Tucker Carlson White Supremacist Messaging
The face of Fox News is not the bow-tied buffoon from his "Crossfire" days.
When Tucker Carlson debuted as a CNN talking head in 2000, I thought he was an intellectual lightweight and wondered how he got to be the co-host of the network’s “Crossfire,” sitting in a seat that had previously been held but much more senior journalists. By the time the network fired Carlson in January 2005, I had long since given up on the show. Regardless, my opinion of him remained unchained: he was a partisan hack and a lightweight.
Carlson never went away, of course. He appeared on PBS of all places (2004-2005) before moving on to MSNBC (2005-2008) and his present home at Fox News (2009-present). He founded the Daily Caller in 2010 and continued, in my estimation, to be a joke.
Something clearly changed in the Trump era, though. He got his own prime time show on November 14, 2016, just after Trump’s election, replacing Greta Van Susteren at 7pm in the lineup. Just weeks later, on January 9, 2017, he replaced Megyn Kelly in the more prestigious 9pm slot and then replaced Bill O’Reilly in the 8pm slot on April 19, 2017. So, in less than five months, he went from some dude that appeared on Fox shows to being its biggest star.
Somewhere along the way, he went from a hackish Rush Limbaugh wannabe to something far darker. Whether his newfound power allowed him the freedom to be who he always was or he is simply tapping into the zeitgeist, I have no way of knowing.
While I’ve been vaguely aware of all this, I honestly hadn’t paid it all that much attention because Carlson has been around for so long and my views of him were formed two decades ago.
We’ve seen reports such as Esquire‘s March 2021 piece “John Oliver Breaks Down Tucker Carlson’s Decades of White Supremacist Messaging” (obviously, based on Oliver’s HBO show which I drifted away from years ago for a variety of reasons) and Rolling Stone‘s September 2021 report “Quiz: Can You Tell the Difference Between Tucker Carlson and an Admitted White Supremacist?“
Here’s the Oliver segment:
The New York Times is later to the party but appears to have gone all in, with multiple features in today’s edition and indications that more pieces are forthcoming. The main story is headlined “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.”
Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.
His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.
Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.
“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”
There’s a whole lot more but I’ll let you read it for yourselves.
That Fox, which originally resisted Trump but has subsequently gone all-in and marginalized or outright shed more reasonable voices is something that I’ve commented on here quite a bit. But the degree to which the one-time bowtied goofball has been unabashedly pushing white nationalism is something that I hadn’t fully appreciated.
And the degree to which the one-time bowtied goofball has been unabashedly embraced by FOX and their audience should give everyone concern.
eta correction of pronoun
Intellectual lightweights can master propagandism. In fact, it might be a requirement. Someone who thinks hard on a topic in an open-minded way can no no longer be a propagandist – that would be betraying their education and studies. Like James said, a fucking lightweight putz.
OTOH, The Hannity texts blew me away. Absolute coordination. Orders issued. Orders received. Hannity’s replies “Got it.”
This is banana republic stuff. This is Soviet era stuff. This is media coordination with the ruling class.
I do not understand why this has been a “B” story. To me, this is huge. Overt coordination with a “news” channel.
Blows my mind. The implications are chilling beyond words. This should not happen. It is grotesque. Should not happen here.
In my mind, bigger than Nixon. Way bigger.
Why would not Tucker be pro blacks? Their testosterone levels are higher.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3455741/
James, I agree with everything above with the exception of one sentence:
I don’t think that where Tucker ended up is all that much darker than Limbaugh. At the time of his death, Limbaugh’s brand of white nationalism reached a far larger audience than Carlson does. Limbaugh built his career on that model (which only got moved more and more to the forefront in later years). If he was still alive now, there would be very little daylight between him and Carlson.
Granted, Limbaugh, at least in the early years might have put more of a veneer of “humor” on the racism (and always had the fallback of “well Snerdly approves and he’s black and I hired him so I can’t be racist”). But his show always ran on white greivence.
