Not bloody likely. But it’s probably all we’ve got. The Court has gone rogues and the entire GOP supports it.
It seems as though the press is dropping a new Clarence Thomas corruption scandal every day. Yesterday we got two. First, Pro-Publica published yet another story about Thomas’ wealthy benefactor Harlan Crow passing on a lavish gift to his pal which Thomas once again failed to report. This time, it was private school tuition for the grand-nephew Thomas and his wife Ginni have said they raised like he was their own son since he was 6 years old. By evening, we found out that Federalist Society guru Leonard Leo instructed longtime GOP operative Kellyanne Conway back in 2012 to have her polling firm bill his nonprofit group “another $25,000” but give the money to Ginni Thomas — adding, with “no mention of Ginni, of course.”
What the hell is going on here?
It’s bad enough that Ginni Thomas is a hardcore far-right Republican activist who even participated in the coup attempt of 2020 and spouted QAnon conspiracy theories. This was not a huge surprise since she’s been working in far-right circles for some time, even helming her own Tea Party group and working with the shadowy Groundswell organization. But it’s particularly unnerving since her husband was the lone Justice to dissent from the Supreme Court’s rejection of former President Donald Trump’s bid to block the release of some presidential records to the January 6 committee. She claimed that she never talks to the man she famously calls her “best friend” about any of that — which nobody believes. So we’re left with the fact that while it’s unseemly that she’s so involved in issues that come before the court in the first place, and her husband refuses to recuse himself, they both are completely shameless about their rank partisanship so there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it.
To be precise, this isn’t exactly news. Back in 2004, the Los Angeles Times published a big expose of Crow’s lavish gifts to Thomas, which he wasn’t disclosing. And in 2011, Ian Millhiser, then at Think Progress, came out with yet another article revealing even more examples of Crow’s largesse to the Thomases. They both made brief splashes at the time but Thomas didn’t care and that was that. We’ll have to see if this time is different.
The story about Leonard Leo in cahoots with Kellyanne Conway to secretly funnel money to Ginni Thomas is a new twist. We knew that Crow had bankrolled Ginni’s activist group Liberty Central back in 2009 with over half a million dollars, $120,000 of which was used to pay her salary. As it happens, Leonard Leo co-founded that group with Ginni Thomas and the non-profit he told Conway to bill for her non-existent services filed a brief in a landmark case, Shelby County v. Holder, which was the first step in gutting the Voting Rights Act. So Crow may not have had immediate business before the court but Leo certainly did. The opinion was 5-4 with Thomas voting in the majority. I doubt the money caused Thomas to vote the way he did — he has always been hostile to the right to vote — but it certainly is nice to have so many good friends with similar ideas making a public servant’s life so comfortable, isn’t it?
In 2010, Ginni left the group so that it would not be encumbered by the distractions her “media celebrity” was causing. This happened shortly after it was revealed that Ginni had left a message with Anita Hill, the woman who had accused Thomas of sexual harassment back in 1992, demanding an apology. Shortly thereafter, Justice Thomas amended 13 years of his financial disclosures after having omitted his wife’s employment. He said he had misunderstood the rules. It seems to be an ongoing problem with Thomas, which is odd for a man who is charged with interpreting the U.S. Constitution.
Then came all the lavish trips and the purchasing of Thomas’ mother’s house, which she lives in rent-free, and various other perks and presents, none of which Thomas disclosed even after having been caught numerous times in the past. He seems so addled about all this that you have to wonder if he might have neglected to claim all these gifts on his taxes which would not just be an ethical violation but an illegal one as well. Maybe nobody told him that either. He’s just an old country Supreme Court justice, after all.
With the revelations about Ginni Thomas combined with the sheer volume of Harlan Crow’s cash and the justice’s ongoing refusal to disclose it, we might finally be reaching a tipping point. But it’s a long shot. The Senate can hold more hearings and give Ted Cruz a platform to say “high tech lynching” again but Chief Justice John Roberts claims there is a separation of powers issue that precludes him, and I assume any other justice, from testifying so that’s not going anywhere. They can bring Harlan Crow up to the Hill but I’m not sure what good that would do as long as the Republicans are protecting Thomas. And Roberts could push through some new ethics requirements but he doesn’t seem inclined to do it and anyway. This looks like rank corruption which some new norms and rules won’t fix. Disclosure requirements are supposed to make judges embarrassed to take big sums of money from “friends” and cause them to recuse themselves when there are conflicts of interest (or the appearance of such conflicts.) Thomas obviously has no such concerns and neither do his defenders.
