tucker – Radio Free

Welcome to the Inquisition: Trump’s Christ Nationalist Brigades Aim to Gut Church-State Separation

Bill Berkowitz — Thu, 29 May 2025 18:55:07 +0000

The ghosts of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the OG’s (Old Guard) of the religious right are dancing these days. Since his inauguration, Trump has rewarded his religious right allies with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.”

“Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to undermine separation of church and state,” Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery recently reported.

On May 1, members of the religious liberty commission were announced, and nearly all are ultra-conservative Christian nationalists with a huge right-wing agenda. The commission’s chair is Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and its vice chair is Ben Carson.

Right Wing Watch profiled several of the commission’s members:

Paula White, serving again as Trump’s faith advisor in the White House, has used her position to elevate the influence of dominionist preachers and Christian nationalist activists. A preacher of the prosperity gospel, White has repeatedly denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic. When Trump announced the Religious Liberty Commission, White made the startling assertion, “Prayer is not a religious act, it’s a national necessity.”

Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who developed the Heritage Foundation’s “road map” for overturning marriage equality and was the face of Heritage’s anti-trans activism.

Franklin Graham, the more-political son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is a MAGA activist and fan of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies who backed Trump in 2016 as the last chance for Christians to save America from godless secularists and the “very wicked” LGTBT agenda. After the 2020 election Graham promoted Trump’s stolen-election claims and blamed the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol on “antifa.”

Eric Metaxas, a once somewhat reputable scholar who has devolved into a far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist, emceed a December 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who helped lead U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ equality, was an original signer of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declared that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”

Kelly Shackleford, president of First Liberty, who works to undermine church-state separation via the courts; Shackleford has endorsed a Christian nationalist effort to block conservative judges from joining the Supreme Court if they do not meet the faith and worldview standards of the religious right.

Allyson Ho, a lawyer and wife of right-wing Judge James Ho, has been affiliated with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ equality religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute.

Other commission members include Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry; 2009 Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean Boller; TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.

Montgomery noted that “Advisory board members are divided into three categories: religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The list is more religiously diverse than the commission itself; in addition to right-wing lawyers and Christian-right activists, it includes several additional Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim activists.”

Notable new advisory board members:

Kristen Waggoner, president of the mammoth anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which uses the courts to make “generational” wins like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has been named as a possible Supreme Court Justice by the Center for Judicial Renewal, a Christian nationalist project of the American Family Association’s advocacy arm. The ADF is active around the world.

Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom.

Jentezen Franklin, a MAGA pastor, told conservative Christians at a 2020 Evangelicals for Trump rally, “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

Gene Bailey, host of FlashPoint, a program that regularly promotes pro-Trump prophecy and propaganda on the air and at live events. Bailey has said the point of FlashPoint’s trainings is to help right-wing Christians “take over the world.” FlashPoint was until recently a program of Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel.

Anti-abortion activist Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., once dismissed the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality by saying , ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”

Abigail Robertson, CBN podcast host and granddaughter of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

Donald Trump claiming that he’s the front man for “bringing religion back to our country,” is as if the late Jeffrey Epstein claimed that he was working to end sex trafficking.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation called Trump’s religious liberty commission “a dangerous initiative,” that “despite its branding, this commission is not about protecting religious freedom — it’s about advancing religious privilege and promoting a Christian nationalist agenda”.

The post Welcome to the Inquisition: Trump’s Christ Nationalist Brigades Aim to Gut Church-State Separation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Tucker interview with Palestinian Christian pastor triggers Zionist freakout

The Grayzone — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 20:39:59 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

Tucker Comes in From the Cold

Matthew Stevenson — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 06:57:51 +0000

Still from Carlson’s Putin interview.

If Tucker Carlson had spent any longer hawking his ratings outside Vladimir Putin’s Great Hall of Illusion and Kremlin Imaginarium, he might have had to register as a foreign agent on his return to the United States of Cable.

As it was, Tucker queued up for a two-hour Red Square advertorial on Putin’s airing of Soviet grievances—all those instances in Russian history when Moscovy had to endure the perfidy of Congress Poland or the West failed to recognize Stalin’s noble intentions.

In many ways, Carlson’s X broadcast wasn’t so much a political interview as it was a deposition in an ugly divorce proceeding in which one spouse (Putin) gives endless, rambling answers to mansplain why the relationship (with the West) failed and why Vlad had no choice but to invade Ukraine (or seek the solace of women who were not his wife). It was all background to justify why, in the settlement, he deserves the Porsche and Kiev.

In Putin’s world view (mind you, he’s only comfortable in the contours of the old Soviet Union, or perhaps in his 17,691 square meter dacha on the Black Sea coast), he and Russia—they are indivisible—are aggrieved victims of never-ending Western aggression, which in Putin’s mind justifies everything from poisoning his political rivals to the invasion of Crimea.

Live from the Kremlin

During the two-hour Kremlin interview, Carlson’s demeanor was that of a Boy Scout out to earn a Fox merit badge for helping a doddering Comintern apparachnik across a busy Moscow boulevard. He smiled and laughed, listened attentively, groveled when necessary, and never interrupted Tsar Vladimir, lest he incur his majesty’s wrath.

On the subject of Russian history, Tucker knows little or nothing, so all he could do when Putin droned on about the Zemsky Sobor or the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was look like a dazed college sophomore during a pop quiz on Tolstoy’s theory of social reform.

Putin’s manner in the interview was that of an insufferable finger-wagging professor who hates to be corrected even though he hasn’t revised his lecture notes since 1973. His body language expressed pure contempt for Carlson, who Putin seemed to regard as a supplicant begging alms from the tsar’s carriage.

After the jam session, back in his hotel, Carlson said in a selfie post: “He [Putin] is not good at explaining himself. … But he’s clearly spending a lot of time in a world where he doesn’t have to explain himself.”

Go West, Old Man

To be fair to Carlson, by allowing Putin an open mic, he did get on the record in front a Western audience important insights into Putin’s strategic thinking, which the non-Trump West would do well to digest.

As I doubt many Carlson viewers took in anything more than a few highlights of the interview, I thought it would be useful to excerpt some of Putin’s salient points, so you can judge their meaning for yourself.

—In denying the existence of Ukrainian nationality (“an artificial state”), Putin makes it clear that he resents Polish and Austrian influence in the borderlands, even though the Austrians haven’t occupied Galicia in more than a hundred years and the last change to Poland’s borders was in 1945:

But for decades, the Poles have been engaged in the Polonization of this part of the population: they introduced their language there, they began to introduce the idea that these are not entirely Russians, that since they live on the edge, they are Ukrainians. Initially, the word “Ukrainian” meant that a person lives on the outskirts of the state, “at the edge,” or is engaged in border service, in fact. It did not mean any particular ethnic group….

Under the rule of Catherine the Great, Russia reclaimed all of its historical lands, including in the south and west. This all lasted until the Revolution. Before World War I, Austrian General Staff relied on the ideas of Ukrainianization and started actively promoting the ideas of Ukraine and the Ukrainianization.

What Putin omits is that Catherine herself seized Crimea from the Ottoman Empire, and that Stalin dealt with these new Soviet men by deporting and liquidating the Tatar (largely Turkish) population. (If you want to restore Crimea to its rightful owners, give it to the Greeks or the Khanate.)

—Putin blames Poland for starting World War II and collaborating with Hitler:

In 1939, after Poland cooperated with Hitler — it did collaborate with Hitler, you know — Hitler offered Poland peace and a treaty of friendship and alliance — we have all the relevant documents in the archives, demanding in return that Poland give back to Germany the so-called Danzig Corridor, which connected the bulk of Germany with East Prussia and Konigsberg. After World War I this territory was transferred to Poland, and instead of Danzig, a city of Gdansk emerged. Hitler asked them to give it amicably, but they refused. Still they collaborated with Hitler and engaged together in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia.

From this passage you might have thought it was Poland, not the Soviet Union, that signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, as a prelude to the partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin. Nevertheless, Putin exonerates Stalin of any duplicity:

By the way, the USSR — I have read some archive documents — behaved very honestly. It asked Poland’s permission to transit its troops through the Polish territory to help Czechoslovakia. But the then Polish foreign minister said that if the Soviet planes ﬂew over Poland, they would be downed over the territory of Poland. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the war began, and Poland fell prey to the policies it had pursued against Czechoslovakia, as under the well-known Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, part of that territory, including western Ukraine, was to be given to Russia. Thus Russia, which was then named the USSR, regained its historical lands.

Clearly to Putin, Russian “historical lands” might well be anything Alexander I traversed on his triumphant 1813–14 ride from Leipzig to Paris.

—Throughout the two-hour monologue, Putin compliments himself for his encyclopedic knowledge of Russian history, even though in the following passage he confuses the date (by thirty years) when Crimea became part of Ukraine:

Stalin insisted that those republics be included in the USSR as autonomous entities. For some inexplicable reason, Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, insisted that they be entitled to withdraw from the USSR. And, again for some unknown reasons, he transferred to that newly established Soviet Republic of Ukraine some of the lands together with people living there, even though those lands had never been called Ukraine; and yet they were made part of that Soviet Republic of Ukraine. Those lands included the Black Sea region, which was received under Catherine the Great and which had no historical connection with Ukraine whatsoever.

Only in 1954, after Stalin’s death, did Nikita Khrushchev assign Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and Lenin died in 1924.

—In nursing his endless, self-pitying grievances against the West, Putin implies over and over that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West failed to embrace the successor nations, notably Russia, as equal partners in the family of nations:

Now we won’t say who is afraid of whom, let’s not talk in such categories. Let’s talk about the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected to be taken into the fraternal family of “civilized peoples,” nothing like that happened. You deceived us — when I say “you,” I don’t mean you personally, of course, but the United States — you promised that there would be no NATO expansion to the east, but this happened ﬁve times, ﬁve waves of expansion. We endured everything, persuaded everything, said: no need, we are now our own, as they say, bourgeois, we have a market economy, there is no power of the Communist Party, let’s come to an agreement.

Some of this Putin criticism is justified. At the same time, it overlooks that in the 1990s, newly-independent Russia bankrupted its currency, defaulted on its sovereign debt, waged something close to a civil war (with tanks firing shells into the Duma), devolved the economy into the hands of an oligarchy, and conducted elections as if they were a drug war. Then in the 2000s Putin began liquidating his rivals, sometimes with poison in London tearooms.

—Putin blames the West for inciting terrorism and separatism in the North Caucasus:

I repeatedly raised the issue that the United States should not support separatism or terrorism in the North Caucasus. But they continued to do it anyway. And political support, information support, ﬁnancial support, even military support came from the United States and its satellites for terrorist groups in the Caucasus.

I assume that this is an allusion to American support for Georgia, although it might well be alleging direct U.S. support for separatists in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya, for which there is little or no evidence, outside of the John le Carré novel Our Game. After 2001 Russia and the U.S. supported each other’s “war on terrorism” especially in the Caucasus.

—According to Putin’s interpretation of history, the West (notably the United States and NATO) overthrew Russian-friendly governments in Ukraine and later supplied military aid that Ukraine used to attack Russia:

So, in 2008 the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine. In 2014, there was a coup, they started persecuting those who did not accept the coup, and it was indeed a coup, they created a threat to Crimea which we had to take under our protection. They launched a war in Donbass in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it started. There is a video of aircraft attacking Donetsk from above. They launched a large-scale military operation, then another one. When they failed, they started to prepare the next one. All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO’s doors.

The statement spoke to Carlson’s worldview, that Democrats are to blame for all wars, although the 2008 expression of support for Ukraine and Georgia to someday join NATO (pushed by Republican President George W. Bush) never went anywhere. In particular, Germany and France opposed such expansion, and it was dropped, but to Putin, a memorandum of understanding that died in 2008 was the reason he had to attack Ukraine in 2022, assuming he wasn’t still nursing the wounds of Tilsit (1807).

—Putin invokes the specter of neo-Nazis as another justification for his Ukraine invasion:

That is what I want to talk about right now. It is a very important issue. De-naziﬁcation. After gaining independence, Ukraine began to search, as some Western analysts say, its identity. And it came up with nothing better than to build this identity upon some false heroes who collaborated with Hitler….

I say that Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people. They say, “No, we are a separate people.” Okay, ﬁne. If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so, but not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology….

All this put together led to the decision to end the war that neo-Nazis started in Ukraine in 2014.

In my own travels around Ukraine, I have seen little evidence of Nuremberg-like rallies underpinning the government, but I have no doubt that like many countries in Europe, Ukraine has far right-wing nationalist parties.

Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Poland—to name but a few—all have them. But in these passages Putin isn’t merely equating the Zelensky government with Ukrainian collaborators who in 1941 welcomed the German invasion of the Soviet Union; he is drawing a larger point that NATO, the United States, and the European Union are little more than the reincarnation of the Third Reich just biding their time until they can launch a blitzkrieg into Russia.

A Little Something for the Effort

Because the interview was destined for YouTube and X, it did not run to a strict schedule and only ended when Putin ran out of historical grievances.

With time winding down, Carlson tried to get Putin to hand over the imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, “as a sign of your decency.” Putin responded: “We have done so many gestures of goodwill out of decency that I think we have run out of them.”

Had this been a Hollywood sitcom, presumably a laugh track would have been laid down over the words “so many gestures,” but as it was agitation propaganda all the viewers got was Carlson’s Eagle Scout expression and Putin’s off-with-their heads sly cynical smile.

Harder to compute is what accounts for Putin’s surging popularity within the cultish Republican Party, which for a long time thought the Russians represented “Godless terrorism” and bet everything on rolling back the Iron Curtain. Now country club Republicans seem to be humming “The Internationale”, and even the hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham would consign Zelensky’s government to the dustin of history.

Soviet Revanchism

Be assured that Putin’s territorial claims and ambitions go far beyond the Donbas and Crimea. Left to his own devices, Putin would occupy not just Ukraine, but Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova, and Slovakia—if not the Czech Republic and Finland.

His best chance to recapture these lost tsarist lands would come during a second Trump collaborationist regime, which may explain why Putin agreed to an interview with Donald’s fellow traveler, Tucker Carlson. Was it to make it clear to everyone what the Putin mafia will claim if its bots secure a Trump restoration? (By the way, Donnie still hasn’t delivered on Ukraine for 2016.)

Putin wasn’t sitting down with Carlson’s audience so that it would be better informed on the accomplishments of Peter the Great or understand the betrayals in the Treaty of San Stefano (1878); he spoke only as a loan shark might speak to his custo (Trump), to make it clear how much any re-election will cost in terms of Eastern European annexations.

For his part, Trump signaled back to Putin that he “got” the message about the expected juice, saying a few days later in South Carolina of the NATO allies:

I came in, I made a speech, and I said, ‘You got to pay out.’ They asked me that question. One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ ‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.’