@Matt Bernius:
The one way that I think this is darker than Limbaugh is that there is a major, publicly-traded media network that is providing Carlson with this platform.
The issue here isn’t Carlson, it’s Fox.
Comedians take a germ of truth or a random observation and expand and amplify it in order to get their audience laughing. Tucker Carlson is like a bizarro world malignant comedian, appropriating those techniques not for laughs but to generate fear, outrage and repulsion in his audience.
according to Michael Shermer’s mini-course on conspiracy theories, since 2015 a new kind of conspiracism has come to dominate. Older conspiracy theories employed sophistry and the misuse and misrepresentation of evidence. New ones merely need be asserted. That’s in fact what Benito does for the most part, a lot of people say that.
Given this fact, an intellectual lightweight can easily come up with rationalizations and other sophistry to bolster such things, especially given the lightweight nature of his audience gullibility.
In essence, he’s only had to teach the flock of sheep to say “Benito good, Biden baaaaad!”
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
@Dr. Joyner
Which is what I, and many others on this site, have been telling you for years. You have a blind spot when it comes to some matters of race. And, sadly, many of your fellow countryment have the same blindspot. I believe, as stated here repeatedly, that there is a strain of racism that “Conservative, Inc” has been pushing for more than a decade that has permeated the country deeply, and the worst is yet to come. Trump gave racists permission to speak freely, and they are, but it’s not getting the attention it deserves, and has been almost normalized.
Is Susan Collins racist? No. But with every vote for Trump’s policies, she enabled racism and misygony. Same with Romney, Murkowski, Sasse, and the other anti-Trumpers who still believe the GOP can be saved.
It can’t.
But… the bigger problem is that 45% of our fellow countrymen/women are not only okay with racism and misogyny, they support it. THAT’s the real problem.
What’s especially striking is that he joined Crossfire just after the departure of Pat Buchanan, the prime crypto-white-nationalist of his time. Buchanan in the ’90s forged a brand similar to that of today’s Tucker in a lot of ways, obsessing over brown-skinned immigrants changing the makeup of the US, and often appropriating white-nationalist slogans without being quite as explicit about the racial component to his views as, say, David Duke. (A key quote was then he told his fellow conservatives to “take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues,” such as “reverse discrimination against white folks.”)
Needless to say, Tucker wasn’t known for this brand of “conservatism” at the time he was on Crossfire. He tended to come off as a fairly standard Bush-era right-leaning pundit. He didn’t start to shift in a Buchanan-esque direction until the launch of Daily Caller in 2010. Whether it was a personal evolution or not, it fit the zeitgeist of the time, as that publication delved heavily into the racial side of anti-Obamism (it was there they published stories like the one accusing the president of anti-white animus due his getting black-colored puppies). I do wonder how much Tucker took a look back at what Buchanan was doing while he was still a bow-tie conservative and consciously decided to model himself more on the ways of his former co-host.
Not to defend Carlson or Fox News, but the labeling of white grievance as White Nationalism is precisely what rallies white conservatives under their banner. It’s poisonous, but it’s not the same thing.
@Will:
Fair, and in Limbaugh’s case it was definitely more white grievance.
I do think that Carson continues to drifts much further toward the nationalism side. And he had been associated with a lot of people who are White Nationalists (a least two of whom worked for him as writers).
So, a commercially successful Rod Dreher?
… But more brown than gay focused?
@Will:
I’ll bite. In practical, real world terms, what’s the difference? How does the behavior of someone pushing “white grievance” differ from someone pushing “white nationalism.”?
@EddieInCA:
– Quoted for Truth!
The racists and misogynists have always been there, but they were quieted for a time through good old fashioned cultural shaming. A former POTUS (and the party he epitomizes), plus a highly paid TV personality (and the media empire he epitomizes) have given them permission to proudly fly their freak flags.
Sadly, having tasted public acceptance and given asymmetric power by the US electoral system, these people won’t return easily to their corner. But, the first steps have to be shining light on their reprobate views and, of course, electoral reform.