Obviously, impeachment is off the table with the House in the hands of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her loyal manservant Kevin McCarthy. Even if the Democrats were in control, the Senate doesn’t have even close to the votes to convict. (So much for our vaunted checks and balances.) That leaves the only option being Thomas resigning in disgrace and I am quite sure that will never happen. He won’t even stop taking “gifts” from Harlan Crow.
As long as Clarence Thomas is the patron saint of the right-wing legal establishment, he will not be held liable for his actions. He can do what he wants and he knows it. He could have accepted suitcases full of hundred dollar bills on the courthouse steps and Ginni could have rampaged through the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence” and it would have changed nothing. The Supreme Court has a radical majority made up of hard-right extremists and Republican partisans and apparently at least one of them is openly corrupt and they have gone rogue. And they have the full support of the Republican Party.
The country has lost trust in the institution and the members of that institution could not care less. That’s a serious problem for our system of government and unless the political system wakes up and takes some kind of action like passing term limits or expanding the numbers of justices (very difficult to do, of course) we are in for decades of turmoil no matter who sits in the White House or has a majority in Congress.
I know, the Market is not the average American’s lived experience. But damned if Republicans don’t treat it that way when it’s going their way. Except under a Democratic president.
Investor’s Business Daily: Dow Jones Surges 450 Points On Strong Jobs Report. AAPL Stock Jumps On Earnings.
Barron’s: The Jobs Data Were Hotter Than Expected. Why the Stock Market Is Celebrating.
In March 2021, more than 4 million workers were “missing” from the job market as a result of early retirements, a lack of child care, covid illness and death, and slowdowns in immigration. More than 75 percent of that shortfall has been filled, according to a Washington Post analysis, as new and returning workers help boost labor-force participation back to pre-pandemic levels. The share of adults who have a job or are looking for one is back to where it was in March 2020.
Watch for the negative spin from the right’s Eeyores. And from “labor participation truthers,” cautions Carolina Forward.
Not remotely the biggest news in #ncpol, but – another HUGE jobs report out today.
235,000 new jobs in the U.S. last month, massively over-performing expectations. The U.S. unemployment rate drops to 3.4%, the lowest since 1969.
For a long time, the "labor participation truther" crowd has insisted that U.S. unemployment was *secretly* much higher, because the BLS was juking the stats and ignoring the participation rate, or something 🤷♀️
Today's report pretty well puts that to bed. (They won't care.)
The strangulation homicide of Jordan Neely, Michael Jackson impersonator, on a New York City subway has prompted a flurry of commentary. Neely’s race and that of his killer is familiar. What’s out of the ordinary is that his assailant was not a cop and did not use a gun. Also familiar is the judgment by law enforcement officials (for now) that a homicide of a black man is not necessarily a murder. The assailant has not been charged.
“Barack freaking Obama would not be allowed to walk away after choking a homeless white man to death on the subway,” rages Elie Mystal at The Nation. Poverty, homelessness and mental illness in the richest nation on earth are all accomplices, as are the bystanders who remained bystanders as they watched (reportedly) a former Marine choke the life out of Neely for behaving erratically.
There is a forest here, not just trees. The string of Americans killed lately over mundane, nonthreatening actions, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, should unsettle us all. But it is the outgrowth of paranoia that’s been cultivated.
Since the 1980s and earlier, unreasoning fear of the “other” has been cultivated and marketed. There was the moral panic over rumors of ritual Satanic abuse at day care centers. There was the repressed memory syndrome fad. There was “stranger danger.” The response of parents fearful of their children being abducted was to have them photographed and fingerprinted at mall clinics designed more for identifying bodies than for preventing rare abductions. There were ubiquitous “Baby on Board” signs in car windows. Danger lurked around every corner.
By the 1990s, there was Rush Limbaugh’ and imitators’ version of “Two Minutes Hate” that lasted three hours per day, five days a week. There was the “Clinton Death List.” There was a bombing in New York City that did not take down the Trade Towers. That came later. And another in Oklahoma City that demolished a federal building, killing 168, including children in the daycare center.
Not to mention the daily firearms slaughter. The individual risk remains near-infinitesimally low, “but the incessant rat-a-tat of bloody headlines makes people feel—viscerally—that the risks they do encounter are unbearably dangerous,” writes Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic in response to the Neely killing:
This process, through which mundane uncomfortable situations are transformed into terrifying ordeals by all the incidents of random gun violence that came before, is one means by which a healthy community becomes a violent society. Nobody looks forward to encountering people behaving erratically on the subway, and neither does anyone want to fall victim to an act of stochastic violence, but killing a mentally ill man on a train doesn’t represent much of an improvement upon either circumstance. It represents the loss of a peaceful commons, the absence of compassion, and the overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence. This is the country we have become.