As they say in The Godfather, “It’s not personal… it’s strictly business,” unless, of course, if you owe E. Jean Carroll $83 million.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

Putin’s 15 Major Points in Tucker Carlson Interview

Jack Rasmus — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 06:26:26 +0000

The following are my ‘takeaways’ from listening closely to the Tucker Carlson-Putin Interview of this past week. A number of revelations came out of the interview (e.g. repeated role of France, Germany, UK and CIA scuttling a resolution to the conflict) as well as Putin’s deep commitment to continue until Ukraine is no longer a threat to Russia. One comes away from listening to the interview that Putin feels he has been ‘had’ by the US/EU so often he no longer trusts its politicians and doesn’t believe US presidents have the power to decide; he, and Russians in general, have a deep belief that Russia and Ukraine (and Belarus) are ‘one people’ who have been divided by invaders in the past but always re-united again; and that he’s ready to negotiate but Zelensky and US/NATO have ruled it out and would have to initiate it. Finally, US sanctions have failed, the world is changing fast, and many countries have developed to the point they no longer do whatever the US wants and are demanding more independence.

1) Putin says he’s ready to negotiate but Zelensky has outlawed discussions and US/NATO doesn’t want to. Zelensky is “head of Ukraine state. He could cancel his decree” and negotiate. Russia’s ready but will not ask for negotiations. Russia’s minimal demands: No NATO. Neutral Ukraine. Nazis out of Ukraine government & military

2) Russia & Ukraine had a signed deal in Istanbul in April ’22 to end war. As part of the deal, Donbass remained in Ukraine but with some autonomy. Russia asked to withdraw troops from Kiev as a sign of good faith during negotiations in Istanbul and did. Zelensky reneged on the deal after Boris Johnson flew in and told him to, promising him all the money and weapons he needed.

3) Putin gave a long historical introduction on history of Russia & Ukraine since 862. He explained attempts (in 1200s, 1650s, 1918-21, 1941-44) by invaders to split Ukraine from Russia that all eventually failed. (Suggesting current NATO effort would too). A major repeated Putin theme as Ukraine & Russia have always been one people

4) Western Ukraine (Lvov region) before WW2 was Poland-Hungarian-Romanian, but given to Ukraine by Stalin after WW2 after Poland was given eastern Germany. Putin implied the West could have western Ukraine back (as Putin suggested in prior speeches). West Ukraine is not part of historic Russian homeland which is Russia-Ukraine-Belarus.

5) Russia wanted to join Europe after 1991 but was repeatedly rejected by West. Putin described face-to-face meetings with Clinton & Bush Jr. where they agreed re. Russia joining NATO (Clinton) and stopping US intervention in Chechnya (Bush) but both Clinton and Bush then reversed after conferring with advisors. Putin’s impression US presidents can’t make a deal and are often overturned by other powers in Washington. China’s Xi has the same impression, per Putin.

6) After meeting with Bush, Putin gave him proof CIA was involved in Chechnya war. Bush replied “Well, I’m going to kick their ass”. Bush never got back to Putin after. In 2008 US/NATO in Bucharest NATO meeting declared Ukraine & Georgia would soon join NATO. Russia’s 2008 War with Georgia followed

7) Re. 2014 coup, Putin said “CIA did its job” but it was unnecessary. It “could have been done all legally”. Ukraine president at the time (Yanukovich) was warned by US/EU at the time of the coup not to use police or army against demonstrators in Maidan. He didn’t. Yanukovich agreed to a 3^rdre-election not provided by Ukraine’s constitution but they went ahead with coup anyway. US representatives bragged they spent $5B on the coup. Putin would not mention names (Victoria Nuland). Regarding 2015 Minsk agreement: Putin said Ukraine refused to implement it. EU leaders (Germany’s Merkel & France’s Holland) admitted in 2022 Minsk agreement in 2015 was ‘just to buy time’ to rearm Ukraine. In Putin’s words: “They simply led us by the nose”

8) When asked by Carlson if current talk in the West that if Russia wins in Ukraine it means it will invade Europe, Putin replied ‘only if they attack Russia first’. US mercenaries are already fighting in Ukraine. And when Carlson mentioned US Sen. Schumer’s statement that the US might have to fight in Ukraine, Putin sarcastically said: “Does the US have nothing better to do than fight in Ukraine”. If US did commit troops to Ukraine, it would push world to “brink of humanity”.

9) When asked by Carlson who blew up the Nordstream pipeline, Putin: “CIA has no alibi” and “look at those interested and have capability of doing it” and “beneficiaries are American institutions”. When Carlson asked for more evidence US did it, Putin replied Russia has the evidence but no purpose to reveal it now. Germany has shut down 2 other pipelines that can still be opened & Russia will gladly resume sending gas(naming names might obviously jeopardize what he implied). Germany goes along with US because “German leaders are driven by interests of collaborative west rather than German interests”.

10) Putin: Biden’s Russian sanctions are “a grave mistake”. By weaponizing the US $, the US is undermining its global economic influence. Putin: The dollar is the cornerstone of US power. “Do you even realize what’s going on or not? You are cutting yourself off”. He added, before 2022, “80% Russia’s trade was in $ and only 3% in Yuan. Now 30% is in Yuan, 30% in Rubles and only 13% in $US.

11) Sanctions failed. Russia is now 5th largest economy in ‘purchasing power parity’ measure. China 1st. Russia-China trade now >$240B. BRICS economies are now as large in GDP as US/G7. Sanction “tools US uses don’t work”

12) World is changing very fast. US can’t stop it but is reacting aggressively & militarily to the change. Threats from genetics, AI technologies, ‘brain chip’, etc. Much like gunpowder in the prior era. There’s “no stopping Elon Musk” (i.e. technological change)

13) Carlson asked if Russia would negotiate. Putin: “They’re options if there’s a will”. Those in power must realize Russia can’t be defeated. West “stopped negotiations”.. “Let them correct their mistake”..”I know they want it; let them think how to do it.”Ukraine is now a satellite of the USA, which spends $72B a year on it

14) Putin: what’s happening “to an extent is a civil war”. Ukraine and Russia will be reunited again. “No one can separate the Russian soul” (once again returning to the theme at the start of the interview that historically) Russia, Ukraine, Belarus are one people

15) Among the various reporting ‘bombshells’ revealed by Carlson’s interview was Putin’s clarification it wasn’t Ukraine negotiators at Istanbul that requested Russia pull back from Kiev in ’22 as a show of good faith..it was Macron (France) and Sholtz (Germany) request. And so much for the Western media myth of Ukraine’s great military ‘victory’ driving the Russians out of Kiev in April ’22

The post Putin’s 15 Major Points in Tucker Carlson Interview appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jack Rasmus.

Is Tucker Carlson an Unregistered Foreign Agent? [TEASER]

Andrea Chalupa — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 15:31:00 +0000

Welcome to this Gaslit Nation Emergency Bonus Episode, to cover Walter Duranty’s latest interview with Stalin, as he carries out a genocide. That was over ninety years ago. Today history repeats, with Tucker Carlson releasing a two-hour rant by Putin, presenting what Kellyanne Conway once lovingly referred to as “alternative facts.” Gaslit Nation has the fact-check for you here, and explains why Tucker Carlson, in his traitors paradise in Moscow, visiting Tara Reade, should be investigated for being an unregistered foreign agent. The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News essentially established that Tucker Carlson is not a journalist, and therefore must be investigated for furthering the Kremlin’s agenda.

Like longtime Kremlin operative Paul Manafort who he tried to rehabilitate on his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson reeks of FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act). According to Anton Gerashchenko, a former member of Ukraine’s parliament who has served in various government roles, Russian telegram channels expressed frustration in the Kremlin over Putin and Tucker’s love-in. (Putin sounded like one of those rambling email forwards about Barack HUSSEIN Obama, but the anti-Ukrainian version.) Those reports mention that Tucker was paid a fee. If that’s the case, then he needs to report that and any other perks he received from a foreign adversary. If he doesn’t disclose if and what he was paid for his Kremlin interview, he should face a FARA investigation by the DOJ (Wake up, Merrick Garland!), and an investigation by Democrats in the Senate.

Amazingly, this week the Mr. Jones' graphic novel adaptation, In the Shadow of Stalin, was announced by Oni Press – read more about that in the show notes below. The graphic novel includes deleted scenes from the film. A sneak peak of the pages can be seen here: https://aiptcomics.com/2024/02/07/in-the-shadow-of-stalin-the-story-of-mr-jones/ For historical context of Tucker Carlson’s dangerous Putin interview, watch Mr. Jones or read In the Shadow of Stalin, out September 4th, and available for pre-order now.

We look forward to seeing you at the special live taping of Gaslit Nation featuring former New York state prosecutor Tristan Snell, author of the new book, Taking Down Trump: 12 Rules for Prosecuting Donald Trump by Someone Who Did It Successfully. To our supporters at the Truth-teller level or higher, look out for a Zoom link sent to your inboxes Monday morning. Ask questions in the chat or in the recorded post-interview audience Q&A.To make sure you have your ticket, sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit

Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!

Show Notes:

Opening Clip: https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1755757290953515479

Historical Thriller In the Shadow Of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones Out September 4th https://aiptcomics.com/2024/02/07/in-the-shadow-of-stalin-the-story-of-mr-jones/

Tucker Carlson Releases Putin Interview: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HTMYXtfQt/

Congress Removes Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”)-Related Provisions from Final NDAA https://www.insidepoliticallaw.com/2023/12/07/congress-removes-foreign-agents-registration-act-fara-related-provisions-from-final-ndaa/

Berlin Murder Raises Suspicions of Russian Involvement https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/world/europe/berlin-murder-russia.html

Ukraine's Zelenskyy replaces top general in major shake-up at pivotal moment in war with Russia https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-zelenskyy-replacing-top-general-valerii-zaluzhnyi-to-lead-army/

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Fact-Checking Tucker Carlson Interview With Vladimir Putin: Baseless Claims About The War In Ukraine

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 18:07:40 +0000

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Putin Appears to Mock Tucker Carlson for Being Rejected from the CIA #shorts

VICE News — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 13:09:56 +0000

This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

CPJ joins group calling for explanation of FBI raid linked to Tucker Carlson interview

Committee to Protect Journalists — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 09:54:10 +0000

The FBI used a search warrant to raid the home of freelance journalist Tim Burke on May 8, 2023, in Tampa, Fla., seizing most of his electronic devices, after Burke obtained outtakes of a 2022 Fox News interview by Tucker Carlson with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.

The Committee to Protect Journalists signed on to a coalition letter calling on the Justice Department to make public information about its role in the raid on Burke’s home and how Justice officials believe he broke the law.

Letter_to_DOJ_re_Raid_on_Tim_Burkes_Home_Newsroom Download

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Tucker Carlson, The Post-Left, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Nick Pemberton — Tue, 09 May 2023 05:51:21 +0000

The left must be promoted. The left is just as important as the proletariat, if not more. I am not against the left. I am against the post-left. Upon Tucker Carlson’s firing the position of the post-left became even more clarifying. Consider these tweets from the Post-Left Watch: “These people went on Tucker Carlson: Glenn More

The post Tucker Carlson, The Post-Left, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

I Really Think You Should Read Tucker Carlson’s Last Speech Before Fox Fired Him

Jon Schwarz — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 10:00:22 +0000

Tucker Carlson gives a speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala in National Harbor, Md., on April 21, 2023.

Photo: Leigh Vogel/The New York Times/Redux

Soon the quadrillion online takes on Tucker Carlson’s firing by Fox News will be forgotten. Someday, Carlson himself will fade from human memory. Eventually people will think about cable news as much as they today ponder semaphore.

Yet I believe that one act of Carlson’s — his last pre-termination appearance, an April 21 speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala — will endure for millennia. It is a gargantuan achievement and will abide like a pyramid in the sand, an eternal monument to humanity’s infinite vanity, self-deception, and self-congratulation.

I’ve found it difficult to choose snippets of Carlson’s words to quote. It’s like trying to explain the perfection of Michelangelo’s David to someone, but being only able to show them its fingers, nipples, and wrinkly foreskin. You need the whole experience, to see how the parts fit together to express a larger truth, to genuinely understand its magnificence.

So if you possibly can, I urge you to read the entire transcript. Even better, watch the whole thing. Then we can reconvene below for an in-depth discussion.

As you see, Carlson’s speech is about the “two conclusions” to which he’s come during the past, dark decades.

The first is that he perceives a dangerous phenomenon in which Americans are “going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs.” This is because “the herd instinct is maybe the strongest instinct … not to be cast out of the group, not to be shunned. … It’s harnessed, in fact, by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity.” Huge swaths of Americans, then, have “become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards.”

Because of this, says Carlson, America’s institutions are “all run by weak people.” And “weak leaders cause an angry country.”

His second conclusion is better news: For every 10 cowards, there is one shining individual who has, in Carlson’s words, stood up to say, “No, I’m not doing that. … It’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy. I am not a slave. I am a free citizen, and I’m not doing that. And there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it.”

Moreover, Carlson proclaims, “The truth is contagious. Lying is, but the truth is as well. And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this — I don’t want to get supernatural on you — but you are filled with this power from somewhere else.”

Here’s what you might assume Carlson would say next, if you’re the kind of dreamer who’s filled with an irrepressible hope that words can have meaning:

Carlson would have confessed that he himself is one of these shameful cowards. As everyone in the room surely knew, Carlson collected huge checks from Fox even as it encouraged its audience to believe what Carlson and everyone there knew was false: that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Carlson would have explained that he’d been a quisling to the truth and gone along with a new, new poisonous thing because he wanted to keep his job. He’d have apologized for being part of the herd trying to punish heretics, since he wanted Fox to fire a reporter who was reporting on the topic accurately.

In other words, he is one of the weak leaders creating an angry country. He knows these things because he was personally tested — and failed.

And that would have been merely the start of Carlson’s electrifying, manly truth-telling. He was speaking to all the potentates of the Heritage Foundation, one of the most powerful forces in U.S. politics supporting the capitalist depredations and hawkish foreign policy that we know Carlson hates with such passionate sincerity. Scarred by his moral collapse after the 2020 election, Carlson is now going to seize an incredible opportunity to be the 1 man in 10 with the courage to defy the herd to their faces!

He could have begun by paging through the Heritage Foundation’s 2022 annual report. He would have noted that Heritage’s top donors, giving over $1 million per year, include Barb Van Andel-Gaby: a member of the family that founded Amway, a multilevel marketing scheme and one of American business’s scuzziest bottom-feeders. Another is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which Carlson would be horrified to note was a top contributor to the Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative outfit that helped make the invasion of Iraq happen.

He would be likewise appalled to see Heritage also got over $500,000 from Ray Stata, the co-founder of Analog Devices. Analog is a semiconductor company created with technology invented in the U.S. that is now — as it explains in an SEC filing — “leveraging an outsourcing model for manufacturing operations.” (It also owns factories in Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, as well as the U.S.)