The GOP has been a racist party since the late 1960’s, they’ve just stopped dog-whistling. Throughout the time James and Steven were Republican voters it was already a racist party. Overtly? No. Easily seen nevertheless? Yes. No reasonably informed American had any doubts what The Silent Majority and Welfare Queens and Willie Horton were about.
I welcome all converts to the cause. But let’s not rewrite history. Republicans knew full well what the party was doing on race and gay rights and women’s rights, they just hand-waved it away so they could pretend they were all about individual liberty and tax breaks. This was always transparent bullshit. Every liberal in the country knew full well what the GOP was, and we told you what it was, and we warned you where it would lead. For my political lifetime at least the GOP has always been authoritarian, they’ve always hated any freedom but the freedom to stockpile guns and money, they’ve always been racist, narrow-minded and cruel.
All that’s changed is that Republicans don’t bother to lie about it as much. That’s what has finally embarrassed some few Republicans into quitting the party. But for the vast majority of Republicans the freedom to be openly despicable is a huge relief.
@Will: Considering the fact that white grievance is the ground in which White Nationalism finds most fertile for taking root, I’m not sure it makes much difference.
He’s a nazi who doesn’t go after Jews. He’s practically begging to put immigrants (illegal and legal) in camps, and he wouldn’t be bothered in the last by mass deaths. I don’t believe its an act anymore than I believed it was an act with Limbaugh. Peas in a pod, hardcore racists who wouldn’t do the lynching, but would cheer those who do the dirty work on.
Rupert Murdoch is the same, the guy is worth at least $50 billion, he doesn’t need a few billion extra. He’s to happy to have Carlson, Ingraham and the rest of the nazis on the network push their racist ideologies because he believe it too.
@EddieInCA:
I started seriously turning away from the GOP circa 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party (and to some extent even with the Palin nomination in 20o8). In the 2012 Presidential primaries, I was pretty adamant that I could not support any of the non-Mormon candidates. My druthers would have been Jon Huntsman but I was happy enough with Romney. With Trump, the whole party essentially went the Palin-Joe The Plumber-Tea Party path and turned it up to 11.
@Matt Bernius:
Yes, I’m really thinking of circa-2002 Limbaugh, which is the last I really paid much attention. As I’ve written many times over the years, I think that the insane number of people competing to be pundits in the Internet era pushed the competition ever more over-the-top in order to stand out.
@EddieInCA:
I started seriously turning away from the GOP circa 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party (and to some extent even with the Palin nomination in 20o8). In the 2012 Presidential primaries, I was pretty adamant that I could not support any of the non-Mormon candidates. My druthers would have been Jon Huntsman but I was happy enough with Romney. With Trump, the whole party essentially went the Palin-Joe The Plumber-Tea Party path and turned it up to 11.
@EddieInCA:
FTFY. It’s been part of the mix since at least the founding of the National Review 3 years after I was born–and probably before that given that he didn’t compose the racist stuff he spewed there just for the sake of the magazine.
And yes, when he was running for office in New York, he renounced (sort of) some of the stuff that he’d said in the past. I contend that it was a change of face, not of heart, because he knew that *snootier than thou intellectual cracker* was not going to resonate with NY voters well enough to allow him a chance at office.
@senyordave:
He may not explicitly go after Jews, but many of the white-nationalist themes he’s pushed contain more than a few nuggets of it. The “replacement theory” he’s helped normalize is at its core not only racist but deeply anti-Semitic. He just declines to specifically identify the villains responsible for doing the replacing as Jews–though he has used Soros as the boogeyman. He has also attacked Jared Kushner as the person secretly undermining Trump–a theme pushed by David Duke and his ilk for years.
Let’s remember–the main thing motivating the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter wasn’t anything Jews were doing, but the so-called “caravan of migrants” that Trump and Tucker others had been stirring their followers up about for months, including claims that Soros was somehow funding the caravan. The “mainstream” right-wingers don’t need to mention Jews in order for their listeners to pick up on who really is to blame.
much more senior journalists? Who? Political Talk shows are hosted by political hacks.