“Paranoia strikes deep” dates from the 1960s. By the 2020s, it’s reached our doorsteps, writes Roxane Gay in the New York Times:
We are at something of an impasse. The list of things that can get you killed in public is expanding every single day. Whether it’s mass shootings or police brutality or random acts of violence, it only takes running into one scared man to have the worst and likely last day of your life. We can’t even agree on right and wrong anymore. Instead of addressing actual problems, like homelessness and displacement, lack of physical and mental health care, food scarcity, poverty, lax gun laws and more, we bury our heads in the sand. Only when this unchecked violence comes to our doorstep do we maybe care enough to try to effect change.
There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions. There is no regard for due process. People who deem themselves judge, jury and executioner walk among us, and we have no real way of knowing when they will turn on us.
More than a few of the paranoid have turned on our democracy and deemed themselves its executioners. More were convicted Thursday of trying to kill that. We’ve become “a people without empathy, without any respect for the sanctity of life unless it’s our own,” Gay laments.
The Texas Legislature is advancing a bill that would allow the secretary of state to redo elections in Harris County, where a number of Democratic candidates posted strong midterm election results and which has been dogged by GOP claims of election mismanagement.
The Republican-controlled Senate passed the bill Tuesday and sent it to the state House. If it is enacted, it would allow the secretary of state to toss out election results in the state’s largest county and call a new vote if there is “good cause” to believe that at least 2% of polling places ran out of usable ballots during voting hours.
The bill would apply only to counties with populations greater than 2.7 million, effectively singling out Harris County, which is home to Houston and has by far the largest population in the state, at nearly 5 million. In recent decades, Harris County has become more Democratic.
Last year, the Harris County Republican Party sued the county and Clifford Tatum, its election administrator, over the administration of last year’s election, and numerous Republicans also challenged their losses and called for the election to be redone. During the election, a legal battle arose over whether to extend voting hours at Harris County’s polling places after several locations had issues, including ballot paper shortages and late openings.
[…]
Mimi Marziani, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law and a former president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit group that advocates for voter rights, said the bill was a “partisan power grab” over Harris County.
“It gives an unelected person the authority, without any procedural guardrails, to overturn an election when there are paper ballot issues,” Marziani said. “It’s very easy to see how this vast authority could be abused in a way that’s profoundly undemocratic.”
She added that there are existing mechanisms to address election errors, including recount litigation.
They did post-election assessment and couldn’t find any evidence that people were turned away because of the shortage of paper ballots. It’s all BS of course.
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the far-right extremist group were convicted Thursday of a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 presidential election.
A jury in Washington, D.C., found Tarrio guilty of seditious conspiracy after hearing from dozens of witnesses over more than three months in one of the most serious cases brought in the stunning attack that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, as the world watched on live TV.
It’s a significant milestone for the Justice Department, which has now secured seditious conspiracy convictions against the leaders of two major extremist groups prosecutors say were intent on keeping Democratic President Joe Biden out of the White House at all costs. The charge carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Tarrio, behind bars since his March 2022 arrest, didn’t appear to show any emotion as the verdict was read. He hugged one of his lawyers and shook the hand of the other before leaving the courtroom. A few of the people sitting among the defendants’ relatives wiped away tears as the verdict was read.
The verdict comes after a trial that took more than twice as long as originally expected, slowed by bickering, mistrial motions and revelations of government informants in the group. Securing the conviction of Tarrio, a high-profile leader who wasn’t at the riot itself, could embolden the Justice Department as a special counsel investigates Trump, including key aspects of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Special Counsel Jack Smith in recent weeks has sought the testimony of many people close to Trump. They include former Vice President Mike Pence, who testified before a grand jury last week, likely giving prosecutors a key first-person account about certain conversations and events in the weeks preceding the riot.
Tarrio was a top target of what has become the largest Justice Department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group — known for street fights with left-wing activists — when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first debate with Biden.
Tarrio wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6, because he had been arrested two days earlier in a separate case and ordered out of the capital city. But prosecutors said he organized and directed the attack by Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol that day.
In addition to Tarrio, a Miami resident, three other Proud Boys were convicted of seditious conspiracy: Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl.
Jurors have not yet reached a unanimous verdict on the sedition charge for fifth defendant: Dominic Pezzola, a new member who hadn’t spoken to the other defendants until after the charges were filed. Pezzola, however, was convicted of other serious charges.
Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs and Rehl were also convicted of obstructing Congress’ certification of Biden’s electoral victory and obstructing law enforcement as well as two other conspiracy charges. The four were cleared of an assault charge stemming from Pezzola, who stole an officer’s riot shield.
The judge told jurors to keep deliberating on a few remaining counts where they haven’t reached agreement.
Rehl’s attorney, Carmen Hernandez, said her client “continues to maintain his innocence.” Lawyers for Biggs and Pezzola declined to comment. An attorney for Tarrio declined to comment.
Prosecutors told jurors the group viewed itself as “Trump’s army” and was prepared for “all-out war” to stop Biden from becoming president.
The Proud Boys were “lined up behind Donald Trump and willing to commit violence on his behalf,” prosecutor Conor Mulroe said in his closing argument.
The backbone of the government’s case was hundreds of messages exchanged by Proud Boys in the days leading up to Jan. 6 that show the far-right extremist group peddling Trump’s false claims of a stolen election and trading fears over what would happen when Biden took office.
Here’s the latest for Thursday May 4th: Suspect caught after Atlanta shooting; North Carolina House passes new abortion ban; Trump taped deposition played in court; Bipartisan group of Senators trying to keep children away from social media.
0 seconds of 58 secondsVolume 90%
As Proud Boys swarmed the Capitol, Tarrio cheered them on from afar, writing on social media: “Do what must be done.” In a Proud Boys encrypted group chat later that day someone asked what they should do next. Tarrio responded: “Do it again.”
“Make no mistake,” Tarrio wrote in another message. “We did this.”
Defense lawyers denied there was any plot to attack the Capitol or stop Congress’ certification of Biden’s win. A lawyer for Tarrio sought to push the blame onto Trump, arguing the former president incited the pro-Trump mob’s attack when he urged the crowd near the White House to “fight like hell.”
Who’s their ultimate leader? It would be the guy who recorded a song with them and promised to pardon the whole group if he becomes president.
The obvious bottom line gets lost: The President of the United States spurred on multiple extremist groups to undertake sedition against the country. And he's running to be president again.
Breaking: Donald Trump rails against rape accuser E Jean Carroll’s “false accusations”, and tells us he will “probably” attend the trial in New York, which he calls a “scam” and a “political attack” – he says he will “confront” the claims, which he denies #Trump#Doonbegpic.twitter.com/mZAYwVnjvB
Before his infamous “grab them by the p—-” remark in the “Access Hollywood” tape, then-candidate Donald Trump told Billy Bush: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” Trump doubled-down on those lines during his deposition on E. Jean Carroll’s rape allegations.
“Historically, that’s true, with stars,” Trump testified. “Well what’s what if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true not always but largely true, unfortunately or fortunately.”
Originally recorded in October 2022, the video deposition was shown to a jury on Thursday. The jury will only hear Trump on video, as he is not planning to appear in person. In a brief passage, Trump sat expressionless as the “Access Hollywood” tape roles in the corner of the frame, marking the second time the jury saw it played.
On Wednesday, the outtake appeared in court for the first time during testimony by journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who testified that Trump pushed her against a wall and started kissing her when she was sent to profile him and his wife Melania at Mar-a-Lago in 2015.
When she saw Trump on the hot mic to Billy Bush, Stoynoff said, she thought: “Oh, he does this to a lot of women. It’s not just me.”
In the video deposition, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan grilled Trump about his reaction to sexual assault allegations made by Carroll, Stoynoff, and Jessica Leeds, another accuser who said Trump groped her on a plane. In each instance, Trump implied that he didn’t find his accuser physically attractive, and he acknowledged that implication in the video.
In Carroll’s case, Trump said: “She’s not my type,” but the jury saw that claim take a hit when Trump mistook Carroll with his ex-wife Marla Maples in the video.
“That’s Marla, yeah,” Trump could be seen commenting, apparently referring to Carroll. “That’s my wife.”
The photograph, seen in the deposition, showed Trump, Carroll, and then-spouses Ivana Trump and John Johnson. Trump was referring to the woman standing next to Johnson, who was Carroll.
This photograph of Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll at a party was embedded in her complaint.
As an afterthought, Trump claimed the photograph was “blurry.”
Jumping at the error, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked Trump: “I take it the three women you married are all your type?”
Trump answered in the affirmative.
No fewer than four times, Trump has been seen by jurors disparaging the attractiveness of women who appeared in court. In another video, Trump said of Leeds: “She would not be my first choice.” At a rally, Trump jeered Stoynoff to a roaring crowd by saying: “Look at her. Look at her words. You tell me. What do you think? I don’t think so.”