Then Carlson, in his role as a journalist committed to transparency, would excoriate Heritage for granting anonymity to 25 big contributors. He would be disgusted to see that Heritage tells donors “we pledge always to respect your philanthropic intent” and that it offers “a written contract clearly stating the purpose and intent of the donation and how it shall be spent.” Worst of all, the annual report proudly features a photograph of Donald Trump — a man Carlson believes to be a “demonic force” — at Heritage’s annual leadership conference.

Next, Carlson would have gotten down to specifics. He would have told his audience that Americans, wearied by the endless wars of U.S. elites, would be disgusted to learn of Heritage’s close ties with the world’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin. Carlson, a man devoted to peace, would have scoffed at Heritage’s eager promotion of a “new cold war” with China. Finally, he would angrily denounce Heritage’s declaration that any Biden administration proposals to weaken Covid-19 vaccine patents — and thereby lower the profits of Pfizer and Moderna — must be “dead on arrival.”

To say that Carlson did not utter anything like this is much like saying the sun is larger than a tangerine. It’s accurate — but doesn’t wholly capture the magnitude of the situation.

Carlson actually started with voluminous praise of Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. He reports that he’d recently gone pheasant hunting with Roberts in South Dakota and found that, unlike all the phonies in D.C., Roberts is “completely real. He’s an honest person.” Carlson double-checked this by asking a member of Heritage’s security detail what he thought of Roberts. His response: “I would go to war for him.” As Carlson puts it, “Why would he lie to me?” Obviously, there’s no possible reason. As all students of human nature know, when the boss’s rich buddy asks an employee what they think of the boss, the employee always provides the absolute unvarnished truth.

Then Carlson gets into the details of the monstrous tyranny engulfing America, a tyranny that luckily enough has nothing at all to do with the Heritage Foundation. To start with, there’s “putting your pronouns in your email.” For what it’s worth, this does not fit with my personal experience. I’ve never put pronouns in my email beyond “I” or “you,” and I’ve yet to be sent to the Pronoun Detainment Camp high in the Sierra Nevadas.

Then there’s “saying things you can’t define. LBGTQIA+, who’s the plus?” This suggests that Carlson does not have access to a notable recent invention called the internet.

Also, “You have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.’” And, “The Treasury secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.’” Here Carlson is standing valiantly against many terrible things that have happened in his imagination.

Higher and higher Carlson’s fever rages. In the past, American politics was about “rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes. So, we all want the country to be more prosperous and free.” But now you have the good, rational people from Heritage in the room with him, versus something that’s “not a political movement. It’s evil.”

What is good? “Good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace … cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness.” And what is evil? “Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth.” Yes, “and filth.” As Stanley Kubrick dramatized in “Dr. Strangelove,” and science has since illuminated, conservatives tend to have a peculiar fixation on contamination. Carlson is one second away from talking about our precious bodily fluids.

Indeed, he whips himself up into such a frenzy of fear that he pronounces himself ready to be martyred like St. Paul over these issues. “I hope it won’t come to that,” he says, “but if it does come to that, here I am. Here I am. It’s Paul on trial.”

This forms the bulk of Carlson’s Great Pyramid of human fatuousness. For 35 minutes he bloviates about the supreme importance of being “the lone, brave person in the crowd who says, ‘No, thank you.’” Then he says nothing that would cause his wealthy, cosseted crowd the least discomfort. It’s like watching someone yammer incessantly about how we all must wear double-breasted purple suits while standing before you in a bright green muumuu.

The greatest propaganda always identifies genuine, deep human problems, even as it embodies these problems itself.

This is, for me, why Carlson’s speech will last the ages. The greatest propaganda always identifies genuine, deep human problems, even as it embodies these problems itself. Carlson asks his audience to say a prayer for our country and mentions the Beatitudes. But he’s apparently never read them. “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” asks Jesus in Matthew 7:3. “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s.”

So all of that is wonderful enough. But then there’s the pyramid’s capstone, the pyramidion covered in gleaming hilarious gold.

“I’m paid to predict things,” Carlson tells us at one point. “I try and think a lot about what connects certain outcomes that I should have seen before they occurred.” Given what was just about to happen to Carlson less than three days later, this indicates either that Carlson was terrible at his job, or that he never understood what he was paid for to begin with.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

End of the Tucker era – The Grayzone live

The Grayzone — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 19:11:17 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

The Ejection of Tucker Carlson Is a Classic “Reverse Ferret” by Rupert Murdoch

Peter Maass — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 10:00:54 +0000

It’s been a lifetime since Fox News offloaded Tucker Carlson, and when I say a lifetime, I mean six days.

It feels like forever thanks to the exhausting velocity of theories that seek to explain the downfall of cable television’s most famous host and racist. Carlson was fired because of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Carlson was fired because he used the C-word. Carlson was fired because he prayed too much. Carlson was fired because even his colleagues at Fox despised him.

That’s just a partial list of the best guesses circulating in the media ether. While Carlson was probably felled by more than a single factor, these guesses are akin to the trees that obscure the proverbial forest. Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News, did what he often does at a moment of crisis, swiveling 180 degrees to secure his business empire. The move is famous enough to have an unusual name in Britain, where Murdoch first came to global prominence: the reverse ferret.

In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”

One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenoweth wrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.” For instance, the right-wing Murdoch unexpectedly threw The Sun’s support to the Labor Party and Tony Blair in 1997, reportedly because then-Prime Minister John Major refused to back policies that Murdoch had pressed him on.

That kind of out-of-the-blue abandonment is basically what happened with Carlson, Fox’s biggest star and the pride and joy of not just Rupert Murdoch but also his son Lachlan, who runs the network on a daily basis. Both Murdochs had unusually close relationships with their favorite host — Carlson even dined with Rupert at the 92-year-old’s estate in Bel Air just a few weeks ago — until, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Carlson learned just a few minutes before the rest of us that his services were no longer required at Fox News.

This occurred a few days after another big reversal: Fox’s decision to pay $787.5 million in damages to Dominion for wrongfully reporting that its machines took votes away from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The stop-the-steal ferret placed in America’s pants by Carlson and other Fox hosts, such as Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, was suddenly extracted, and while it was major news across the country, Fox hardly mentioned it, just as the network said almost nothing about Carlson’s exit. The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.

Protesters outside Fox News HQ in the wake of the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and the firing of Fox’s anchor Tucker Carlson on April 25, 2023.

Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

The philosophy behind this maneuver helps answer another question: What’s next for Fox? The consensus, expressed by journalist Brian Stelter, is that the Murdochs have learned to never again let a host become as extreme and beyond their control as Carlson. The Murdochs have a line of allowed mendacity, Stelter explained this week, and Carlson crossed it all the time; whoever replaces him will understand that you do not cross the line. Stelter, who is now working on his second book about Fox News, added, “I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.”

That would defy the imperative of the reverse ferret. Glenn Beck got too wild and was reverse ferreted more than a decade ago. As NPR reported in 2011, “At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News channel?” Bill O’Reilly took Beck’s place as the network’s headliner, and when he eventually went too far (by sexually harassing women), he too was gone. Now, it’s Tucker Carlson’s turn. Throughout it all, Fox has made piles of money, billions and billions of dollars, far more than its rivals.

The lucrative dialectic of the ferret/reverse ferret is the spring mechanism for Murdoch’s business success. That’s because the kind of right-wing propaganda that makes the greatest amount of money is not reality-based; it’s how we got birtherism, the war on Christmas, Seth Rich, ivermectin, the “great replacement theory,” and election denialism. Walking up to the edge of what might destroy them, and doing an about-face that might involve paying off an aggrieved party, is not a mistake but a business strategy.

It is magical thinking to believe that Rupert and Lachlan have any interest in abandoning a strategy that constitutes their DNA. The Murdochs will not save us from the Murdochs.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Peter Maass.

Poetic Justice: On the Departure of Fox Hatemonger Tucker Carlson

Ari Paul — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 16:17:22 +0000

Things seemed hopeless for those wondering if Tucker Carlson ofFox News—who used his show to promote white supremacist hoaxes (Independent, 7/20/22) and degrading statements about immigrants (The Hill, 9/23/21)—would ever be held accountable for spewing hate on air. An advertiser exodus (New York Times, 6/18/20) and calls for his deplatforming from mainstream organizations (Anti-Defamation League, 5/25/22) seemed only to solidify the frozen-dinner heir's position as cable news' top-rated host. Last year, Carlson's show "averaged 3.32 million viewers, nabbing the biggest audience in cable news among viewers ages 25 to 54," according to the New York Post (4/24/23).

"He's the tent pole of the entire prime time line-up," said Reece Peck, author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class. "He helps the other shows, people stay to watch after Tucker and before Tucker."

And in a flash, he was gone (NBC, 4/24/23). After Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for nearly $800 million over the network's repeated lies about the company fixing the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden, I noted (FAIR.org, 4/20/23) that the last-minute agreement was still a form of accountability for the network, even if the settlement sum was half of what Dominion sought. (Carlson's departure took $700 million from Fox's stock value in the 30 minutes after it was announced. The stock recovered somewhat, but was still down half a billion dollars at the closing bell.)

Done in by Dominion?

Indeed, the damaging discovery process preceding the trial date might have done Carlson in. The Washington Post (4/24/23) reported that "it was Carlson's comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company's thinking told the Post."

Dominion said Carlson's departure was not a condition of the settlement, according to the LA Times(4/24/23), but the paper did say that Carlson's comments "that turned up in the discovery process for the case may have also played a role in" his departure.

The LA Times also said that sources within Fox said that Carlson's departure is related to a separate, hostile work environment lawsuit brought by his former head of booking, Abby Grossberg, who alleges "that male producers regularly used vulgarities to describe women and frequently made antisemitic jokes" (New York Times, 4/24/23).

The texts exposed Carlson for who he is, a pompous, rich media elitist who gives not one single damn about MAGA voters and hates their king.

The discovery process of the Dominion case revealed numerous texts from Carlson—whose entire persona at Fox News rests on the wave of the Make America Great Again movement—showing his intense dislike of Donald Trump (New York Times, 3/8/23). "What [Trump is] good at is destroying things" was among one of the key texts, but everyone's favorite, of course, is Carlson saying of Trump, "I hate him passionately."

No, Carlson's on-air racism (Independent, 4/13/21; ADL, 4/22/21), transphobia (New York Post, 12/28/22), xenophobia (Washington Post, 12/15/18), admiration for authoritarians (FAIR.org, 8/3/21, 10/20/21), and flirtations with antisemitism (Daily Beast, 10/11/22, 12/23/22) were never the problem for Fox News. If The Washington Post's report that the Dominion texts were definitive is true, it's poetic justice: The texts exposed Carlson for who he is, a pompous, rich media elitist who gives not one single damn about MAGA voters and hates their king, only cynically using Trump's political popularity for his own media grift. That lifting of the veil, the end of the conceit for a corporation whose entire modus operandi is disguising its ruling-class politics to sell faux populism to its viewers, is a major outcome of the Dominion settlement.

Off to the gold mine

But what is to become of Carlson? Surely he won't drift quietly off into obscurity. The right-wing media machine, with its growing community of news sites, podcasts, and Substack newsletters, is a gold mine for anyone who can draft a sentence linking any conservative grievance to the word "wokeness." Carlson sold his stake in the Daily Caller (New York Times, 6/10/20), the news site he helped found, but the possibilities for rehabilitation are seemingly endless.

Bill O'Reilly once reigned as the star of Fox News until his ouster due to sexual harassment accusations (New York Times, 4/19/17), and today he is but a mere afterthought. But he was an aging relic before an explosion in Trump-fueled media. Today, a fresh-faced Carlson, still an emblem of MAGA rage, has the world as his oyster where he could perform untethered by corporate restraints, although without as much reach as cable news.

"His star will never shine as bright as it did at Fox."

"It's not beyond the realm of possibility that he could reinvent himself, but I think Fox is center stage, everything flows from its framing, from its agenda-setting, and it has the most influence over Republican politicians," Peck said. "Even with Newsmax and [One America News Network], it's really hard to match the respectability you get from being on a cable dial."

"His star will never shine as bright as it did at Fox," he said.

Fox is going to survive, valuing the audience that made the network what it is today, even if a little less hate is going to be pumped onto the mainstream American airwaves at primetime. "Fox has survived the loss of its biggest stars before," Peck said.

But Carlson's departure is a reminder that while the fight against Fox's worst hatemonger often seemed fruitless, the Goliaths are, in fact, vulnerable.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ari Paul.

How bad was Tucker Carlson for the planet?

John McCracken — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 10:30:00 +0000

Tucker Carlson spent years denying, deflecting, and sowing doubt on climate change to his 3.4 million nightly viewers.

His program was the most popular on Fox New and he spent his nights spewing misogynistic, racist, and bizarre rants. Carlson, who began his role as host of Tucker Carlson Tonight in 2016, also obsessively waged a war on guests who talked about climate change, from scientists to protestors.

While court documents and his first public appearance since he was abruptly fired earlier this week point towards Carlson’s and his peers’ full awareness that they knew they were lying to the public, the damage is still real.

From airing conspiracy theories about the government forcing people to eat bugs or inviting guests on air to talk about shrinking people to stop carbon footprints, here are some of his more memorable moments.

“In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky,” Carlson said after Western lawmakers linked 2020 wildfires to climate change.

“How about no more heat or air conditioning or electricity or cars or wearing leather or eating meat or having children? All are sins against the climate. So, for you, it is insects, tap water, and celibacy,” Carlson said early this year, declaring that the United States had a new “climate cult” as politicians and environmentalists look to decarbonize the economy.

“I’m open-minded and you are not,” Carlson assured famous scientist and climate activist Bill Nye in 2017.

Now that Carlson is off the air, renowned climate scientist Michael E. Mann didn’t mince words on the Fox News host’s role in delaying climate action.

“He was a perpetual fount of climate change disinformation,” Mann said in an email to Grist.

Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The New Climate War, said that Carlson’s nightly misinformation “pollutes our entire public discourse, slowing down the needed decarbonization of our economy, ultimately leading to trillions of dollars of damage, and much suffering and loss of life.”

For Allison Fisher, Carlson is just one part of a larger climate change web of denial, which continues to cause incalculable damage.

Fisher, the climate and energy program director at media watchdog group Media Matters for America, said Carlson’s track record of denialism and overt eco-fascism —seen in a 2019 segment where he said climate-based migration to the U.S. would allow immigrants to “pollute” and “despoil” the country— doesn’t bode well for consequences at the network for stoking fear over the climate crisis.

She said Carlson’s departure would stop his specific brand of obfuscation, but Fox has plenty of other hosts and guests who latch onto ways to stall progress and sow doubt.

“The bigger threat is that they’re going to continue to push back against the clean energy economy and the transition away from fossil fuels,” Fisher told Grist. “They all do it in their own way for their own audiences.”

When climate deniers like Carlson deflect and misinform on the pressing issue of climate change, the damage can be hard to tally, said Max Boykoff, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and a researcher of media and climate communications.