The average American doesn’t define racism as malleably and self-servingly as the far Left/OTB community.
Today’s OTB community PTSD verboten subject: Bush TANG memos.
Mad Max is just on the arising, no law and order, I’ve said this for years, the police, chief of police, DISTRICT attorney, the Judge, the Supreme Court Judges, Look at Clarence Thomas, he’s above the law,the Law is becoming the “ENEMY “@Paul L: @Paul L: @Paul L:
@Paul L:
Some rando on Twitter is your “evidence”?
Be better.
Discussing Carlson’s intellectual heft is a category error. It’s not a question of intellectual ability, it’s a question of morality. Read Frankfurt On Bullshit. It’s not a question of knowing what’s true, it’s a question of caring what’s true. He doesn’t ask, “Is this true?” He doesn’t ask, “Is this harmful?” He only asks, “Will this boost my ratings?”
@OzarkHillbilly: taking pot shots at available media figures, left and right is easy.
How about your suggestions, unless you feel all these areas to be copecetic: inflation (cure not blame); unvetted access to our southern border by immigrants seeking a better life, cartel agents, terrorists, gang bangers. You could keep your home open and unguarded and carefore those who seek your aid; will you dip into your savings to feed, shelter educate and health assistance for needy iunauthorized visitors;
Help our big cities prevent crime against Minority people by expanding police protection:
Repair our supply shortages and prevent harm to affected populations.
Maybe you prefer pining away at media pundits who displease you with their views and attitudes?
@Paul L:
The average American is a quantitative construct. Most individuals are likely average in some metric even if they are more than one standard deviation from the mean in either direction in others.
Using that construct in a qualitative sense is just shorthand for whatever the speaker wants it to be, often, if not almost always in the sense of, “I’m average American, and I think this, therefore…”
In other words, your post isn’t even wrong–a description of an entity that does not and cannot exist. It is useless at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
Oh, and labeling OTB as far-Left says a lot more about you than it does about Joyner or Taylor. Imagine thinking either of them could be described as far-Left! Maybe if they’re dining at a table with Atilla sitting at the head.
Reagan raised taxes, so I’m guessing you see him as a fellow-traveler of Debbs, right?
Correct, OTB is mercenary corporate Democrat shilling to the Far-Left’s narratives under the guise of community just like the Lincoln Project grifters.
Regardless, Masnick is right: the value of comment moderation is the ability to maintain a community.
Reagan also banned machine guns and allowed 30 million illegal aliens to replace insurrectionists.
I never, ever, EVER thought I’d hear someone refer to the good Dr. Joyner and Dr. Taylor as mercenaries, but there you go, our dear, beloved mercenary overlords! You’ve officially hit the bigtime on “eeeeeevil”. 😛 😛 😛
Sometimes I wish pithy quotes weren’t a reasonable facsimile of reality.
“He’s what a dumb person thinks a smart person sounds like” does describe nearly everything about Tucker’s current persona. As James realized years ago, intellectually he’s a total hack with zero contribution to society.
In Tucker’s mind, he’s just playing a game. Sometimes I wonder about the actual motivation of these people — “I’m just doing what I’ve gotta do” or “Nothing matters anyway” — but the outcome is, sadly, no different than if he actually believed in every word out of his mouth. Of course, if he had a soul, he wouldn’t be working for Fox, so I don’t think self-awareness ever kicked in for Lord Tuck Tuck.
Oh, you sweet summer child. It’s always fun to see someone trolling their first thread.
@Gavin: He’s an old-timer on the troll functions. We just haven’t heard from him in years.
@Jax: .
I was banned under the old comment system. I stopped reading OTB when that happened as there are better leftwing echo chambers (Raw Story) to get the current Democrat operative narrative.
Who would the more senior [right leading] journalist to use instead of Tucker as host of the original Crossfire. George Will?