The fourth woman who’s appearance Trump disparaged was Carroll’s lawyer: Kaplan.
“You wouldn’t be a choice of mine, either, to be honest,” he said during the deposition. “I hope you’re not insulted.”
“I wouldn’t, in any circumstances, have any interest in you,” Trump added.
I will be shocked if he shows up. But I kind of hope he does. It would ensure a big verdict for Carroll.
Q: "Where are you on the [Biden] administration sending troops to the border?"
Graham: "I think it's ridiculous theater."
Q: "Did you feel the same…when Trump sent troops to the border in 2018?"
Graham: "I feel that Donald Trump did the best job in my political lifetime." pic.twitter.com/mPhEfg1RMw
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) May 3, 2023
Hey, only two impeachments and one insurrection. Plus he lost. But other than that he was great.
I’m reminded of this interview with Graham after he lost. He’s lying. He just thinks Trump is the best chance for Republican power and he doesn’t care how he does it:
Sen. Lindsey Graham told “Axios on HBO” that Donald Trump has a “dark side” but he tries to “harness the magic” because he succeeded where Republican candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney failed.
Why it matters: The South Carolina Republican gyrates between support and criticism of the former president, even after Trump harshly criticized McCain — Graham’s longtime friend — and helped spark the Capitol insurrection.
“What I’m tryin’ to do is just harness the magic,” Graham told Axios’ Jonathan Swan. “To me, Donald Trump is sort of a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and P.T. Barnum.”
“He could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know can make it. He can make it bigger. He can make it stronger. He can make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it,” Graham said.
The big picture: Graham won reelection in November in one of the most expensive political races in American history. That helps explain his embrace of Trump, wildly popular with the Republican base, but also confounds those who wonder why he sticks with him.
In 2016, when they were competing for the GOP presidential nomination, Graham questioned Trump’s mental fitness.
After Trump beat Hillary Rodham Clinton, Graham embraced the new president, despite him criticizing his former sidekick McCain for becoming a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The day after the Capitol siege, Graham blamed Trump for fueling the attack and declared, “enough is enough.”
Now, Graham says he is reengaging purposefully.
What they’re saying: “Donald Trump was my friend before the riot. And I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot. I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history, and we’re going to move forward.”
“I want us to continue the policies that I think will make America strong. I believe the best way for the Republican Party to do that is with Trump, not without Trump.”
“Mitt Romney didn’t do it. John McCain didn’t do it. There’s something about Trump. There’s a dark side and there’s some magic there.”
Flashback: When Swan noted Trump is not showing remorse for his election challenge and still arguing he won in a landslide, Graham invoked McCain.
“I tell (Trump) every day that he wants to listen that I think the main reason he probably lost in Arizona is beatin’ on the dead guy called John McCain,” the senator said.
Sadly, I doubt this will end up blowing back on Graham. If Trump is defeated, Graham will still be a senator and he will attach himself to yet another daddy figure that he tells himself he’s manipulating for the good of the country.
Read this thread by Emptywheel and you’ll see what I’m talking about:
WaPo’s 1800-word, 4 reporter story on the upcoming decision on whether to charge Hunter or not says it matters bc it’ll affect Biden’s campaign.
Here's WaPo's front page, with the Hunter story on it.
Can someone point me to where the story on the rape trial, the one in which TRUMP, not his son, is a defendant?
How about the news that Trump's long-time digial media guru spent all day before Jack Smith's grand jury yesterday (on a Tuesday)?
NOW: Trump aide Dan Scavino and his legal team have left the federal courthouse in DC where a grand jury is hearing evidence in special counsel Jack Smith's investigations. Scavino arrived shortly before 9am and had been inside all day.
Now check out story. It's not until ¶¶10 & 11 that WaPo tells you that EVEN IF Hunter is indicted, it's not the stuff that right wing has been drooling abt non-stop for 5 years, it's a charge that Trump's campaign manager, personal lawyer, and OWN CORPORATION were convicted of.
HOW FUCKING STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE to say that a Hunter Biden prosecution on tax charges would hurt Biden's reelection campaign, w/o mentioning Trump Org's conviction on tax charges?
Trump is mentioned ~11 times.
None of those times are a description that Trump's eponymous company was ALREADY CONVICTED, by a jury, of tax charges.
MOST hilarious paragraph in this really embarrassing article is this one: Questions about Hunter Biden's foreign businesses have dogged Joe Biden's political life.
BUT WAIT!! You've already told us this AT WORST is a tax and false statement charge. That's not the Burisma stuff.
