For most of his career in Washington, Tucker Carlson was a young George Will with the bowtie and all. He looked and acted like the kid on Young Sheldon. Carlson would graciously lose debates to Paul Begala on Crossfire. Carlson had some fame and fortune.
His father's second wife was an heir to the Swanson TV dinner fortune, which paid for the son's schooling. He was connected. He was an elitist.
But Carlson's father also was the son of a teenage mother who dropped him off at an orphanage. Maybe that history had something to do with Carlson removing the stick from his colon and taking a look at how the rest of America exists outside the DC bubble.
At any rate, he decided to stop being a conservative stooge. On January 28, 2016, he penned his resignation from the club of cruise conservatives. Politico published it under the headline, "Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right. And, my dear fellow Republicans, he's all your fault."
It was a delicious upbraiding of the Washington Establishment Conservatives who indeed go on cruises with rich rubes. On one of those cruises to Alaska, Bill Kristol discovered Sarah Palin and chatted her up to his amusement.
Carlson wrote, "If Trump is leading a populist movement, many of his Republican critics have joined an elitist one. Deriding Trump is an act of class solidarity, visible evidence of refinement and proof that you live nowhere near a Walmart. Early last summer, in a piece that greeted Trump when he entered the race, National Review described the candidate as 'a ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula.' Virtually every other critique of Trump from the right has voiced similar aesthetic concerns.
"Why is the Party of Ideas suddenly so fixated on fashion and hair? Maybe all dying institutions devolve this way, from an insistence on intellectual rigor to a flabby preoccupation with appearances. It happened in the Episcopal Church, once renowned for its liturgy, now a stop on architectural and garden tours. Only tourists go there anymore."
His column was prophetic, wasn't it?
I recall reading it at the time and thinking, good gravy, someone in DC gets it. I foolishly thought others would. Hahaha. How wrong I was.
Carlson knows these people and his column was a declaration of independence from them.
He wrote, "Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.
"Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents 'an existential threat to conservatism.'
"Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal."
The gracious loser on CNN was about to become the lion of cable news. He took over the 7 PM timeslot a week after the 2016 election, then shifted to 9 PM when Megyn Kelly left, and then moved to the 8 PM hour when Fox fired Bill O'Reilly.
By March 2018, he was the third-most-watched show on all of cable.
Now he is No. 1. His only competition is Sean Hannity whose show follows his on Fox.
With success comes power, and with power comes the NSA.
The Biden administration -- actually the Obama administration -- is using the NSA to spy on him, ostensibly because he tried to land an interview with Putin.
Liberal writer Matt Taibbi sees trouble in the media laughing about Carlson's situation. The initial reports made him out as a kook. Prove it, they said.
And so Carlson did prove it. The reaction by corporate media was depressingly pro-spying.
Taibbi wrote, "In a flash, the gloating and non-denial denials that littered early coverage of this story (like the NSA’s meaningless insistence that Carlson was not a “target” of surveillance) dried up. They were instantly replaced by new, more tortured rhetoric, exemplified by an amazingly loathsome interview conducted by former Bush official Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC. The Wallace panel included rodentine former Robert Mueller team member Andrew Weissman, and another of the networks’ seemingly limitless pool of interchangeable ex-FBI stooge-commentators, Frank Figliuzzi.
"Weissman denounced Carlson for sowing distrust in the intel community, which he said was 'so anti-American.' Wallace, who we recall was MSNBC’s idea of a 'crossover voice to attract a younger demographic, agreed that Carlson had contributed to a “growing chorus of distrust in our country’s intelligence agencies.' Figliuzzi said the playbook of Carlson and the GOP was to 'erode the public’s trust in their institutions.' Each made an identical point in the same words minus tiny, nervous variations, as if they were all trying to read the same statement off a moving teleprompter."
They should be nervous.
We are on to them.
Our November 3 insurrection at the polls forced them to pull an all-nighter on Election Night because they failed to stuff enough ballots in the ballot boxes.
He received 75 million votes, not the 70 million they thought he would get.
Washington is totally freaked. That January 6 gathering at the mall showed this movement is not going away. This is why they pumped up a protest in the Capitol as an insurrection.
Trump and Carlson lead a movement bigger and older than their brief political careers. The marginalization of the working class began in the 1970s when the elitists blamed inflation on us and our union wages. We voted for Reagan, Perot, and Gingrich.
But the situation got worse as the elitists held the White House for 28 years.
We sent in Trump, and we are not going away this time.
A panicked Washington Post ran a story on Wednesday under the headline, "How Tucker Carlson became the voice of White grievance."
White grievance?
Try Red, White, And Blue Grievance because Americans are just as fed up with their government as the Cubans and Iranians are fed up with theirs. The countrymen of all three nations agree on one thing: They do not want to be spied upon by an autocratic central government that dines on Kobe beef while we eat gristle.
The media does not get it because they are on the wrong side of history. They think BLM is new and fresh. It is old and stale. In the 1970s it used the name Black Liberation Movement, and while the media fluffed it, BLM failed to catch on.
This time, BLM leaders played it for millions in donations, divvied the loot, and quit before its inevitable collapse as all communist front groups are doomed to fail in the USA. As Obama famously whined in law school, socialism will never catch on because too many Americans want to be Donald Trump.
BLM supports Cuba? It always has. Black Liberation Army founder Assata Shakur killed a cop and fled to Cuba in 1979.
I digress.
Not supporting Carlson is a very bad move by the media. Taibbi sees the media making the same mistake with Carlson that the media made with The Donald.
Taibbi wrote, "During Trump’s first run for president, I nearly lost my mind trying to explain to fellow reporters that he was succeeding in part because of us, that the prestige media’s ham-handed, hysterical, anti-intellectual approach to covering the Trump phenomenon was itself massively fueling it, making a case for establishment corruption and incompetence more eloquently than he could.
"Something similar now is happening with the collapse of traditional media and the rise of Carlson, the current #1 voice on cable, who is rapidly stealing the audience MSNBC somehow believed it could corral with spokesgoons like Wallace. It seems impossible that Carlson’s haters don’t realize how easy they’ve made it for him, turning themselves into such caricatures of illiberalism that they’re practically handing him the top spot.
"The inspiration for his current show seemingly came when Carlson watched his former colleagues among the GOP Brahmins make a show of reacting with horror to Trump’s arrival. These were people who had no problem wantonly bombing poor and mostly nonwhite countries all over the world, made a joke of the rule of law (and America’s reputation abroad) with policies like torture, rendition, and mass surveillance, and shamelessly whored themselves out to Wall Street even after the 2008 crash. Yet they pretended to severe moral anguish before Trump even took office.
"Carlson grasped that the sudden piety of the Kristols and Max Boots and David Frenches was rooted in the same terror the Democratic Party nomenklatura felt at the possibility of a Bernie Sanders presidency in 2020, i.e. fear of a line-jumping outsider tearing away their hard-fought consultancies and sinecures."
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Carlson grew up. He decided not to be a House Conservative for corporate media.
The mockingbirds in corporate media foolishly believe that they are protected from a government that attacked a sitting president. For their own sake, reporters and media moguls must speak up for Tucker Carlson because they are next on the deep state's list.
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