a bout with Covid-19.
One Washington Post columnist called Carlson “sycophancy-adjacent rather than entirely immersed in the MAGAverse”, a relative distancing made possible because “Trump shares many of his core philosophies, like preserving institutional power for white Americans”.
Carlson regularly espouses the racist “replacement theory”, which says Democrats encourage immigration in order to win elections. Recent calls for him to be fired for doing so were rebuffed by the Murdochs – the immigrant family that owns Fox News.
On Friday, the Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent accused Carlson of peddling “a monumental scam with potential real world implications”.
A recent poll, Sargent wrote, “found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about ‘ensuring the country’s survival as we know it’” and that “there is a ‘real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege’”.
Carlson is seen in some quarters as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024, should Trump chose not to run.
In an echo of controversy over comments in which he said immigration made America “dirtier”, the Fox News host also told Outkick: “Unrestrained mass immigration has also put a huge strain on the natural world.
“Just the amount of pollution and litter and destruction that’s generated by the movement of hundreds of thousands of people, unrestrained, across the border. That’s not a small thing to me. But you never hear that. I’ve never heard anybody mention that. And it’s so awful.”
Yeah, his concern is all about the environment. Sure it is.
I don’t know exactly what’s going on with Carlson but something is. If he’s truly gone this radical he may just be this year’s Glenn Beck, who had a similar trajectory before his lunacy flamed him out. If he’s being an opportunist, then he’s actually way more dangerous. I’m honestly not sure.