And, I kid you not, Devlin Barrett et al present as proof that HUNTER's business life dogged his dad's political life …
Because Trump was impeached for trying to gin up a false scandal about it.
"dogged Joe's political life" = Trump being impeached.
Again, FOUR JOURNALISTS put their name on that article. None of the four apparently thought a rape trial or Dan Scavino's testimony was newsworthy enough to get coverage. None of the four seem to remember that Trump Org has ALREADY been convicted on tax charges.
Tucker Carlson — who was fired by Fox News last week at the height of his popularity and influence in right-wing punditry — has aspirations of moving into a larger role that doesn’t limit him to a single medium, according to people familiar with his thinking. And he is willing to walk away from some of the millions that Fox is contractually obligated to pay him, if that would give him the flexibility to have a prominent voice in the 2024 election cycle.
Most ambitiously, Carlson wants to moderate his own GOP candidate forum, outside of the usual strictures of the Republican National Committee debate system. The idea, which he has discussed with Donald Trump, the front-runner for the party nomination, would test his vaunted sway over conservative politics. And it would take a jab at his former employer — Fox is hosting the first official primary debate, which Trump has threatened not to attend — if he can manage to make his grandest plan happen.
Ultimately, Carlson is scrambling to try to avoid the fate of other once-towering former Fox News personalities, who in exile from the network have found lucrative gigs but nothing like their former positions of influence.
“If I’m sitting in his seat right now, I’m plotting really my own media company, how I want to build it,” said Joel Cheatwood, a former Fox News and CNN executive who helped found theblaze.com with Glenn Beck after his forced departure from Fox News in 2011. “Whether you like him or not, there are very few individual brands out there that you can almost guarantee an incredibly significant following from day one.”
Carlson’s Fox contract reportedly runs through the end of 2024, which would limit his options, though a source close to Carlson said he might accept less money than he is owed to be able to get back into the media game before then. Hollywood lawyer Bryan Freedman, who is representing Carlson, did not respond to a message asking about his contractual status.
Among the smaller broadcasters that have approached Carlson are the faith-based Trinity Broadcast Network and the far-right One America News Network. OAN’s founder and chief executive, Robert Herring Sr., fulsomely praised Carlson as having “the largest and most passionate audience in cable news,” adding that the company has “made our interest clear.”
A stronger pitch has come from Newsmax, the conservative media company that has seen a prime-time ratings surge this past week at the same time Fox was losing viewers from Carlson’s old time slot.
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy approached Carlson and his associates with a wide-ranging proposal that, in the words of one person familiar with the pitch, would involve “rebranding Newsmax under Tucker’s name.” Carlson and his advisers are intrigued by the idea of his own media company, and taking over an existing one would be easier than building from the ground up — though any possible deal would boil down to unresolved questions of money and editorial control.
And Cheatwood speculated that Carlson would diminish his own brand by signing on with a smaller media company. “I just don’t think he needs it,” he added. “He’s just so much bigger than they are.”
Many in conservative corners of the digital media world have assumed that Carlson — a polarizing personality whose disparaging comments about immigrants, defense of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and dabbling in paranoid white-nationalist theories during his years on Fox would make him toxic for mainstream media companies — will strike out with his own podcast or streaming show.
“He could do very well and find an audience immediately, and he could earn a good living and never have to leave his home studio,” said Ken LaCorte, a former digital-side executive for Fox News.
In 2020, Carlson’s team explored the idea of launching a podcast as a “joint venture of sorts” with his then-employers at Fox, according to a text message exchange made public in a recent defamation lawsuit against the network. And since his firing, his team has fielded inquiries from potential podcast partners.
But Carlson doesn’t want to just be a podcaster, people in his circle say. He wants to produce documentaries and host live events as well.
Twitter has also emerged as an area of intrigue for Carlson. That’s where he went to issue his first public comments after his dismissal, and his team was impressed by the number of views amassed by the video, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Carlson has not had any recent conversations with Twitter or its political-provocateur new owner, Elon Musk; but shortly before he left Fox, he had a briefing from Twitter tech staff about new features for subscriptions and other ways for content creators to make money from the platform.
Beck praised the Twitter video, in which Carlson claimed that television news shuts off legitimate debate. “You see what he’s setting up here? He’s setting up a different kind of show, a show where he takes big issues and he debates them,” Beck said last week on his own show. “That’s where he’s headed.” (Beck, who pivoted to digital video after being forced out of Fox, has already offered Carlson a job.)
