Every now and then I get frequent hits on old postings. Let me rank 2016’s most popular posts.
April 2016: Coming in a distant third is a piece on police brutality.
March 2016: A story about Nancy Reagan’s oral talents came in second.
And then, with absolutely no explanation, with more hits than second and third place put together…
May 2015: I relate that Tucker Carlson is an asshole.
Tucker continues to this very day to bring hits to my little site. I am aware that I am the third return for “tucker carlson is an asshole” on Google. Now granted, Tucker’s riding high as ever, with a hotshit website, a fellowship at Cato, and a new job at Fox. But I didn’t know that so many folks are searching for insults toward the man because of it.
What’s the deal, gang?
Well, I guess since Tucker is such a draw, I must write about him again. I’m sure he’s out there, being an asshole about something, somewhere. Let me take a look.
First hit: Tucker Carlson’s war on elitism. Let’s talk about that. I sure want to hear what a man who wore a fucking bowtie for half his professional career has to say about the snobbish.
Right now, we have a majority of the voting population who hates “elitism”. As usual, conservatives are remarkably challenged about what an “elite” is. Actual elites are making up 90% of the Trump cabinet, and the man himself is one as well. All he did was say enough Everyman dumb shit, repeated a bunch of Big Lies, and the rubes wanted more. See, “elitist” has become a epithetic substitution for “knowledgeable”. If you speak over the level of a fourth grader and critically think out of the box at all, you must be living in an ivory tower(whatever the fuck that means). So basically, what we are staring in the face come ’17 is an all-out war on academia and the press. The conservative rabble wants Newspeak, not facts. I have gotten into the muck more than I care to admit by arguing with them, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t understand what they are saying anymore because they use all this weird quasi-jargon they’ve picked up by “non-elitist” media. The advent of talk radio conglomerates gave us Rush Limbaugh, who made a living attacking institutions (calling public schools “scruels”…man, I love conservative humor, don’t you?) and people by turning words like “liberal” and “feminist” into insults. I mean, I could go back to Bircherism to find the roots of conservative Newspeak-others may be able to go farther back than that, like Chip Berlet. But this trash is now accessible to anyone who can push a button. The thing is, bullshit gubbermint conspiracies like “socialism” and “multiculturalism” are much easier to believe in than actual political science or persuasive journalism that is trying to warn them that Republicans are gunning for poor peoples’ food and medicine, or that hate crimes are on the rise or that Trump is militarizing his foreign policy outreach or that cutting taxes is ruining Kansas and your state might be next and I could go on and on. Thinking, it turns out, is hard. Something has gone seriously wrong where we stop believing our educated resources for facts. In their place is Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
So anyway, can Tucker Carlson say something intelligent about the elite and elitism?
Carlson, a conservative journalist who most recently founded The Daily Caller, a right-leaning online publication, holds ardent views about small government, excessive regulation, and a multitude of other issues typically shared among Republicans.
But the issue he perhaps is most passionate about these days cuts across party lines: He describes it as a distaste for elitism, particularly among political journalists who reside in the Acela corridor.
“What bothers me is the lack of self-awareness. I don’t know if I have ever met a group less self-aware than political reporters,” Carlson told Business Insider in a recent interview. “They honestly don’t believe that there are legitimate alternative views of anything. And like most small-minded and dumb people they are very, very quick to dismiss anything they don’t understand as crazy.”
Hm. Tucker Carlson is a political reporter and runs a site full of them. Must be non-self aware, I guess. IOKIYAR. He is basically signing on to the Trump credo that there aren’t any facts anymore. Truths are relative. While this may philosophically be a tenable position, it’s a scary way to play politics. There are facts and things we can know for certain, and they are not challengeable by “alternative views”. They are, to be blunt, wrong. A great example of this recently was the Weather Channel having to correct Breitbart for misrepresenting and misunderstanding the fundamentals of climate change. The “legitimate alternative view” was that the planet is cooling. It turns out that Breitbart didn’t know what the fuck it was talking about. And that is the fundamental characteristic of these views-they’re ill-informed. And they’re all over the place, thanks to people like Carlson who quixotically try to bring the “elite” down.
Small minded and dumb, eh, Tucker?
Pro-ject-ion. I’m all for keeping an open mind, but I’m not listening to bullshit.
What other non self-aware stuff is he saying in yonder story about elites?
Following Trump’s unforeseen election victory, the journalism community went into self-evaluation mode, hoping to understand how it had failed to see a Trump win on the horizon.
One of the immediate conclusions was that reporters had become too encapsulated in some sort of bubble. They had failed to detect, and thus understand, the sentiment of Americans residing in the heartland.
That was a conclusion with which Carlson wholeheartedly agreed.
Referencing a widely circulated quote from conservative Wisconsin-based talk-radio host Charlie Sykes, in which he suggested conservative voters were stuck in a bubble and only accepting news from right-wing sources, Carlson said the same was true of the mainstream media.
“It’s the mirror image of the world I live in,” Carlson said. “In Washington, no one believes anything unless it comes from The New Yorker, New York Times editorial page, or The Washington Post. There’s not just one bubble.”
Tucker Fucking Carlson lives in a two million dollar DC home. What world does he live in? Bueller?
At least Tucker can admit he’s in a bubble…almost. But watch carefully what Carlson is up to. He’s slandering Northeastern liberalism and the educated folk who come from there. It’s the permanently blue-voting land of ultimate urbanity-young, crowded, relatively wealthy, politically active, and schooled well enough to have a sense of social responsibility to the least of them. He’s from fucking San Francisco, so he knows those are his people across the way. But for whatever reason, Tucker probably prefers the opinions of some cow humpers in North Dakota or West Virginia instead because I figure he’s in love with the Lockean idea that workers of the land create something special and very important to Carlson and conservatives in general-property, and to a larger degree, he’s also heavily invested in the idolization of work. So he’s also fond of the opinions of people whom industry has left behind in the Midwest, I guess. Those (white) people are easy to rile up and you don’t have to look far for scapegoats. But it’s not that Carlson loves labor-he loves the authenticity, in my opinion. It helps him deal with the fact that he’s good for nothing. He’s a goddamn Episcopalian, which makes him about as necessary as an atheist in the Baptist land, but that’s another one of Carson’s adopted milieus. He romanticizes the heartland in some bizarre mechanism of self-loathing. At bottom, it’s likely a cynical calculation has also been made. Conservative media has been a cottage industry for well-nigh on two decades now, and the Daily Caller, like all right-wing projects, has a built-in, heavily propagandized and guaranteed readership/viewership.
Carlson is naive at best, and dangerous at worst to single out certain news outlets that cover Washington-two of those are papers of record, and for all their faults, are still doing the heavy lifting in journalism while the rest of us copy it. I suspect Tucker doesn’t get the cartoons in the New Yorker, so he threw them in there as well. But what I want to make clear is that he’s doing exactly what Trump and the rest of the conservative information outlets are doing-trying very hard to make people resistant to factual news. They’ve made a cuss word, a smear out of the term “mainstream”. More code and dog-whistling. If your average brainwashed Republican rube sees or hears that, they know instinctively that it is false information and can be tuned out.
This is all coming from a rather longish profile of Carlson. And my response is getting long. I may have to put this in installments, because it’s rather distracting at this point. Can I stay interested in him long enough to finish this screed? Can you?
Your still an asshole