Let us not pretend that Bill Press, Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, Paul Begala and James Carville are good faith unbiased straight shooting journalists
@Paul L: So what’s your take now, currently, on the right wing journosphere? Who’s your main squeeze for information? I assume you’re still anti-Biden, but who’s your bet against him in 2024? If not Trump, then who, and why? I’m actually interested in hearing how your media consumption has progressed since your ban.
Ewww….Raw Story. They’re right up there with Ranker on “breathless journalism for the clicks”.
@Gavin:
I assume he believes every word of it. He could just be sitting back, enjoying the life of a frozen dinner heir, the wastrel child of inherited wealth. Instead he wants to make something of himself, and this is that something.
(Our beloved hosts have more mercenary goals, desperate for the ad revenue this site brings in, as they are not the heirs of frozen food fortunes)
@Gustopher:
So he really believes that Jill Biden referring to herself as “doctor” risks making people think she’s a physician during a medical emergency? Please. He’s not an idiot. He just thinks most of his audience are idiots, and that the rest are trolls who think it’s “owning the libs” to say dumbshit. In any case, he’s figured out that what he does pays dividends and that he won’t suffer any negative consequences for it. So he’s having fun at the expense of anyone who deigns to take him seriously, whether that be the true believers in his audience or the normies who get outraged by what he says.
@EddieInCA: The practical real world difference would lie in the aspects of ‘White Grievance’ being rooted in socio-economic insecurity, perceived and real. And it’s rather clear the US Left being so fully bought into its Identarian play is blind here, as your very post shows. And so the US Left continues to lose white and even non-latino working class votes as per last electoral round.
@Paul L: How very bizarrely unhinged radical reactionary delusion…. Joyner & Co as “corporate” is precious, really precious. Rather they tend to the “egg-head” intellectual (of course I write such things in semi-irony, being the holder of two graduate degrees), middle-class centrist.
@Matt Bernius: Yes, and within Fox ownership, two persons, Murdoch Père & Lachlan. When Murdoch Père dies, it shall be quite interesting what happens, if Liz backs James outright (if internal equity votes provide the leverage).
@Matt Bernius: why on earth to you grant the White Supremacists the honour of the title Nationalist? They are nothing more the ethnic supremacists. Nationalism is pure sophistry and misnomer for them. Call they by their proper name, not some faddish appelation.
@Lounsbury:
I get where you’re coming from, and I resisted using the term “white nationalist” for a long time, largely because I knew it was a term they invented–it was like the way Holocaust deniers call themselves Holocaust “revisionists.”
But I’ve come to see the term as useful, and I think it’s lost whatever euphemistic flavor it may have once had, which is why most of them have moved on to other terms like identitarian, alt-right, groyper, and so on. You call someone a white nationalist, pretty much everyone knows what that means by now. It doesn’t give them any added respectability.
@Lounsbury:
I am using the term “corporate Democrat” like progressives such as the Young Turks for centrist Democrats who believe that corporations and Capitalism should not be abolished for a moneyless society and resource based economy that provides necessaries to all.
@Jax:
“currently, on the right wing journosphere? Who’s your main squeeze for information?”
The Lincoln Project and Never Trump/Republicians Neocons like the Dispatch and the Bulwark.
@Kylopod: Among political junkies. Which is a poor standard.
@Jax:
I’d love to know where my mercenary checks have been deposited.
@Kylopod:
I didn’t realize it was a term they created. I used it because from my perspective it’s accurate in so much as they fundamentally tie whiteness to national identity. I see that as slightly different than supremacy (though there is a lot of crossover in that Venn diagram).
I also think it’s important to use that term as it the shows how this is a growing political movement and how it shows up in policy.
@Steven L. Taylor:
mer·ce·nar·y /ˈmərsəˌnerē/
adjective
(of a person or their behavior) primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I know I’m a junior partner in this, but given that I’m the most consistent “corporate democrat” on staff, I definitely would LOVE to understand when my check is coming so I can finally give up this act of actually making it look like I really believe in the things I write about.