“It’s a whole lot easier to muddy the waters of these discussions and destroy public trust than it is to keep those waters clean,” Boykoff told Grist. “A lot of his utterances over the years through the Fox News megaphone really did a lot of damage.”

Boykoff said Carlson, who he called “one of the most influential contrarians on climate change,” followed textbook techniques of denial.

Informed by the teachings of Kari Norgaard, a University of Oregon sociologist and author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, Boykoff said Carlson would likely engage in denialism to create ambiguity and delay the progress of how the world was moving forward.

“When he denies climate change, he fractures the collective action that we need to be moving forward,” Boykoff said.

Boykoff, author of Who Speaks for Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change, said one way to combat climate misinformation is to find ways into climate change conversations through other issues that are affected by a warming world.

“We can talk about it through energy security, we can talk about it through immigration,” Boykoff said. “There are all these different ways we can find common ground by talking about associated challenges we’re facing.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How bad was Tucker Carlson for the planet? on Apr 28, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

Demagogues Three: Charles Foster Kane, Willie Stark, and Tucker Carlson

Stephen F. Eisenman — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 06:00:07 +0000

The firing of Tucker Carlson by the Fox Corporation is a peculiarly American kind of denouement. A person born into wealth and influence, pushes, scrambles, and bullies to secure more of each, convinced they are his birthright. This being the United States, he quickly discovers that the best way to gain a mass following and the rewards that come with it is to embrace nativism or fascism. He does so and rises to a pinnacle of influence. But just as quickly as he rose to atmospheric heights, he falls back to earth. More

The post Demagogues Three: Charles Foster Kane, Willie Stark, and Tucker Carlson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen F. Eisenman.

Tucker Carlson: What Happened?

Robert Fantina — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 05:40:57 +0000

The world awoke just a few days ago to the news that Tucker Carson, the darling of the FOX News right-wing conspiracy world, was unemployed. Yes, after years of spewing nonsense about COVID 19, transgender people, Black Lives Matter and a ‘stolen’ election, Carson is now FOX News history. Why, one might ask, did an More

The post Tucker Carlson: What Happened? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Fantina.

Tucker Carlson, GOP Candidate?

Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 03:11:00 +0000

This week we take a look at the slate for 2024, including recently declared candidate President Biden, career criminal seditionist Donald Trump, Marianne Williamson, Robert Kennedy Jr, and possibly two more Republicans – the faltering Ron DeSantis, and the demonic Tucker Carlson, who recently was set free from his Fox News hellscape to possibly run for office. We contemplate a Carlson run, examine the Fox News lawsuit, and discuss the gutting of investigative reporting and the demise of cable news in general. At the end of the show, we debate about how Biden is doing and what he should be doing – not to win, but to fulfill his campaign promises and serve the American people, which is his job!

We also discuss the Kremlin’s latest moves into Sudan and the operations of the Wagner Group: the brutal band of professional mercenaries that has been active in Ukraine, Syria, and other regions the Kremlin seeks to drag into their sphere of influence. We discuss the history of Russia’s efforts in Africa and how Obama official Susan Rice helped paved the road for the current disaster. We also discuss what it means that Rice is finally leaving the Biden administration.

Every week we do a bonus episode for our Patreon subscribers. We’ve decided to start releasing them later in the week because we often have extra topics we don’t get to in the main show. So this week, stay tuned for some extra Gaslit Nation as well as the answers to our listener Q&A! To submit a question, join at the Democracy Defender level or higher. To listen to the bonus episode, join at the Truth-Teller level or higher.

Gaslit Nation is one of few podcasts that is free to all and that keeps all of our episodes archived online in transcript form. This is important as news websites continue to go under or paywall their content. We are under no corporate control and are funded entirely by our listeners. Help keep Gaslit Nation going by joining us on Patreon!

Show Notes:

Submit your song for the Gaslit Nation Make Art song series. Sign up here.

Clip: CNN on Russia in Sudan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQapgnGwLBw

Clip: Tucker Carlson’s Disinformation on Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG8uLFHJWVE

Clip: Tucker Carlson defending child rap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr1WnL070hc

Clip: Don Lemon on Vivek Ramaswamy https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1650563196795641871

Russia is plundering gold in Sudan to boost Putin’s war effort in Ukraine https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/africa/sudan-russia-gold-investigation-cmd-intl/index.html

South African Border War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Border_War

Putin’s Private Army Accused of Raping New Moms on Maternity Ward https://www.thedailybeast.com/wagner-group-mercenaries-accused-of-raping-new-moms-on-maternity-ward-in-central-african-republic

Rex Tillerson Is Running the State Department Into the Ground https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/04/rex-tillerson-is-running-the-state-department-into-the-ground-215677/

Shot 5-year-old girl in head: Prisoners from Wagner confess to killing children in Bakhmut and Soledar https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/shot-5-old-girl-head-120100855.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGXtXRZip4dbSPAHNmLau_eGyS6S7xX-IinzOlzTLPpPy3-l3wG6eay7o8myxP5i28E8fZizEV8BGjVpahNPC7atwhHDmKZ3TW1BrXK61L-dcbn-4rhyGe13jPFFCHDz2qvF_0rJdTovCObPDC-xNvAPsbVNwe8ziFnxRstM3KUj

Xi Condemns Killings in African Nation Where Russian and Chinese Interests Compete https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/world/europe/central-african-republic-russia-china.html

Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/us/politics/jack-teixeira-leaks-russia-ukraine.html

“Stunning”: Reporters who uncovered Matt Gaetz evidence baffled after DOJ drops sex trafficking case https://www.salon.com/2023/02/16/stunning-reporters-uncovered-matt-gaetz-evidence-baffled-after-doj-drops-trafficking-case/

Ukraine war: US to provide long-range missiles in latest aid package https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64518532

The changes at CNN look politically motivated. That should concern us all https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/24/the-changes-at-cnn-look-politically-motivated-that-should-concern-us-all

‘He’s Making Up a World He Wants to Attack’: How Vivek Ramaswamy Became a Right-Wing Culture Warrior https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-making-of-a-conservative-culture-warrior

Don Lemon Ousted From CNN in Move That Left Him ‘Stunned’ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/business/media/don-lemon-cnn.html

Wagner in Sudan: What have Russian mercenaries been up to? (yahoo.com)

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

Has Fox News ‘Found Religion’ by Firing Tucker Carlson?

Ariel Gold — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 20:18:44 +0000

Tucker Carlson got fired!

Many liberals are celebrating, calling it a reckoning—a win for racial justice and decency. With this bombshell revelation, some might even believe that Fox News has finally gotten religion and seen the error of its ways. It's better late than never, they say. Salvation is always possible.

But if Fox did find religion, why did it take so long? Religion is not something that is found overnight. It is a conversion that moves us when it takes hold at the core of our being. It's hard to believe that Fox has suddenly seen the light and come to the conclusion that the blatant racism, hatred, and xenophobia that the network has trafficked in for so long is not something they want to continue. Does Fox News want us to believe that it has seen the light and knelt at the altar of repentance because it finally jettisoned the leading and most incendiary voice of racial hatred?

Why now?

True religion requires clear directional change. Repentance requires amends.

Why has the network at this moment felt a need to jettison Tucker Carlson from his throne? Fox had no problem previously with the racism, xenophobia, replacement theories, conspiracy theories, and the blatantly white supremacist tropes spewing from his mouth each evening. The network not only did not have a problem with Carlson's lies, half-truths, and propagandist rhetoric, it benefited enormously and from what was the cornerstone of ratings and advertising dollars. If Fox suddenly found religion, it was a different religion than the voice Paul heard on the road to Damascus that caused a radical change of heart. It was a different religion than the bright light of revelation from heaven that makes one turn away from one's complacency and complicity—from slavery, Jim Crow, unabashed and unchecked capitalism, and patriarchy.

At best, the kind of religion Fox found was the $787.5 million judgment agreement kind of spirit. It was not the fear of fire and brimstone and souls burning in hell. It was not the inability to live in one's own skin and sleep at night while doing nothing to stop the extrajudicial execution of Black and Brown in their own homes and neighborhoods or to stop refugee children from being separated from their parents and held in concentration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border. At best, the payout of nearly $1 billion to Dominion Voting Systems, and the other legal threats looming, is Fox's interpretation of dangling over the fires of hell.

If Fox has seen the light, even just the light of financial salvation, then it will purge itself not just of Carlson, but of all of the minions of hell that continue to pollute its airwaves with the filth of hatred, racism, and white supremacy. Why fire Carlson but continue to offer airtime to white supremacist ideologues like Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo, who have each engaged in the same distortions that Carlson is guilty of? Why exchange one divisive and hateful personality for another? True religion requires clear directional change. Repentance requires amends.

Can you imagine if it had been a Black or Brown person on the air spewing anti-white rhetoric, embracing hate-filled divisive ideologies, and fanning historical flames of the country's tendencies towards violence? How long will they be allowed on the air?

The very same day that Fox ousted Carson, CNN fired Don Lemon. Was the exact same day timing of the firings—weeks after Lemon said that Nikki Haley was "not in her prime" and CNN sent him to sensitivity training—a coincidence? Perhaps it was a joint sacrifice to the Gods of ratings, the almighty God of the dollar by networks who claim to be arch-enemies but are part of the same system.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Ariel Gold.

Why Did Fox Fire Tucker Carlson? Far-Right Host Helped Fox Mainstream Hate, Conspiracies to Millions

Democracy Now! — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 14:05:54 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Why Did Fox Fire Tucker Carlson? Far-Right Host Helped Fox Mainstream Hate, Conspiracies to Millions

Democracy Now! — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 12:41:58 +0000

In a surprise announcement, Fox News said Monday it was cutting ties with its top-rated host Tucker Carlson, effective immediately. Although a precise reason wasn’t given, the move came just days after the cable network settled a $787.5 million defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over lies propagated by the cable network about the 2020 presidential election. Since taking over the primetime slot in 2016, Carlson has also spread far-right talking points about immigrants, Black people and the LGBTQ community. For more, we speak with Madeline Peltz of Media Matters for America, where she has helped to expose Carlson’s extremism. “It creates a major vacuum in the right-wing media ecosystem,” Peltz says of Carlson’s departure.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Tucker Carlson, ‘Purveyor of Hate,’ Out at Fox

Julia Conley — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:03:41 +0000

Less than a week after avoiding a trial regarding its election lies with a $787.5 million settlement, Fox News announced on Monday that its top-rated prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, is leaving the network effective immediately.

Carlson's final show was Friday evening, and he closed the broadcast by telling viewers, "We'll be back on Monday," suggesting he wasn't aware of his imminent departure.

"Tucker Carlson Tonight" played a key role in the defamation lawsuit filed against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the network of spreading misinformation about its election software as its hosts and guests repeatedly claimed votes cast for former Republican President Donald Trump in 2020 had been "flipped" for Democratic President Joe Biden.

Carlson had been expected to testify in the case before it was settled just before the trial was scheduled to begin last month. While claiming on-air that questions about the validity of the 2020 election results were part of "legitimate discourse and inquiry," uncovered text messages between Carlson and his producer showed that he found Trump's claims about the election "disgusting" and "destructive."

In addition to promoting lies about Biden's victory, Carlson spent his 14-year tenure at Fox News—as a contributor, panelist, co-host, and starting in 2016 as host of his own prime-time show—attacking immigrants and asylum-seekers, advancing the white supremacist "Great Replacement Theory," and urging police to crack down on racial justice protesters.

Economist Robert Reich noted that Carlson's exit does not mean that the network will "start telling the truth."

\u201cTucker Carlson might be gone, but if you're counting on Fox News to suddenly start telling the truth, don't hold your breath.\u201d
— Robert Reich (@Robert Reich) 1682353106

While Fox News has given no indication that its other hosts, commentators, and guests will stop promoting similar ideas, consumer rights watchdog Public Citizen President Robert Weissman called Carlson's departure "flat-out great news."

"Anything that reduces the reach of this purveyor [of] hate, racism, reaction and authoritarianism is a positive step for America and the world," he said.

With Carlson gone, said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Fox News officials "just need to take out the rest of the trash."

Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America, said Carlson was likely pushed out because he had become "toxic" for the network, even as it relied heavily on him and his millions of viewers.

\u201c2/ That said, Tucker was extremely important to Fox News. When Fox\u2019s audience backlashed back in 2020, they put Tucker out front and center. \n\nTucker is also the *only* Fox personality that has been able to convert Fox viewers to Fox Nation subscribers.\u201d
— Angelo Carusone (@Angelo Carusone) 1682350953

"Fox News without Tucker is basically a wet paper towel: fragile and functionally useless," said Carusone. "They will try and get their footing back fast, but don't let them."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Glenn Greenwald’s Lalaland Defense of Tucker Carlson

Chris Green — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 05:45:35 +0000

Glenn Greenwald is a man whose life in the early and mid-2010s seemed right out of a spy thriller as he helped Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in landmark incidents exposing, among other things, US military atrocities and illegal NSA spying. Long seen as part of the radical left, he has, in recent More

The post Glenn Greenwald’s Lalaland Defense of Tucker Carlson appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chris Green.

The Tucker Carlson-Led Effort to Whitewash the History of January 6 Will Fail

Fred Wertheimer — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 12:23:01 +0000

Dominion Voting Systems has provided a public service for the American people.

As a result of its pending defamation lawsuit against Fox News, Dominion has laid bare the extraordinary con game that Fox carried out in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and that continues today.

Fox elevated and affirmed for their millions of viewers former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him by giving airtime to Trump’s team. But even as they put them on the air, Fox hosts and executives admitted privately that they knew they were airing lies and “insane” conspiracy theories.

The big three Fox propagandists, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham privately complained about their lying guests. But they never bothered to tell this to their viewers. Their texts, obtained by Dominion as part of the lawsuit, also reveal that some worried they would lose viewers if they actually told the truth.

Today, Trump continues to peddle his Big Lie — and so does Fox News.

Carlson, gifted with exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of internal Capitol footage from the January 6 riot by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is attempting to persuade people they should not believe what they saw with their own eyes. He has been airing cherry-picked portions of the January 6 videos to absurdly argue that the insurrectionist mob attack that led to the death and injury of Capitol police officers was little more than a “peaceful” protest of “sightseers.”

According to The New York Times, more than 150 officers from the Capitol Police, the Washington, DC Police Department, and other agencies suffered injuries as a result of the violence. A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people, including three police officers, lost their lives in connection with the attack.

A number of Senate Republicans have called Carlson out this week. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the way Carlson portrayed the insurrection, Minority Whip John Thune described January 6 as “an attack on the Capitol,” and Sen. Thom Tillis called Carlson’s claims “bulls — -.”

Hypocrisy abounds at Fox News. And, they are joined by Speaker McCarthy.

Many House Republicans, however, are supporting Carlson’s revisionist history. They include the Republican leaders: House Speaker McCarthy, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik.

In his Dominion deposition, Fox head Rupert Murdoch said he believed the 2020 presidential election was free, fair, and not stolen. Yet, Murdoch never pulled Fox back from promoting the Trump Big Lie. And, he currently silently sits by as Carlson tries to sell the lie that January 6 was a peaceful protest.