Carlson and his team have discussed the possibility of moderating a candidate forum outside of the traditional protocols surrounding the GOP primary debate system, according to two people familiar with the considerations. These people said the setup — as well as Carlson’s availability to take on that kind of role, given the noncompete constraints of his contract with Fox — remain unclear. But Carlson has personally expressed enthusiasm about the idea, according to people familiar with his comments. At least one major candidate — Trump — has told Carlson he’s interested, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
The former Fox host’s interest in a debate is said to stem in part from its potential to loosen the Republican National Committee’s grip on the process, as well as to challenge the role traditionally played by the major television networks. “He could go straight to the candidates, stream it live, invite the networks but maintain control over the process,” said one person familiar with the discussions.
Carlson has been approached in recent days by candidates as well as Republican fundraisers about appearing on the campaign trail but is interested in maintaining a more independent posture, according to people with knowledge of his views. A role moderating a debate or delivering analysis about the contest is seen as a way to influence the process without becoming an arm of a particular campaign.
But the main holdup in Carlson’s post-Fox future is his contract status, which could limit his options until his deal with the network runs out. “Fame is a depreciating asset, and Tucker in nine months of relative radio silence would not be nearly as powerful as Tucker is now,” LaCorte said.
“Tucker’s too gifted a writer and host not to put those talents to use every day,” said Vince Coglianese, a friend of Carlson who serves as editorial director for the publication he co-founded, the Daily Caller. “I don’t know what format he’ll end up in, but I’m confident he’ll be a massive success — which will be good for the country. Anything that breaks the corporate stranglehold on our debates is a huge win.”
I don’t believe this. Tucker Carlson is motivated by money. I doubt very seriously he will give up millions just so he can host a 2024 primary debate. (You can bet that Joe Biden won’t agree to any debate with him so the general election is out of the question.) This is just silly. I can imagine him trying to build his own online media company — and I would guess it could make big bucks. The right is full of suckers. But his influence was dependent on that older TV viewing audience and I can’t imagine that Newsmax will offer him the kind of money and profile that he believes he is worthy of.
I suspect he will go the way of Glenn Beck, the last wingnut who achieved Tucker’s level of influence. He’ll have a podcast and some kind of video presence and he’ll be rich. But nobody will pay attention to him anymore.
This literary analysis by A.O. Scott of Carlson’s notorious “white men don’t fight like that” text is very interesting:
Gertrude Stein warned that remarks are not literature. Neither are hateful messages sent to a television producer’s smartphone and hidden away in redacted legal documents.
In the case of Tucker Carlson’s now notorious post-Jan. 6 remarks on an earlier episode of political violence — recently uncovered by New York Times reporters — literary criticism seems to be beside the point. But given that the text is both unusually long (almost 200 words) and contributed to Carlson’s firing from Fox News, some textual analysis might illuminate the author’s state of mind and the political context in which he operates.
What Carlson wrote is a complicated and troubling piece of prose. That it can even be called prose is somewhat remarkable. Not many of us, thumbing away on our phones, would compose such a grammatically coherent, cleanly punctuated missive, without an abbreviation, emoji or autocorrect snafu in sight.
Before he was a cable-news demagogue, Carlson was a magazine journalist, and some of the old print discipline clings to these 15 sentences. They quickly set a scene, place the author within it and tell a compact story, complete with a moral at the end.
That story — about Carlson’s conflicted response to the sight of “a group of Trump guys” dogpiling an “Antifa kid” — appears to involve a crisis of conscience, an unexpected, chastening eruption of empathy. The narrator’s bloodlust seems to waver as he moves from solidarity with the perpetrators of the attack to a grudging acknowledgment of their victim’s humanity. This looks like the kind of wishy-washyness Carlson often mocked on the air, a departure from the demonization of political and cultural enemies that was his nightly bread and butter. You might wonder if Fox fired him for going offbrand. But a closer reading elucidates what that brand always was.
At first, Carlson is right where you’d expect him to be: on the side of the attackers, rooting them on toward homicide, even as he finds their behavior “dishonorable.” “It’s not how white men fight,” he says.
That is a jaw-dropping sentence — as empirically ludicrous as it is ideologically loaded. A glance at American history — taking in night riders, lynch mobs, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and the killings of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins in New York in the 1980s, to say nothing of Jan. 6 itself — suggests that this is exactly how white men fight. Not all white men, of course, and not only white men, but white men precisely when they perceive the symbolic and material prerogatives of their whiteness to be under attack.
Thinking otherwise is more than just a fantasy of Anglo-Saxon righteousness, redolent of Rudyard Kipling and The Marquess of Queensberry. The old imperial myth undergirding that fantasy — the belief that a program of plunder and subjugation was, in spite of everything, a noble crusade — survives in the curious amalgam of genteel preening and pseudo-proletarian rage that Carlson manifested in his nightly broadcast.