Also, for the record, I did check into Paul’s claim about being banned. He did get a warning in this thread back in January of 2020: https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/podcast-recommendation/
Paul L. then continued to post until February of that year and then disappeared for a year before resuming posting under the same name (using a different email) in February of 2021 and has been posting on and off since then.
There was no official ban message, which James or Steven usually do. I don’t have permission to check if a specific email was banned. However if Paul L. was banned, it lasted for approximately a year. And if that ban happened, the specific reason for the ban was derailing threads.
Also, for the record, there was no “old comment system” beyond a short experiment James ran a gazillion years ago.
@Paul L:
I don’t know which part of this statement is worse:
– The fact you think that our writing about things is in any way revenue-generating for us.
– Or the fact you just accused us of being unethical to earn non-existent money.
The first demonstrates that you really have no idea about how this works (unless of course, your blog is raking in tons of cash for you–if that’s the case good for you).
The second apparently demonstrates that you think anyone who doesn’t agree with your positions is somehow knowingly lying and/or unethically taking positions they otherwise wouldn’t support.
Neither reflects particularly well on you my dude.
@Paul L: “Let us not pretend that Bill Press, Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, Paul Begala and James Carville are good faith unbiased straight shooting journalists”
That’s a good idea, since Press, Buchanan, Begala and Carville never claimed to be journalists at all — they were political operatives and consultants.
You really don’t even know what a journalist is, do you?
@wr:
The 1st paragraph of this post.
“Tucker Carlson … got to be the co-host of the network’s “Crossfire,” sitting in a seat that had previously been held but much more senior journalists”
More senior journalists: Bill Press, Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, Paul Begala and James Carville
wr, Paul takes it as a given that “an independent journalist” doesn’t exist:
1] Fox is a wholly incorporated subsidiary of the Republican party. Thus, “political operatives” and “journalists” are the same thing.
2] Presto change-o, Democrats just simply must be doing the same and everyone who says otherwise is lying.
Combine this with a healthy dose of confirmation bias [The more you disagree, the more I dig in!] and here we are at the nonsense goulash.
@Matt Bernius:
I remember trying to post and my comments getting disappeared in the queue. That, no posts by Doug M, the “OTB community” turning this blog into another Balloon Juice and removal of the RSS feed lead me to stop paying attention to it. I can back when Dr. James posted on twitter praising the Judge who called out Trump in a case that did not have him as a defendant.
I stand by my comments on Preet Bharara and would say that most Federal U.S. Attorneys are as dishonest, abusive and unethical as him and Prosecutorial misconduct is just SOP for defendants who lack the resources to fight back and find it.
I thought you guys replaced the comment system when you no longer showed possible imbed tags for comments. They may still work.
@Gavin:
Name who you view as “an independent journalist”. Dan Rather? Rachel Maddow? Joy Reid?
@Paul L:
Both Breaking Points and Kyle Kulinski have more credibility in their little finger(s, that’s 3 people) than any of the MSDNC ghouls or FauxNews throwaway hacks.
The benefit of being funded by viewers is that they can actually be intellectually consistent — and call out the failings of both “sides” .. which depending on the issue are not opposing sides given the corruption of those parties.
Individual people do actually pay attention — lack of intellectual credibility is why CNN+ failed spectacularly over the last couple of weeks.
Kyle Kulinski just parrots TYT.
Krystal Ball is a former MSDNC ghoul.
.. who was pushed out because she’s an actual progressive unwilling to parrot what MSDNC wanted her to say on camera.
@Paul L:
He had a falling out with them in the past year due to serious disagreements on foreign policy.
@Matt Bernius: I fail to see how in any substance this differs from White Supremacy in history. It has always tied national identity to the “right” race. America, South Africa, etc. The only change is loss of significant access to power. You dignify this reactionary reaction far too much and to grant it “nationalism” dignify it with a word generally outside multiculti Left circles, generally positive feelings as see Ukraine.
