Tucker Carlson. (photo: Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
01 August 21
ucker Carlson’s truly terrible week began with a person turning the tables and calling out Fox News’ star propagandist on camera, and ended with possibly his biggest remaining advertiser deciding to leave Fox News altogether.
It started in a bait shop in Livingston, Montana, where Tucker encountered a man, Dan Bailey, who calmly told him that he was “the worst human being known to mankind.” Tucker was all smiles on camera, but later Fox News released a statement implying the TV host was less than thrilled with the exchange: “No public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view.”
The irony is that it was just a few months ago that Tucker had instructed viewers of his show that if they saw a masked child outside they should “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse, and you’re morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.” And Carlson is famous for using his show to target young female journalists, including former Beast Brandy Zadrozny and Taylor Lorenz, but I guess Fox News has different rules for its own hosts, those delicate little snowflakes. Their previous top-rated monster, Bill O’Reilly, made ambushing and harassing people on the street a regular feature, one that launched the career of Tucker wannabe Jesse Watters.
Things only went downhill from there for the frozen fish fortune heir after America heard testimony from the Capitol Police officers who thought they were going to die on Jan. 6, and saw even more footage of the MAGA maniacs looking to lynch Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi and with no compunctions about killing cops in the process. Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, a combat veteran, wept as he told the House Special Committee that he thought “This is how I am going to die” as he and others described fighting for their lives against the violent mob and being beaten even once they were on the ground.
Tucker shrugged, and smirked: “When they lie and they don’t stop lying, when they compare it to the Civil War or 9/11, they make us all very cynical and make us suspect that they are lying all the time. Because actually what happened on Jan. 6, according to video, did not look a lot like Iraq. It’s not Fallujah.”
Speaking of Iraq, when Rush Limbaugh infamously said the utterly deplorable Americans who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib were just “having a good time” and “blowing off steam,” the propaganda pioneer was at least defending the indefensible on behalf of American service members. Carlson, by contrast, was mocking men who serve bravely and honorably, because their lived experience, captured on video, didn’t line up with the fascist narrative he’s promoting for profit. There’s not even a pretend patriotism left for this generation of tough-talking chickhawks, just a cultist’s devotion to Trump’s yuge lie.
And then there’s Covid. Even as Republicans like polio survivor Mitch McConnell pushes Republicans to get vaccinated and Fox News has frantically reversed course to belatedly try and stop killing its viewers as the Delta variant tears through Trump-y true believers in red states, Carlson has doubled down, telling his viewers that “They've been telling us for six months the vaccine is perfect. But clearly, in some cases, it doesn’t always work.” He told viewers they should take it from the guy who created COVID,” before playing a clip of Dr. Anthony Fauci and talking about famous people who’d gotten the virus after being vaccinated.
The end-game seems clear as Tucker is telling his faithful not to get the vaccine, presumably since keeping his viewers—and anyone else they come into contact with—alive would give Joe Biden a win.
This is a sick man, albeit one who I’d bet has protected himself from getting infected. Tucker has refused to say whether he’s been vaccinated himself, but I suspect that he is, just like Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, who was vaccinated in December of 2020, and Donald and Melania Trump, who got their shots in January of 2021.
The bad news kept coming for Tucker on Friday, as the MyPillow guy, easily one of his show’s biggest advertisers as others have pulled out, said he would stop advertising on Fox News after the network—which is contesting a $1.6 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems—declined to run his ad promoting an coming “cybersymposium” intended to promote Trump’s yuge lie.
Does Tucker Carlson, whose top writer was outed as a not-so-secret white supremacist, deserve everything that’s coming to him? Like he likes to say, I’m just asking.
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