Right-wing media figures have spent more than a week encouraging their audiences to harass healthcare workers at Boston Children’s Hospital for providing care to trans youth, leading to fears that the disinformation campaign could result in acts of violence. After reports surfaced of death threats against hospital employees, some on the right have broadened their focus to other children’s hospitals.
On Thursday evening, Fox News’ top star Tucker Carlson devoted two segments to the topic, interviewing far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and anti-LGBTQ activist Chris Elston, who goes by the moniker Billboard Chris. Carlson repeatedly, falsely described providing gender-affirming care as [a blatant, disgusting lie about compassionate hospital services]*, before asking Elston to elaborate.
“We have the biggest [bullshit mischaracterization of gender-affirming care] scandal in modern medicine history,” Elston said.
“I don’t think there’s any debate over whether we should be allowed – which doctors should be allowed to [lying misrepresentation of medical care for trans] children,” Carlson responded.
They’re about 150,000 trans kids in the US. To be sure, trans healthcare for youth is a major issue for the children, the parents and the caregivers directly involved. Any healthy modern political party would simply facilitate access to appropriate treatment and turn its attention to focusing on other issues — like the genuine potential for a medical catastrophe from the return of polio .
So if this is not about trans kids — and it isn’t — what’s it really about? You can troll for votes without bullying children. No, this is about Carlson and others learning how to control and focus a violent mob. A very useful thing if your goal is to smash American democracy and replace it with a Hungarian-style white man’s dictatorship. Yesterday, it was hospitals — and from the death threats and fear generated, certain lessons were learned. Tomorrow Carlson will find another target which will elicit more death threats from his deplorable followers — and American fascists will learn a bit more about what does and doesn’t work to direct them. The idea, of course, is to find out how little provocation is needed in order to incite violence — helps with deniability when what you’re doing comes to the attention of law enforcement (“hey, just asking questions, voicing my opinion, censorship! cancelling!”).
The only reason Carlson gets away with this despicable behavior is that he knows that it is quite possible to get away with far worse. After all, the obscene orange Hitler who incited a mob to seek out and kill his own vice president is still free. So, because there are no consequences for that guy, every day Carlson learns how to get bolder in expressing his own racist dog whistles, his own anti-semitism, and all his other hatreds and bigotries. It leads in only one direction: more death threats, more physical intimidation, and ultimately more physical violence.
As the photo above makes crystal clear, we already have a civil war, even if at present the deadly political violence is not yet a daily occurrence (but hardly a month goes by…). But if Carlson and others continue to get a free pass and get better at stoking their mobs, the violence will become chronic very, very soon.
There is only one way this country can even conceivably start to walk back from the precipice of sustained civil war. Trump must not be held “accountable” — that’s too weak a word for what needs to happen. Trump needs to be swiftly indicted, prosecuted, and if found guilty, jailed for his numerous crimes against this country.
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*I see no reason to repeat lies, bullshit, and misrepresentations by Nazi-wannabes. You can click the link if you would like to know what they actually said, but why bother? Their lies are just lies. Don’t you have something more worthwhile to do?