Hypocrisy abounds at Fox News. And, they are joined by Speaker McCarthy.

Shortly after January 6, McCarthy called the attackers “un-American,” and said that anyone who participated in the mob attack should go to jail. “You don’t understand what was transpiring at that moment and that time,” McCarthy told reporters shortly after the Capitol attack. “People brought ropes. When I got back into my building, I found the straps that they had. I don’t know if they’d come [to] try to kidnap somebody or whatever. But they were well planned for it.”

McCarthy knew perfectly well that Carlson would use his show to present an untrue version of what happened on January 6.

Carlson had earlier called January 6 a “footnote” in history and “forgettably minor.” Yet, that didn’t stop McCarthy from knowingly giving Carlson the opportunity to further a false narrative that is the complete opposite of what McCarthy described in 2021.

Meanwhile, the effort to rewrite history goes on.

McCarthy ally Rep. Barry Loudermilk is preparing to investigate the Jan. 6 investigators as part of a new House subcommittee, and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are planning to visit some of the January 6 rioters in jail.

House Republicans will fail.

Fox News and Carlson’s efforts to whitewash the January 6 insurrection will also fail and will go down in history as a national disgrace.

This op-ed is adapted from a piece that appeared in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter that is published each Thursday. Read this week’s newsletterhere.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Fred Wertheimer.

Dominion, Tucker Carlson, and the Very Big and More Dangerous Lie

Jeffrey C. Isaac — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 15:55:25 +0000

The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has gotten a great deal of attention, and rightly so, for it raises fundamental questions about democracy in the U.S. and the ways that it is profoundly corrupted and seriously endangered by an alliance of right-wing media and the Republican Party. And yet beneath the lying exposed in the case are the more dangerous lies at the heart of MAGA ideology. And whether or not the notorious liars at Fox News Corp. believed anything they were saying about Dominion, there is no doubt that the deeper lies remain articles of faith for Fox and the Republican party.

The facts of the case are pretty straightforward.

Dominion Voting Systems Corporation is a privately owned company that produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including electronic voting machines. Its technology has been used extensively by many U.S. states. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Trump and many of his supporters promoted the claim—the lie—that Dominion was part of a wide conspiracy to "rig" the election for Biden, exaggerating Biden votes and hiding Trump votes. This claim was persistently and deliberately promoted and amplified by Fox News anchors, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Dominion is suing Fox News Corp. for defamation and damages related to its promotion of false conspiracy theories that have serious harmed the reputation and the revenues of the company.

As information about witness testimony, along with redacted and unredacted documents, has been made public, it seems clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Dominion's core allegation is true: Fox News officials and news anchors actively promoted lies about a Dominion-based conspiracy while knowing that there was no evidence to support these lies, and that its principal sources were Trump fanatics, like Sydney Powell, who lacked any credibility whatsoever. Most notoriously, both Rupert Murdoch and Carlson repeatedly made disparaging remarks about Trump, with Carlson also saying that the Dominion "software shit is absurd."

The revelations, which continue, reveal a shocking cynicism on the part of Murdoch, the Fox corporation leadership, and the principal Fox anchors, especially Carlson, about the importance of the corporate bottom line and about the gullibility of Fox viewers. As long as the viewers are willing to tune in, Fox is willing to supply them with the conspiracy theories they demand, crazy ideas they have been primed to believe by Fox itself—"supply and demand" in action.

It is too simplistic, and too politically comforting, to imagine that we are dealing with a simple question of some manipulative people deliberately telling lies to gullible others.

This cynicism of Fox News Corp. about "news" is incredibly disturbing. It reflects horribly on Fox. It also severely undermines the veracity of the false and crazy things that many millions of Trump supporters believe about the election and about the reliability of those "news" anchors who they have so credulously trusted.

If the accurate news about the lying of "Fox News" is widely publicized, it should play some role in delegitimizing the craziest claims made about "election fraud" in 2020. That would be a good thing. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Trump supporters are likely to learn little about this, and to disbelieve what they hear. For they have already been corrupted by years of exposure to Fox and more recently to its even farther-right competitors, Newsmax and One America News (OAN), and they are firmly ensconced in the reactionary media bubble.

Regardless, a focus on the intentional lying of Carlson et al, while important, is politically misleading, in the same way that the House January 6 Committee's focus on whether Trump knew he was telling lies was misleading.

The reason: it is too simplistic, and too politically comforting, to imagine that we are dealing with a simple question of some manipulative people deliberately telling lies to gullible others. Because the MAGA ideology runs much deeper than the most outlandish election machine conspiracy theories exposed by the Dominion case, for its consumers but even for its producers. And for those in the grip of MAGA ideology, all empirical evidence is filtered through a distorted frame.

Carlson et al might have privately believed in early January of 2021 that Trump, Powell, Giuliani and their circle were crazy, and that their desperate lying was a problem for Fox, for the Republican Party, and perhaps even for their twisted view of "law and order."

But "The Big Lie" has never been reducible to the most hysterical and desperate claims being made by Trump and his cronies in the aftermath of the November 2020 election.

Behind those hysterical and arguably insane claims was a deeper claim that has always been central to The Big Lie, a claim not about ballot box tampering on Election Day but about a Democratic Party intent on mobilizing millions of people who either do not have the right to vote (dangerous "illegals") or whose right to vote is suspect, because of their lack of "proper" identification, or their (alleged) criminal history, or simply because they require purportedly "special advantages" like mail-in balloting and drop boxes. (Or, let's face it, because they are simply the "wrong kinds" of people, "bad hombres" who hate "American Greatness".)

In short, The Big Lie draws on a range of long-standing Republican tropes about Democratic "voting fraud" and the need for more restrictive voting laws, tropes that have been amplified by Trump and Fox since long before 2016.

Insane conspiracy theories and lies about Dominion machines and foreign vote harvesting (and Jewish space lasers?), and the willingness of people like Carlson and Murdoch and Trump and Giuliani to lie about such craziness, and the willingness of their followers to believe these lies—this lying is one very disturbing thing.

But whatever Carlson and Murdoch and Trump himself actually believed about ballot box fraud on election day, nothing revealed in the Dominion case suggests that any of them doubted the broader and deeper lie—that the Democratic Party is a nefarious group of radicals long committed to violating "election integrity" and to "flooding the polls" with people who do not deserve to be there, to the detriment of those "real Americans" whose popular sovereignty alone matters.

This Big Lie has been and continues to be a staple of Republican rhetoric independent of Trump and his fate, a fate which, to any rational observer, was not worth betting on in early January, 2021—though Kevin McCarthy and his followers managed to regain their Trumpist footing in record time.

And indeed, behind the Big Lie about long-term Democratic "rigging" of elections is the even Bigger Lie that is the true heart of the MAGA message, one regularly disseminated to scores of millions of supporters, and well stated here:

"You are the loyal defenders of our heritage, our liberty, our culture, our Constitution, and our God-given rights. You never stop fighting for America, and I will never, ever stop fighting for you. So as we gather tonight, our country is being destroyed more from the inside than out. America is on the edge of an abyss. And our movement is the only force on Earth that can save it. This movement right here. What we do in the next few months and the next few years will determine whether American civilization will collapse or fail, or whether it will triumph and thrive, frankly like never before. This is no time for complacency. We cannot be complacent. We have to seize this opportunity to deal with the radical left socialist lunatics and fascists. And we have to hit them very, very hard. Has to be a crippling defeat, because our country cannot take it. . . .

Our country is now a cesspool of crime like it's never been before. They've never seen anything like it. Other countries are talking about it. We're talking about democracy. Isn't it great? Then they say, " You had seven people killed in Chicago this weekend. You had 68 people shot." That's not democracy. That's not what we stand for. Savage criminals are being released on cashless bail to continue their violent rampages against the United States of America. Entire communities are being torn to shreds with stabbings, shootings, strangling, rapes, and murders. . . . The streets of our Democrat-run cities are drenched with the blood of innocent victims, gun battles rage between blood thirsty street gangs, bullets tear into crowds at random killing wonderful, beautiful little children that never even had a chance. They're struck and they're killed, and carjackers lay in wait like predators hunting their prey. . . . Our country is being invaded just like a military force was pouring in. . .

As we take power out of Washington, we also need to take power back from the left wing lunatics who are indoctrinating our youth. We have to finally and completely smash the radical lefts corrupt education establishment. The current system is sick. It's sick. We have the lowest scores almost in the world and we spend more per pupil than any other nation. School prayer is banned, but drag shows are allowed to permeate the whole place. It's okay. You can't teach the Bible, but you can teach children that America is evil and that men are able to get pregnant. Whatever it takes, conservatives must liberate America's children from the captivity of these Marxist teachers unions. . . Across the country, we need to implement strict prohibitions on teaching inappropriate, racial, sexual, and political material to America's school children in any form whatsoever. And if federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education.

. . . no matter how big or powerful the corrupt radicals we are fighting against may be, no matter how menacing they appear, we must never forget that this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage. This is your country that your American ancestors won with their own courage, defended with their own blood and built with their own hands . . . "

Those words, of course, came from the mouth of Donald J. Trump, speaking at last week's CPAC conference in a DC suburb.

And the sentiments expressed, traceable to Pat Buchanan and George Wallace before him, have been staples of the Republican party, and of its Fox propaganda arm, since Trump's ascendance in 2016.

They are Trump's sentiments, but not only Trump's.

And while much has been made of Ron DeSantis's absence from the recent Trump-worshipping CPAC event, DeSantis has been proclaiming the same MAGA sentiments for years, during star turns at prior CPAC conferences, and from the bully pulpit of the Florida Governor's office, where he is doing his best to translate the sentiments into extremely dangerous laws and policies.

And while much has been made about the fact that Tucker Carlson said he "hates Trump passionately" back in January, 2021, this surely does not mean that he hated Trump earlier or that he hates him now. At this moment Carlson might be partial to DeSantis. More likely he will jump on the bandwagon of whichever right-wing Republican seems most likely to win. But his messaging has for years been consistent, and it is the messaging of MAGA pure and simple: that an evil left hates White, Christian, American "Greatness," and this left must be eradicated. And so this supposed "hater" of Trump is right now using his nightly Fox show to represent—literally re-present—the events of January 6 as not an insurrection but a manifestation of civic pride by decent Americans seeking to "take their country back" and to "support their President." And the supposedly "hated" Trump is now congratulating Carlson for having accomplished "one of the biggest scoops for a reporter in U.S. history," and for exposing the "Criminal Fabricators" of the House January 6 Committee.

We are now in the domain of magical thinking of the worst kind—the magical thinking of political actors in service of authoritarian ideologies, willing to abrogate norms and laws, and do whatever it takes to defeat their "enemies."

Is Carlson now lying on behalf of Trump again? Most assuredly he is. But, again, in a deeper sense it is not quite that simple. For he is serving a supposedly "higher truth," the MAGA "truth" that Democrats and liberals hate America, and so what they say cannot be true, and so it is necessary to reframe what took place and to furnish a more authentic, more patriotic counter-narrative which by definition is true or at least true enough. From this vantage point, the representation of January 6 as a moment of patriotic glory is not a lie—they were carrying American flags and chanting "Make America Great Again," right? But even if this framing ignores obvious evidence or shades the truth, this is all done in a noble cause, in service to a more essential "truth."

This readiness to play fast and loose with truth has long been a central feature of Trumpism, most notoriously associated with outrageous claims made on different occasions by Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Rudy Giuliani, whose breathless "truth is not truth" is now the hook of an MSNBC series. It is sometimes described by commentators as "Orwellian," and with good reason, for Orwell's novel 1984 was a classic account of authoritarian, indeed totalitarian, disinformation, and domination. But perhaps it is one of Orwell's contemporaries, Arthur Koestler, best known as the author of the deservedly acclaimed Darkness at Noon, who best identified the logic in play.

Describing his experience as a young militant of the German Communist Party in the years before Hitler's rise to power in The God That Failed, Koestler recalled a piece of party propaganda in many ways similar to that now purveyed by Fox News. The Socialist party then in power, anathematized by the Communists as a "social fascist" party soft on Nazism, had ordered a police raid on Nazi headquarters and proposed a ban on the wearing of the Nazi uniform. When the Communist press ignored these moves and continued to sneer about Socialist "social fascism," young Koestler was confused, a confusion only intensified when his party superior explained:

"He explained that the party's attitude to the Social Democrats was a set, long-term policy which could not be reversed by a small incident. 'But every word on the front page is contradicted by the facts,' I objected. Edgar gave me a tolerant smile. 'You still have the mechanistic outlook,' he said, and then proceeded to give me a dialectical interpretation of the facts. The action of the police was merely a feint to cover up their complicity; even if some Socialist leaders were subjectively anti-Fascist in their outlook, objectively the Socialist Party was a tool of Nazism; in fact, the Socialists were the main enemy . . . Gradually I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectic interpretation . . . "

For an activist of a party or movement that claims to understand a "higher" or "deeper" truth, beyond common sense and the evident facts of experience, any particular facts can be ignored or reinterpreted to serve what is considered more fundamental. Thus Dominion voting machines were corrupted in 2020, but even if they weren't, the Democrats are responsible for a more fundamental electoral and even civilizational corruption, and so the election was corrupted, and the outcome "rigged," and if so, can we really believe all of the evidence that Dominion machines were not corrupt? And if we really can't trust the evidence, then why treat it as dispositive? Why not just repeat the claims which, even if they can't be proven, can't be disproven in any final sense. Indeed, by constantly repeating the claims, we might make them for all intents and purposes "true." And anyway, the battle against liberal evil is more important than any "small incident" or any particular facts.

The lying of Fox News and its damages to Dominion are significant. But the real damage is much deeper and more dangerous.

What does Tucker Carlson really believe? To what extent is he a liar, and to what extent merely a propagandist in the thrall of a "dialectical reasoning" that he helped to create?

The lying about Dominion is symptomatic of much bigger, deeper, and more insidious Big Lies. However much the facts might seem to call these lies into question, Carlson and his collaborators will continue to repeat them and many millions of their followers will continue to accept them and to act on them. Does anyone really believe all the lies? We can't know. What we can know is that Presidential candidates and Governors and the current Speaker of the House of Representatives and almost his entire two hundred-plus caucus, and millions of their followers, all act as though they believe them. And in doing so, they are destroying the political institutions and the civic culture of America's increasingly fragile liberal democracy.

The lying of Fox News and its damages to Dominion are significant.

But the real damage is much deeper and more dangerous. And no lawsuit—not even manifold legitimate indictments of Donald Trump—can stop it. Only the decisive defeat of the Republican Party, and a Democratic Party empowered and committed to addressing the real problems plaguing American democracy, can stop it.

That is a very tall order. And everything hangs in the balance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jeffrey C. Isaac.