His most successful on-air persona, perfected on Fox after the departure of Bill O’Reilly, has been a volatile mixture of upper crust and salt of the earth. Whiteness was the glue that held the package together, and in this text you can see it coming unstuck, even as Carlson tries to work through some inherent contradictions.
At stake is not the life or safety of the anonymous “Antifa kid,” but rather Carlson’s own perception of himself. “This isn’t good for me,” he finds himself thinking. That phrase, a syntactic echo of “it’s not how white men fight,” establishes the stakes, which are not so much Carlson’s ethical probity as his racial superiority. Watching the beating, he becomes aware of what Kipling called “the white man’s burden” — the duty to subjugate the supposedly lesser races without sinking to their level.
The race of the man being beaten isn’t specified in the text, but his otherness — his debased status relative to both his attackers and Carlson — is repeatedly emphasized. “The Antifa creep is a human being,” he writes. This is not exactly an upwelling of compassion, and even so Carlson rushes to qualify it. “Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him, personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it.” The “shoulds” indicate that Carlson isn’t really bothered — is still actually gloating — but is aware that this reaction poses a problem.
It’s a problem because he imagines that the glee he feels at the man’s suffering aligns him not with those inflicting the suffering, but with the man himself. If he takes pleasure in watching an Antifa creep get pounded, that makes him as bad as the Antifa creep. Because that guy reduces “people to their politics.”
How can Carlson be sure of this? Isn’t this just projection? Yes, but it’s also another way of insisting that this isn’t how your side behaves, even as you prove the opposite. Reducing people to their politics is what the enemies — the others, the savages, those without honor — do. Making a point of not doing that, even when it’s clearly what you’re doing, is what sets you above them.
“How am I better than he is?” That question isn’t rhetorical, it’s existential, and it presents Carlson as both the hero and the victim in this story. To borrow a phrase from Elvis Costello, this is someone who “wants to know the names of all those he’s better than.” Not because of personal insecurity, but as a matter of racial and ideological principle. That’s how white men fight.
Interesting but I think sort of misses the point. His hatred for some anonymous alleged Antifa guy is sociopathic as are his feelings of joy at watching him be beaten by a mob. That he has a burst of conscience about his literally insane hatred of something that barely exists in this world and presents no real threat to him doesn’t change the fact that this level of hatred denotes a very serious psychological disorder. And he wrote it on the day after January 6th which indicates to me that it represents an attempt to distance himself emotionally from the violence that took place at the Capitol. He’s got problems.
Steve Martin on the first day of open season on the L.A. freeway. Still image from L.A. Story (1991).
“Road rage incidents are on the rise nationally and right here in San Diego, according to the California Highway Patrol,” reports NBC 7 San Diego:
“Somebody who is driving aggressively is driving in and out of traffic, slamming on brakes, making unsafe lane changes, following too closely, that type of stuff,” CHP Sgt. Brian Pennings said. “It escalates into offending or upsetting another driver.”
Offending someone else isn’t always intentional, but once it happens, road rage is a common response.
This can and has escalated into the road rager threatening gun violence. In recent months, the San Diego City Attorney has secured five road-rage-related gun violence restraining orders for alleged road rage drivers. These civil orders stop someone from buying, possessing or using a gun and can stay in effect for up to five years.
Sgt. Pennings has seen his share of road rage incidents, including one that turned deadly for a driver at a stop light.
“He looked over and there was a driver of the vehicle who was a female,” Pennings remembered. “She looked over at him, smiled, and he smiled back. Her boyfriend was reclined in the passenger seat. He leaned forward. He saw her engage with him with the smile, and as the light turned green, he pulled out a gun and shot and killed him.”
God Bless America. We’re insane.
These are all within the last couple of days:
Colorado: Bullet narrowly misses toddler in car seat in road rage shooting
Hawaii: Man arrested for allegedly showing gun to other drivers in road rage incident
Alabama and Florida: See Alabama man attack teens at Florida gas station in road rage incident
Arizona: Road rage shooting at Phoenix intersection leaves man hospitalized
Pennsylvania: Driver Injured in Road Rage Shooting on I-95 in South Philly
Tennessee: Jonesborough man arrested and charged in alleged road rage incident involving teenager
Wisconsin: Deadly shooting on Milwaukee highway investigated as possible road rage
Steve Martin played road rage for laughs in 1991. Thirty years later the scene feels deeply unsettling.
It’s Star Wars Day. May the Fourth be with you. You’ll need it.