McConnell Among GOP Senators Calling ‘Bullsh*t’ on Tucker Carlson Jan. 6 ‘Whitewash’

Brett Wilkins — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:04:12 +0000

After Fox News' Tucker Carlson falsely dismissed the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump as mostly nonviolent, numerous Republican senators including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday blasted the right-wing opinion host's "whitewashing" of the deadly insurrection.

Carlson—who publicly promoted former President Donald Trump's 2020 election lies while privately calling the GOP loser's claims "absurd"—said Monday on his program that "very little about January 6 was organized or violent" and that "surveillance video from inside the Capitol shows mostly peaceful chaos."

Recently deposed as part of Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, Carlson echoed colleagues who said under oath that they didn't actually believe Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential contest was stolen by Democrats.

"I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today."

While some of the eight Republican senators (and 135 House members) who voted against certifying President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory have stuck by the Big Lie, numerous others pushed back hard against Carlson's reimagination of the worst attack on the Capitol since Puerto Rican nationalists launched an armed assault on the building in 1954.

"I think it's bullshit," Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters Tuesday when asked what he thought of Carlson's narrative. "When you see police officers assaulted, all of that... if you were just a tourist, you should've probably lined up at the visitors' center and came in on an orderly basis."

\u201cRepublican Senator Thom Tillis not impressed by J6 footage aired on Tucker Carlson Tonight:\n\n"I think it's bulls--t."\nhttps://t.co/ck4EKdekjV\u201d
— Citizen Free Press (@Citizen Free Press) 1678217945

Also speaking Tuesday, McConnell (R-Ky.) said that Fox News "made a mistake" by airing Carlson's spurious revision of the deadly insurrection.

"With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on January 6," McConnell declared.

As he spoke, McConnell held up a printout of remarks from U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, who called Carlson's account "filled with offensive and misleading conclusions" and "conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video."

\u201cSenate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Tucker Carlson's whitewashing of the Capitol insurrection was a \u201cmistake.\u201d\n\n"My concern is how it was a depicted ... Clearly, the chief of the Capitol Police ... correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6th."\u201d
— The Recount (@The Recount) 1678218192

Asked whether he thought U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) erred in giving Carlson exclusive access to the footage—a move that prompted watchdogs on Tuesday to call for an Office of Congressional Ethics probe—McConnell said that "my concern is how it was depicted."

"Clearly," he added, "the chief of the Capitol Police correctly described what most of us witnessed on January 6."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined in the criticism of Carlson, saying, "We don't want to whitewash January the 6th."

"I think the January 6 committee had a partisan view of things, and I'd like to know more about what happened that day and the day before," Graham added. "But I'm not interested in whitewashing the Covid lab theory, and I'm not interested in whitewashing January 6."

\u201cGOP senators react to Fox\u2019s Tucker Carlson whitewashing 1/6 and calling it \u201cmostly peaceful.\u201d\n\nThune (SD): \u201cIt was an attack on the Capitol.\u201d\n\nCramer (ND): \u201cBreaking through glass windows and doors \u2026 is a crime.\u201d\n\nGrassley (IA): \u201cWhat happened that day shouldn\u2019t have happened.\u201d\u201d
— The Recount (@The Recount) 1678212918

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) accused Carlson of "feeding falsehoods" to his viewers.

"It's really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails like that," the 2012 Republican presidential nominee told reporters. "The American people saw what happened on January 6. They've seen the people that got injured, they saw the damage to the building."

"You can't hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on," he added. "It's so absurd. It's nonsense. And people saw that it was violent and destructive and should never happen again. But trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting."

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) condemned Carlson's framing of the attack as "some rowdy peaceful protest of Boy Scouts."

"I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol... is a crime," Cramer argued. "I think... when you start opening the members' desks, when you stand up in their balcony—to somehow put that in the same category as, you know, permitted peaceful protest is just a lie."

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) got straight to his point: "I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, called on Fox to keep Carlson off the air this evening.

\u201cTucker Carlson is siding with the enemies of democracy.\n\nHere\u2019s what I just said on the Senate floor:\u201d
— Chuck Schumer (@Chuck Schumer) 1678203791

"To say January 6 was not violent is a lie. A lie, pure and simple," Schumer said on the Senate floor.

"I don't think I have ever seen a prime-time cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night," he added. "I don't think I've ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with such disdain. And he is going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Watchdogs Demand Ethics Probe of Kevin McCarthy’s Jan. 6 Footage Gift to Tucker Carlson

Jake Johnson — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 15:46:54 +0000

A group of watchdogs on Tuesday urged the Office of Congressional Ethics to launch an investigation into House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to exclusively hand more than 40,000 hours of security video from the January 6 Capitol attack to far-right Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who is already selectively using the trove of footage to spin the insurrection as a largely peaceful event.

In their request for an investigation, Public Citizen's Craig Holman and Lisa Gilbert and former White House ethics officials Norm Eisen and Richard Painter wrote that "the exclusive release of the Jan. 6 video footage appears to have been the result of a political agreement between McCarthy, Tucker Carlson, and others in McCarthy's bid to become speaker."

While McCarthy has defended the arrangement with Carlson as similar to the common practice of giving select members of the media "exclusives on certain things," the watchdogs contended that "this is not like granting an exclusive interview; this is providing a valuable government resource exclusively to one news outlet and discriminating against others, which flies in the face of First Amendment values."

The ethics experts went on to argue that "the speaker's release of security footage exclusively to Tucker Carlson is pure and simple using congressional resources for partisan gamesmanship—the very type of polarizing gamesmanship that has caused such damage to the public's perception of the integrity of Congress."

The investigation request was submitted to the Office of Congressional Ethics—an independent body that House Republicans have worked to gut—just hours after Fox News aired Carlson's first segment featuring the exclusively obtained footage.

Consistent with his past descriptions of the January 6 assault, Carlson used the Monday night segment to selectively present footage aimed at downplaying the attack and portraying the Trump supporters involved as individuals who "revered the Capitol"—a narrative that runs counter to publicly available evidence of violence and significant damage to the Capitol building.

Carlson signaled that segments in the coming days will feature additional security footage obtained through the deal with McCarthy.

[embedded content]

Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America noted Monday that "there was never any plausible chance that Carlson's team would look at the footage and decide to tell their audience that it proved they had been wrong all along."

"He's not an impartial finder of fact—he's a propagandist who is in the business of telling his viewers what they want to hear," Gertz wrote. "In this case, they want to believe that they and their political fellow travelers were the victims, so that's what they are going to hear."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Tucker Carlson Deserves a Raise for His Shameless Lies

Jon Schwarz — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 12:00:37 +0000

Tucker Carlson speaks during the 2022 Fox Nation Patriot Awards at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla., on Nov. 17, 2022.

Photo: Jason Koerner/Getty Images

By now you probably know about the filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. It includes a vast trove of communications to and from various Fox hosts — including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — as well as Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and Rupert Murdoch, chair of the parent corporation of Fox News.

The most wonderful part of the filing is Carlson’s inspiring, principled stand against telling the truth. On November 12, 2020, nine days after the election, Carlson flagged a tweet for Hannity and Ingraham by Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich. In it Heinrich had accurately pointed out that there was “no evidence” for then-President Donald Trump’s preposterous claims about the election being stolen by Dominion’s voting machines.

Heinrich’s reference to reality understandably enraged Carlson. He texted his fellow hosts: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Heinrich didn’t lose her job, but her tweet soon disappeared.

Carlson’s concern was that Fox’s viewers simply wouldn’t accept the facts and, if presented with them, would flock to competitors who would tell them the comforting lies for which they yearned. At about the same time, Carlson texted his producer that “we’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like newsmax could be devastating for us.”

It’s easy and fun to jeer at Carlson for his hilarious deceit, and I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone from doing so. It’s especially enjoyable to find out Carlson believes Trump is “a demonic force” (page 43 of the filing), yet has never told his audience this. In fact, Carlson still enjoys sharing a hearty guffaw with the demonic force at Saudi golf tournaments.

But once we’re done pointing and laughing at Carlson, we have to think more seriously about this if we’d like to have a society that’s based — at least a little bit — on rationality and evidence. Because in the society we have now, Carlson should logically be rewarded for everything he’s done.

Fox Corporation has shareholders who expect it to make as much profit as possible. According to one of Fox Corporation’s recent fillings, its “competitive strengths” include “premium brands that resonate deeply with viewers.” In particular, “FOX News is among the most influential and recognized news brands in the world.”

You’ll note that Fox does not claim that one of its strengths is, say, “exposing its viewers to the cold, pitiless light of reality.” That’s because its viewers don’t want that. Imagine you’ve created an extremely profitable business by getting 5-year-olds to tune in every night to hear about how much Santa Claus loves them, and also that the world is full of terrible people trying to assassinate Santa Claus. You wouldn’t switch things up all of a sudden and tell your 5-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus. They’d immediately switch channels to Santamax.

This fact about television “news” was explained cogently in a 1970 memo produced by the Nixon White House that illuminates the thinking behind Fox in embryonic form. Titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News,” the memo explains that television news was popular because “People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.” (Emphasis in original.) The last thing you want to do is drive viewers away by forcing them to think.

Viewer loyalty is especially important to Fox because of the structure of its revenue stream. According to the New York Times, Fox Corporation’s cable segment, which mostly consists of Fox News, took in $283 million in ad revenue in the first three quarters of 2021. But licensing fees — what cable and satellite companies pay to carry Fox News — were $1.07 billion. This explains why Fox’s top concern must naturally be its viewers. Non-cable “free” news makes essentially all its money from advertising, meaning it wants to keep advertisers happy above all else. But Fox needs the specific audience it’s cultivated — i.e., not just any group of affluent watchers who will appeal to advertisers, but the people who are addicted to Fox’s comforting worldview. This is especially true since only a small fraction of cable subscribers actually watch Fox News, even as it commands much higher fees per subscriber than other news outlets. Fox depends on maintaining an audience who will complain vociferously if their cable providers drop their favorite network – which leads us to yet another way in which our corporate overlords cater to the right-wing mob, because Verizon, AT&T and other cable companies don’t have the backbone to tell Fox they won’t continue to overpay the network.

In other words, Tucker Carlson & Co. were simply doing their actual jobs — that is, protecting the profitability of Fox News. Meanwhile, by focusing on the facts, Heinrich was genuinely damaging the company and therefore not doing her actual job. You can hope that corporate employees somehow will act in ways that damage their company’s profitability in defense of journalistic ethics, because it’s the “right” thing to do. This kind of hope will be fulfilled as much as 2 percent of the time.

In fact, seen from this perspective, the only thing Carlson did wrong was foolishly expressing his views in forms that were discoverable in a lawsuit. On Wall Street the smarter executives are sophisticated enough not to do this, and message each other “f2f” — i.e., face-to-face — to indicate to their co-workers when they need to discuss something that wouldn’t look good if written out and cited in court.

Telling the truth is generally not just unprofitable, it’s also actively anti-profit.

So in the end, the problem with Fox News is the problem of all for-profit news organizations. Fox may present it in an especially distilled, enraging, shameless form. But neither advertisers nor, unfortunately, most people want to hear things that conflict with their treasured illusions about the world. For-profit news outlets can do great investigative reporting, but that reporting is itself generally not profitable and is subsidized by their cooking apps or sports coverage that actually do make money. By itself, telling the truth is generally not just unprofitable, it’s also actively anti-profit. The lesson of the Dominion lawsuit isn’t that Fox is extremely bad, although it is. It’s that to have a news system that works, we have to take profit out of the equation.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

McCarthy Hands 41,000 Hours of Jan. 6 Footage to ‘Unrepentant Manipulator’ Tucker Carlson

Jake Johnson — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 14:29:36 +0000

Watchdogs on Monday slammed Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to hand 41,000 hours of surveillance footage of the January 6 attack to far-right Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has repeatedly used his massive platform to peddle disinformation, spew bigotry, and cast doubt on the severity of the 2021 insurrection.

"McCarthy giving exclusive access to many hours of January 6 Capitol security footage to Tucker Carlson, who has consistently downplayed the insurrection, is irresponsible and shows McCarthy's lack of regard for protecting democracy," Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wrote of the Republican leader's decision, which was first reported by Axios.

Carlson, who in 2020 pushed for the firing of a Fox News reporter who fact-checked former President Donald Trump's election lies, has vocally demanded the public release of the security footage. But McCarthy granting the right-wing host and his team exclusive access to the trove has raised questions over how much of the video will actually reach the public—and how it will be edited and framed.

"Funneling footage of a domestic riot to only one member of an extremist media organization is not releasing the footage to 'the public,'" The New Republic's Prem Thakker wrote Monday in response to Rep. Lauren Boebert's (R-Colo.) celebration of the move.

"Perhaps the move is an attempt to dilute the reality of how violent the riot was: just present thousands of hours of inaction or argue that the larger majority of protesters were simply expressing their First Amendment right to free speech," Thakker suggested. "Maybe Carlson will spend dedicated segments railing against the Capitol police, trying out ways to blame those defending the Capitol and divert blame away from the people attacking it."

\u201cThe reason I tire of media coverage that frames Kevin McCarthy 'against' the conspiratorial far right of his party is that Kevin McCarthy *is* the conspiratorial far right of his party:\nhttps://t.co/MOHwymUTON\u201d
— Mehdi Hasan (@Mehdi Hasan) 1676939721

Axios reported Monday that "Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds. Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks."

"Carlson has repeatedly questioned official accounts of 1/6, downplaying the insurrection as 'vandalism,'" Axios noted. "Carlson last yearcalled the attack an "outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards."

Judd Legum, the author of the Popular Information newsletter, argued that "the only reason to give the footage exclusively to Tucker is McCarthy knows the footage will only reinforce the GOP's preferred narrative if it is selectively released by an unrepentant manipulator and liar."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Tucker Carlson and the JFK Allegations

Edward Curtin — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:51:46 +0000

On December 15, the night that the Biden administration released some of the remaining JFK files while withholding others with another half-assed excuse, Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news television host, delivered a monologue about the JFK assassination. It garnered a great deal of attention.

Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, I received messages from many friends and colleagues, people I highly respect, about his monologue’s great significance, so I watched that episode. And then I watched it many more times.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man whom I hold in the highest esteem, tweeted that it was “the most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

While I completely agree with his second sentence, I was underwhelmed by Carlson’s words, to put it mildly. I thought it was clearly “a limited hangout,” as described by the former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:

Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

Or listens carefully.

Carlson surely said some things that were true, and, as my friends and many others have insisted, he was the first mainstream corporate journalist to say that “the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

But “involved” is a word worthy of a lawyer, a public relations expert, or the CIA itself because it can mean something significant or nothing. Or a little of both. It is a weasel word.

And the source for Carlson’s claim was an anonymous source, someone who he said “had access” to the JFK files that were never released. We know, of course, that when the New York Times and its ilk cite “anonymous sources,” claiming that they have told them this or that, this raises eyebrows. Or should. Anyone who closely follows that paper’s claims knows that it is a CIA conduit, but now, those who know this are embracing Tucker Carlson as if he were the prophet of truth, as if a Rupert Murdock-owned Fox TV host who is paid many millions of dollars, has become the Julian Assange of corporate journalism.

In a 2010 radio interview, Mr. Carlson said, “ I am 100 % his bitch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”

The obvious question is: Why would Fox News allow Carlson to say now what many hear as shocking news about the JFK assassination?

So let me run down exactly what Carlson did say.

For five minutes of the 7:28 minute monologue, he said things that are obviously true: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that the claim that both acted alone is weird and beyond any odds; that the Warren Commission was shoddy; that the CIA weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” in 1967 according to Lance De Haven-Smith’s book Conspiracy Theory in America; that the CIA’s brainwashing specialist psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West visited Jack Ruby in jail and declared him insane, contrary to all other assessments of Ruby’s mental state; and that the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy in the president’s assassination.

All of this is true but not news to those knowledgeable about the assassination. Nevertheless, it was perhaps news to Carlson’s audience and therefore good to hear on a corporate news site.

But then, the next few minutes – the key part of his report, the part that drew all the attention – got tricky.

Carlson said that just that day – December 15, 2022 – when all the JFK documents were due to be released but many were withheld, “we spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents.” Who would have such access, and how, is left unaddressed, but it is implied that it is a CIA source, but maybe not. It is strange to say the least.

Carlson then said he asked this person, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?” And the answer was “I believe they were involved.” Carlson goes on to say, “And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

Note the words “hand,” “believe,” “involved,” and then “unequivocal.”

“Hand” can mean many things and is very vague. For example, in front of his wife, a man tells his friend, “I had a hand in preparing Christmas dinner.” To which his wife, laughing, replies, “Yes, he did, he put the napkins on the table.”

To “believe” something is very different from knowing it, as Dr. Martin Schotz, one of the most perceptive JFK assassination researchers, has written in his book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy

On Belief Versus Knowledge

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.

“Involved,” like the word “hand,” can mean many things; it is vague, slippery, not definitive, and is used by tabloid gossip columnists to suggest scandals that may or not be true.

“Unequivocal” does not accurately describe the source’s statement, which was: “I believe.” That is, unless you take someone’s belief as evidence of the truth, or you wish to make it sound so.

Note that nowhere in Carlson’s report does he or his alleged source say clearly and definitively that the CIA/National Security State murdered President Kennedy, for which there has long been overwhelming evidence. Such beating-around-the-bush is quite common and tantalizes the audience to think the next explosive revelation will be dispositive. Yet no release of documents is needed to confirm that the CIA killed Kennedy, as if the national security state would allow itself to be pinned for the murder.

Waiting for the documents is like waiting for Godot; and to promote some hidden smoking gun, some great revelation is to engage in a pseudo-debate without end. It is to do the killers’ bidding for them. And it is quite common. There are many well-known “dissident” writers who continue to claim that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the CIA/national security state killed the president. And this is so for those who question the official story. Furthermore, there are many more pundits who maintain that Oswald did the deed alone, as the Warren Report concluded and the mainstream corporate media trumpet. This group is led by Noam Chomsky, whose acolytes bow to their master’s ignorant conclusions.

Maybe we’ll know the truth in 2063.

While it is true that some people change dramatically, Tucker Carlson, the Fox Television celebrity, would be a very unlikely candidate. He defended Eliot Abrams and praised Oliver North; supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; went to Nicaragua to support those Contras; smeared the great journalist Gary Webb while defending the CIA; supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and much more. Alan MacLeod chronicled all this in February of this year for those who have known nothing of Carlson’s past, including his father’s work as a U.S. intelligence operative as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the body that oversees government-funded media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí and Voice of America – all U.S. propaganda outlets.

Now we are being asked to accept that Carlson is out to show how the CIA is “involved” in the murder of JFK. Why would so many fall for such rhetoric?

No doubt any crumb of national news coverage about the CIA and the assassination by a major corporate player elicits an enthusiastic response from those who have tried for many years to tell the truth about JFK’s murder. One’s first response is excitement. But such reactions need to tempered by sober analyses of exactly what has been said, which is what I am doing here. I, too, wish it were a breakthrough but think it is more of the same. Much ado about nothing. A way to continue to foster uncertainty, not knowledge, about the crime.

I see it as a game of false binaries in the same way the Democrats and Republicans are portrayed as mortal enemies. Yes, there are some differences, but all-in-all they are one party, the War Party, who agree on the essential tenets of U.S. imperial policy. They both represent the interests of the upper classes and are financed by them. They both work within the same frame of reference. They both support what Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, rightly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).

If one asks a dedicated believer in the truthfulness of the New York Times Corporation or NPR, for example, what they think of Tucker Carlson, they will generally dismiss him with disdain as a right-wing charlatan. This, of course, works in reverse if you ask Carlson’s followers what they think of the Times or NPR. Yet for those who think outside the frame – and they are all non-mainstream – a different picture emerges. But sometimes they are taken in by those whose equivocations are extremely lawyerly but appeal to what they wish to hear. This is exactly what a “limited hangout” is. Snagged by some actual truths, they bite on the bait of nuances that don’t mean what they think they do.

Left vs. right, Fox TV vs. the New York Times, NPR, etc.: Just as Carlson’s father Dick Carlson ran the CIA-created U.S. overseas radio propaganda under Reagan and George H. W. Bush, so too the present head of National Public Radio, John Lansing, did the same under Barack Obama. See my piece, Will NPR Now Change its Name to National Propaganda Radio. Birds of a feather disguised as hawks and sparrows in a game meant to confuse and create scrambled brains.

Lastly, let me mention an odd “coincidence.” On December 6 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., nine days before the partial JFK files release and Tucker Carlson’s monologue, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization devoted to JFK research, gave a presentation showcasing what was advertised as explosive new information about the Kennedy assassination. The key presenter was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and prominent JFK assassination researcher who has sued the CIA for documents involving Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA operative George Joannides.

On November 22 Morley had published an article titled “Yes, There is a JFK Smoking Gun.” It was subtitled: It will be found in 44 CIA documents that are still “Denied in Full.” The documents he was referring to allegedly concern contacts between Oswald and Joannides in the summer and fall of 1963 in New Orleans and in Mexico City. “They [the CIA] were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year,” wrote Morley.

Well, the “smoking gun” documents were not released on Dec 15, although on November 20 and then again at The National Press Club on December 6, Morley spoke of them as proving his point about the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, which has been obvious for a long time. Although he said he hadn’t seen these key documents but was awaiting their release, he added that even if they were not released that will still prove him correct. In other words, with this bit of legerdemain, he was saying: What I don’t know, and may not soon not know, supports what I’m claiming even though I don’t know it. And even if the files were released, he writes, “As for the conspiracy question, the massive withholding of documents makes it premature to draw any conclusions. The undisclosed Oswald operation was not necessarily part of a conspiracy. It might indicate CIA incompetence, not complicity. Again, only the CIA knows for sure.” So the smoking gun is not a smoking gun and the waters of uncertainty roll on and on into the receding future.

CIA incompetence, not complicity. Of course. It ain’t necessarily so. Or it is, or might be, or isn’t.

Morley is one of many who still cannot say that the CIA killed the president. Tucker Carlson can speak of its “involvement” just like Morley. We need more information, more files, etc. But even if we get them, we still won’t know. Maybe by 2063.

My question for Tucker Carlson: Who was your anonymous source? And did your source see the documents that were never disclosed? What specific documents are you referring to? And do they prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or just suggest “involvement”?

Finally, as I said before, even as there has long been a mountain of evidence for the CIA’s murder of JFK (and RFK as well, although that is never mentioned), many prominent people continue to play as if there is not. Listen to this video interview between Chris Hedges and former CIA officer John Kiriakou. It is all about the nefarious deeds of the CIA. Right toward the end of the interview (see minutes 32:30-33:19), Hedges says, “So I have to ask [since he has to answer] this question since I know Oliver Stone is convinced the CIA killed JFK … I’ve never seen any evidence that backs it up …” and they both share a mocking laugh at Stone as if he were the village idiot when he knows more about the JFK assassination than the two of them put together, and Kiriakou says he too has not seen such evidence. It’s a disgusting but typical display of arrogance and a “limited hangout.” Criticize the CIA only to make sure you whitewash them for one of their greatest achievements: the murder of President John F. Kennedy. This is straight from Chomsky’s playbook.

Beware double-talkers and the games they play. They come in different flavors.

The post Tucker Carlson and the JFK Allegations first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Tucker Carlson and the JFK Allegations

Edward Curtin — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 14:51:46 +0000

Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

Or listens carefully.

But “involved” is a word worthy of a lawyer, a public relations expert, or the CIA itself because it can mean something significant or nothing. Or a little of both. It is a weasel word.

In a 2010 radio interview, Mr. Carlson said, “ I am 100 % his bitch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”

The obvious question is: Why would Fox News allow Carlson to say now what many hear as shocking news about the JFK assassination?

So let me run down exactly what Carlson did say.

All of this is true but not news to those knowledgeable about the assassination. Nevertheless, it was perhaps news to Carlson’s audience and therefore good to hear on a corporate news site.

But then, the next few minutes – the key part of his report, the part that drew all the attention – got tricky.

Note the words “hand,” “believe,” “involved,” and then “unequivocal.”

On Belief Versus Knowledge

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.

“Involved,” like the word “hand,” can mean many things; it is vague, slippery, not definitive, and is used by tabloid gossip columnists to suggest scandals that may or not be true.

Maybe we’ll know the truth in 2063.

Now we are being asked to accept that Carlson is out to show how the CIA is “involved” in the murder of JFK. Why would so many fall for such rhetoric?

CIA incompetence, not complicity. Of course. It ain’t necessarily so. Or it is, or might be, or isn’t.

Beware double-talkers and the games they play. They come in different flavors.

The post Tucker Carlson and the JFK Allegations first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Apologist for Tucker Carlson’s Racism: Glenn Greenwald

Eoin Higgins — Fri, 27 May 2022 08:55:04 +0000

Photograph source: Senado Federal – CC BY 2.0

There’s no plausible way to dispute that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is spreading racist conspiracy theories, but Glenn Greenwald has been trying anyway.

Since Greenwald—a former Salon columnist, and after that a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the Guardian — departed from The Intercept in September 2020, he’s become a stalwart defender of Fox, and Carlson in particular. As Carlson has gained in viewership and impact—he’s the most widely watched cable news host in the US—his commentary and political positions have come under increased scrutiny. With that attention has come intense criticism. But he has Greenwald in his corner, who has let forth a flood of pro-Carlson arguments, primarily delivered on Twitter, his medium of choice.

Shortly before the May 14 massacre in Buffalo that left 10 dead, the alleged shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, published a 180-page manifesto online. The post explained that he targeted the Tops Market grocery store because the neighborhood was majority Black, in an act of political violence aimed at striking fear into nonwhite US residents. Gendron’s ideological outlook was highly influenced by the racist conspiracy theory known as the “Great Replacement” which holds that whites in the US are being systematically replaced by people of color in a demographic change that’s being masterminded by a cabal of elites.

That demographic-threat conspiracy theory has been laundered in prime time by none other than Carlson. Using his perch atop cable news rankings, the Fox News host has worked to spread the message of demographic threat far and wide amongst conservatives. Gendron’s manifesto doesn’t mention Carlson specifically, a point seized on by Greenwald to explain away the connections between the messaging from his favorite cable news host and the shooter. But the ideological throughline is hard to miss.

Here’s Carlson on Sept. 8, 2018:

How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions, such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better with your neighbors or your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values?

Here’s Gendron in his manifesto:

Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum “diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength…”. Said throughout the media, spoken by politicians, educators and celebrities. But no one ever seems to give a reason why. What gives a nation strength? And how does diversity increase that strength? What part of diversity causes this increase in strength? No one can give an answer.

Nikki McCann Ramirez, a researcher with Media Matters, noted on my podcast last week that the interconnectedness of right-wing messaging, from neo-Nazi chat boards to Fox News, makes drawing distinctions between Carlson and Gendron somewhat irrelevant.

“The shooter did not cite Tucker Carlson as an inspiration in his manifesto or as a direct source of radicalization—but what I think is important to point out here is that this man was radicalized on online forums,” Ramirez said. “Extremism researchers know that these white nationalist online forums view Carlson as an ally in spreading their messaging to the public.”

* * *

Greenwald has been a Fox News partisan for some time, in near-perfect correlation to how often he’s invited on the network. Carlson has hosted Greenwald frequently, while gaining his unswerving loyalty.

What this loyalty has meant in real terms is relentless pro-Carlson arguments from Greenwald. He has seldom criticized Carlson or Fox News—as I detailed last year—and his deference has paid off with a near-weekly slot appearing on Carlson’s primetime show. (Greenwald challenged me to come on his show and hash out our differences. When I replied with a list of dates and times I could do, he did not respond.)

Greenwald argues to critics that his appearances on Carlson’s show allow him to get a pro-privacy, anti-war message out to the network’s viewers. Yet more often than not, he’s just on Fox News to talk about Twitter, liberals, and some aspect of the culture war.

For all of Greenwald’s claims that his presence on the show might shift at least a few Fox viewers from rabid right-wing ideologues to something approaching social libertarianism, his actual appearances seem to serve mainly to support Carlson’s worldview. Greenwald doesn’t challenge Carlson’s worldview, seldom if ever criticizes the right and generally stays in his lane—legitimizing the Fox News narrative.

Thus it was unsurprising that after the Buffalo shooting, Greenwald went out of his way to make outlandish defensive claims about that worldview. One of the main points Greenwald has hammered repeatedly is the idea that Carlson is simply reacting to liberals, who are really the folks spreading conspiracy theories.

“The Democrats and their leading [strategists] for years have been arguing that immigration will change the demographic make-up of the country—by replacing conservative voters with more liberal ones—and that this will benefit them politically,” Greenwald tweeted on May 16.

In a lengthy screed on his Substack blog, Greenwald expressed outrage over the very possibility that Carlson’s critics might tie the cable news host’s rhetoric to that of the Buffalo shooter. In particular, Greenwald found the suggestion that Carlson’s worldview was fundamentally racist beyond the pale.

“His anti-immigration and ‘replacement’ argument is aimed at the idea—one that had been long mainstream on the left until about a decade ago—that large, uncontrolled immigration harms American citizens who are already here,” Greenwald said, notably without a citation or, indeed, any evidence. “There is no racial hierarchy in Carlson’s view of American citizenship and to claim that there is is nothing short of a defamatory lie.”

But the very backbone of Carlson’s replacement theory talk is, in fact, the story of racial hierarchy. Carlson doesn’t just rail at so-called “large, uncontrolled immigration”—he targets immigration as a whole from countries that he finds undesirable. It’s indistinguishable from the conspiracy theories about replacement spouted off by any number of far-right and sometimes overtly white supremacist figures.

* * *

Notably, when Greenwald is directly challenged on these points outside Twitter, he’s had difficulty defending his claims. A videotaped debate in late January with a young man named Nicholas provides a good example. Nicholas, who appears to be a teenager or very young adult, challenged Greenwald on his support for Carlson and the fact Greenwald has “never found anything negative to highlight” about the cable news host. Greenwald retorted that questions about the Fox News host were better directed at Carlson, since Greenwald didn’t watch the show. It was a strange admission from one of Carlson’s most fervent defenders.

Arguing that Carlson’s ideology is free of racism in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is stunningly brazen, even for a provocateur like Greenwald. In March 2021, after Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, Carlson complained that mob rule had overtaken legal justice. Finding Chauvin guilty, he argued, was essentially giving up on the rule of law because demonstrations had followed Floyd’s murder. “We must stop this current insanity,” Carlson declared. “It’s an attack on civilization.”

On Sept. 18, 2021, Carlson claimed that President Biden and the Democratic Party were attempting to “change the racial mix of the country.”

“In political terms,” Carlson told his audience, “this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

Yet just months later, on Nov. 22, Greenwald tweeted that “Tucker’s view” was that the Fox News host believes “in a racially equal society.” In a debate with YouTube personality Steven Fritts released less than a week later, Greenwald said that, in his experience, Carlson’s views on race were hard to square with accusations of racism.

“I have never ever, ever, ever heard Tucker frame immigration or any other issue in the racist terms that you attributed to him,” Greenwald told Fritts. “In fact, he believes that what is racist is liberal discourse—the idea that we should judge people based on their race.”

It’s no longer enough to run interference for the Fox host—now, while expressing solidarity with Carlson, Greenwald repeats the same talking points on crime statistics and replacement theory that have been perfected in right-wing messaging.

In late March, Greenwald approvingly retweeted a cartoon by the avowedly neo-Nazi artist Stonetoss. An exhaustive New York Times report last month detailing how Carlson has mainstreamed white nationalist talking points—including 400 instances of him repeating “great replacement” language and conspiracy theories — was dismissed by Greenwald as hyperbole. “Conservatives know liberal outlets accuse everyone opposing liberalism of being racist,” Greenwald tweeted, two weeks before the Buffalo massacre. Last week, he posted FBI Black-on-Black crime statistics in an apparent effort to disprove that white nationalist violence posed a significant threat to public safety.

While Greenwald formerly defended Carlson while distancing himself from the more extreme interpretations of the Fox host’s views, today he is increasingly deploying his Twitter platform in service of spreading the white nationalist message. These vehement defenses of the most influential media purveyor of the racist “replacement” theory are destructive efforts to launder hate by a once-admirable journalist.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eoin Higgins.

Tucker Carlson Pulls From an Old Playbook as he Stokes Anxiety About a Masculinity Crisis

Conor Heffernan — Fri, 27 May 2022 08:35:09 +0000

Promotions for “The End of Men,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s forthcoming documentary, lament “The total collapse of testosterone levels in American men.” Carlson’s central premise is that modern society has devitalized American men. Strength, drive and aggression are no longer in vogue, and Americans, as a result, are become weaker. This, the film implies, More

The post Tucker Carlson Pulls From an Old Playbook as he Stokes Anxiety About a Masculinity Crisis appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Conor Heffernan .

Post Left Whitewashing of Tucker Carlson’s Racism Uses MSNBC Playbook

Eoin Higgins — Fri, 20 May 2022 08:57:29 +0000

Photograph Source: Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution – CC BY 2.0

Allies of Tucker Carlson are working hard to distract the public from the Fox News host’s culpability in spreading racist conspiracy theories, adopting the same tactics they sneer at from liberals.

In the wake of the Buffalo massacre, where white supremacist Payton Gendron murdered 10 people in a racist attack, Carlson has come under fire for hyping the same Great Replacement conspiracy theory the shooter cited in his manifesto. The two men used nearly identical language to describe the topic, putting Carlson in the hot seat.

Where were they radicalized? pic.twitter.com/Zwi5alvg47

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) May 19, 2022

Now, five days after the shooting, a competing narrative is being pushed. According to certain figures in the fringe post-left conservative movement, the issue is not that Carlson referred to the conspiracy—it’s that he did so in response to Democrats and other liberals bringing it up first.

Their argument claims that because Democrats and liberals have noted in the past that a changing demographic electorate could pay dividends for the party, Carlson’s racist rhetoric around immigration and warnings of racial replacement are simply reactive. It’s a deceitful argument and blame-shifting that allows Carlson and his right-wing allies to sail above the controversy, and has one goal: changing the conversation from Carlson to the dishonest semantics of “who started it.”

Social media influencer Glenn Greenwald was, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the first to deploy the tactic. “The Democrats and their leading strategics for years have been arguing that immigration will change the demographic make-up of the country—by replacing conservative voters with more liberals ones,” he tweeted, “and that this will benefit them politically.” Conspiracy theorist Jimmy Dore told his audience that the Great Replacement has been pushed by the Clintons, not Carlson. And The Hill’s Briahna Joy Gray said that Carlson, who is “fastidiously race neutral” with his language, was right about the fundamentals of the conspiracy with respect to the Democratic embrace of demographic change.

This is like when MSNBC libs rewrite the history Bush administration.

pic.twitter.com/YBCT8O3Gtc

— ℮oin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) May 19, 2022

Their aim is clear—to thoroughly water down and whitewash the reality of the American right. If it sounds familiar, it should, because it’s exactly what liberal media figures, primarily on MSNBC, have been doing for George W. Bush for years.

A real accounting of Bush’s time in office would make the former president a pariah, at least in left-of-center circles (one hopes). But liberal commentators like Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell instead did the opposite, making Bush out to be a cuddly statesman type. The Trump era provided the opportunity for folding the right-wing pundits who hyped up the war and the officials who waged it back into polite society. Just look at MSNBC superstar Nicolle Wallace, who served in the Bush White House press office.

It all gets a bit confusing for the average viewer. With no one there to remember exactly what was done and when—by, in other words, taking the same obfuscation strategy used by Carlson’s ally to confuse the issue—liberals made sure that the former president’s image was ready for rehab. It’s worked, today Democrats love Bush and look back on him fondly.

Comparing the post left with their liberal counterparts is antagonistic, to be sure. There are few people they hate more. But the right-wing laundering approach is virtually indistinguishable. All that’s changed is who’s in power on the right, and who on the liberal-left are willing to help conservatives dissemble about their real beliefs and sell themselves as respectable, serious commentators. Same old story.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eoin Higgins.

Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement” Theory Derives from an American Nazi

Juan Cole — Fri, 20 May 2022 08:48:15 +0000

Before a hate-filled 18-year-old murdered 10 and wounded 3 African Americans in Buffalo on May 14, he penned a rambling screed about replacement theory. The most common version of this whiny idea, imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French far right, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid More

The post Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement” Theory Derives from an American Nazi appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Juan Cole.

Tucker Carlson’s ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Comes From an Anti-US Nazi French Thinker

Juan Cole — Mon, 16 May 2022 15:08:00 +0000

People like Tucker Carlson are pitifully ignorant of history and so are wielding an anti-American, highly unpatriotic notion for the sake of their television ratings.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Juan Cole.

Tucker or Biden is Not a Real Choice

Moshe Adler — Fri, 06 May 2022 08:35:35 +0000

May 6, 2022 by Moshe Adler

What’s wrong with this front page?

On Monday, May 2^nd, the front page of the New York Times included two pictures side by side above the fold. Tucker Carlson was shown under the headline “American Nationalist,” and Nancy Pelosi appeared under the headline “Pelosi visits Kyiv, echoing US vow of wide victory.” And it makes you wonder whether you know what nationalist is. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has declared that ruling out future NATO membership for the Ukraine is a “non-starter,” while Secretary of Defense Llyod Austin has declared “we want to see Russia weakened.” To show that they are not just talking, the US has been arming the Ukraine. All of this is making it impossible for Ukraine to agree to neutrality while the choices it forces upon Russia are total defeat or total war. If Tucker Carlson is an American Nationalist, what is Nancy Pelosi?

The dichotomy that the New York Times presents between the Biden administration and Tucker Carlson is a false one. Tucker Carlson offers racism and guns as the solution to hopelessness. The Biden administration claims to offer a New Deal, but its appetite for American dominance around the world makes its promise impossible to deliver. The Biden administration vilifies Putin while Tucker Carlson preaches isolation; but this is not a real dichotomy either, because a brutal war is not a game that human beings can follow simply as spectators.

What we desperately need is a different choice. The war in Ukraine makes clear that that our program must be anti-nationalist while the pandemic has made it clear that workers are essential, and therefore are essential to our program. But such a program is not one that any government that is in power anywhere in the world now will adopt. It must come from labor organizations, and we must put our shoulders to the wheel to make it happen.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Moshe Adler.

Russian TV Uses Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard to Sell Putin’s War

Robert Mackey — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 01:51:54 +0000

In the hours since Russia launched its military assault on Ukraine, the news on Russian state television has been dominated by official statements and reports from war correspondents. But in the days leading up to the attack, as the state broadcaster worked to tarnish Ukraine and cast American criticism of President Vladimir Putin as hysterical, its producers borrowed heavily from another source: Fox News.

At least four times this week, Russian news reports have featured translated clips of Tucker Carlson or his guest Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic U.S. representative, attacking the Biden administration.

What’s more, one report broadcast on Russian television’s main channel Sunday did more than just quote Carlson: It developed and sharpened a political attack on a prominent Democratic senator that Carlson had just hinted at.

At 8 p.m. on Sunday, a primetime review of the week’s news presented by Dmitry Kiselev, a bombastic Putin favorite, featured remarks from the opening monologue of Carlson’s February 17 show, in which the American commentator trashed Ukraine’s government.

On Sunday, Russian state TV translated this Tucker Carlson rant: "They're promoting war, not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history and it's not now. It is a client state of the Biden administration." pic.twitter.com/36fziEks90
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) February 24, 2022

“These people are so ghoulish,” Carlson said of U.S. officials who provided military aid to Ukraine. “Of course they’re promoting war,” Carlson continued, as his comments were translated into Russian, “not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.”

The Russian broadcast cut away from Carlson’s monologue at this point to show Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appearance at the United Nations that day. But that exactly echoed the next part of the original Fox News broadcast, which also showed Blinken on screen as Carlson mocked his warning that Russia might stage a false flag attack and blame it on Ukraine as a pretext for war.

An hour later, the evening news program on Russia’s main state television channel used a longer excerpt from the same Carlson monologue and shaped its own report to amplify the Fox News host’s attack on a Democrat. In the original Fox News broadcast, Carlson had suggested that Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who worked to arm Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles, was only doing so because of donations from American defense contractors like Raytheon.

Last week, Tucker Carlson suggested Sen. Richard Blumenthal might have pushed to arm Ukraine to aid a campaign donor, Raytheon. Then on Sunday, Russian state TV devoted a segment to Raytheon, Blumenthal and Ukraine, even quoting Carlson in translation. pic.twitter.com/yMTOxsKYuN
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) February 24, 2022

Before quoting Carlson’s comments, the Russian report noted that Blumenthal had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Raytheon and referred to Blumenthal’s false claim that he had served in Vietnam. The Russian broadcast then cut to a part of Carlson’s program in which he showed viewers video of Blumenthal telling MSNBC about the need to supply Javelin missiles to Ukraine. Carlson was then shown laughing at Blumenthal. “So that guy, who lied about his own war service, is pretty excited at the thought of Ukrainians fighting and dying in the streets,” Carlson scoffed.

After cutting away from Carlson, the Russian correspondent noted that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump had also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Raytheon.

On Wednesday night, just hours before Putin ordered the attack on Ukraine to begin, two excerpts from Carlson’s most recent program were featured in Russian state television’s 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. news broadcasts.

Carlson had started his show Tuesday night with a sarcastic monologue in which he told viewers: “Democrats in Washington have told you it’s your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason. Many Americans have obeyed this directive. They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable channels are now devoted to it. Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe.”

Carlson’s comments were so welcome in Moscow that an excerpt from that rant with Russian subtitles was quickly produced by the Russian-language service of RT, the government-funded network formerly known as Russia Today.

During the 8 p.m. news bulletin on Russian state television Wednesday, as Russians tried to make sense of what was about to happen, a dubbed version of Carlson’s monologue was offered to them as an explanation.

On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson claimed that "Democrats in Washington have told you it's your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin." Within hours, the Fox clip was on Russian state TV's evening news broadcast, used to suggest US opposition to Russia's attack on Ukraine is irrational. pic.twitter.com/lGzp7PZhaK
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) February 24, 2022

An hour later, Russian television’s main evening news program featured another clip of Carlson’s show from the previous night, an excerpt from his discussion of possible economic sanctions on Russia with Gabbard, who is now a frequent Fox guest and was given a prime speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend.

Like Carlson, Gabbard sought to blame the U.S. and NATO for supposedly provoking Putin’s attack on Ukraine and suggested that Americans would suffer from higher energy prices if Russia was sanctioned for invading Ukraine.

On the eve of war, Russian state TV showed a translation of Tulsi Gabbard's Fox News criticism of Biden's threat to sanction Russia for attacking Ukraine. "Sanctions don't work. This is whole problem with the Biden administration: they are so focused on how do we punish Putin." pic.twitter.com/pjXxtIrK1h
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) February 24, 2022

“These sanctions don’t work,” Gabbard told Carlson in an exchange screened for Russians. “What we do know is that they will increase suffering and hardship for the American people. And this is whole problem with the Biden administration: They are so focused on how do we punish Putin that they don’t care and are not focused on what is actually in the best interests of the American people.”

Russian officials have not been shy about pointing out that fuel prices are likely to spike in Europe and the United States if sanctions are imposed on its vast oil and gas industry. State television reports from Washington on the crisis have repeatedly included close shots of high gas prices and suggested that they could go higher.

On Thursday, after Russia launched its military assault on Ukraine, Gabbard posted the video of her comments about sanctions on Twitter and suggested, without evidence, that doing anything to press Putin to stop the invasion of Ukraine could lead to a nuclear war.

Biden/Harris tell us we must bear the cost to defend freedom in Ukraine. But while you & your family struggle w/ higher prices, the Power Elite won’t suffer at all. And if the conflict goes nuclear they’ll be safe in bunkers while you, I, & our loved ones are left without shelter pic.twitter.com/75abm9rY35
— Tulsi Gabbard ? (@TulsiGabbard) February 24, 2022

Gabbard returned to Carlson’s show Thursday night; during her appearance, she blamed Biden for not preventing the war, which she said he could have done by giving in to Putin’s demand to rule out the possibility of Ukraine ever joining NATO.

Tulsi: I do not in any way support Putin’s decision to go into Ukraine… If President Biden and NATO had done what you were just talking about in agreeing we’re going to take NATO off the table for Ukraine… this situation could’ve been prevented… pic.twitter.com/espPertdud
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 25, 2022

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Robert Mackey.