I need some help here because I don’t quite understand what Paul is claiming
Here he claims that The Lincoln project is one of his main squeezes for information @Paul L:
His prior post here @Paul L: said
So the Lincoln Project is both a far left corporate democratic group that shills for Democrats while also being Paul’s main squeeze on the right wing journosphere.
Am I reading something wrong??
@Lounsbury:
FWIW, I have no issue with you referring to Tucker Carlson as a white supremacist.
I am feeling a bit of whiplash considering how many times you’ve complained about woke lefties like myself pushing language too far or overemphasizing race. Perhaps, this is an example of keeping your powder dry so you feel like you can call it when you see it.
Either way, this is a place where I’m happy we share crossover. Pace, my man!
@Matt:
Paul L has a longstanding habit of trying to be “funny” or show how “smart” he is compared to the rest of us unethical hacks… um… I mean, mercenaries.
I’ve reached the point where his posts largely serve to prove the adage falsely attributed to Mark Twain about fools and speaking. This is unfortunate because I think if he chose to try and have a conversation versus dunking on us libs, there’s an opportunity for conversation. To his credit, he’s more likely than most to respond to comments with a follow-up. Not to mention, in some cases, he posts something that others agree with.
I also agree with him on many of his posts concerning prosecutorial overreach. Where we sadly fall apart is that his view on the subject seems to still be shaped by partisanship versus all else (in the past he just couldn’t agree that perhaps his apparently preferred candidate/president had a really shitty record when it came to appoint AG’s and trying to combat the very issue he claimed to care deeply about).
@Matt Bernius: You should not have any whiplash, if you do it is from a misunderstanding of the objection to the wokish Left side excessive penchant for ethno-identarian political rhetoric and policy. Such objection comes neither from any sympathy for the reactionary populist right nor from blindness to real issues of equity.
It is pure pragmatism, and a desire not to see you fools ceasely play Don Quixote and thus open the gates to more Trumpism.
The critique is that it is badly framed and narrow politics that will see you continue to perform poorly in the contxt of an electoral system that is not truly national. The condescending write off[*] of the non-urban centre is an own-goal and all the egg-head explanation and sophistry doesn’t help. I rather find this sort of comment useful: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/02/opinion/democrats-rural-america.html
My impatience with you lot idiotic woke political discourse and current politics presentation is simply becuase contrary to perhaps two decades ago or even a decade ago, I would prefer you gits not lose to the Republicans which have become a perverted stalking horse for white supremacy wearing populist clothes and taking advantage of socio-economic fears rooted in real problems.
[*: yes yes, rather hypocritical of me to critique that but then I am not running for any office either here or in USA land, and I am not so naively stupid as to think internet commenting is anything else than a form of modest self-entertainment, one essentially never changes a mind]
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s all out in the open, and it’s obvious to me that there will be no (zero) political price to be paid by the Republican Party.
Republicans have it wired so that they can lose the overall popular vote in presidential elections yet and because they have locked up (governor + legislures) nearly 30 states, they will always be close to majority control of Congress. The Senate in particular favors Republicans because so many red states are ‘population deficient.’
@Lounsbury:
Way to use pompous language to indicate that you really want to sneer and not engage in a conversation.
Honestly, what’s the point? Are you truly blind to the fact that he is trying to honestly engage?
@Steven L. Taylor: Not at all, was responding honestly really. Everyone has their own style, eh? You the Academic ponderousness, me mine. I care no more for yours than you for mine. Why I rarely comment on your posts. Et voila, difference in tastes.
@Lounsbury:
So, your honest goal is to be insulting to someone trying to have a conversation? (Indeed, I note the dig at me as well, so kudos).
Honestly, you come across as someone playing a character.
@Matt Bernius:
Trump picked GOP authority worshippers as his AG instead of a wingman like Obama and Holder. Trump did expose FISA abuse and FBI corruption that the Democrats are still defending .
So the same talking point as Palin’s answer to Katie Couric on what media she reads.
I was told/gaslighted by Democrats and the media that the Lincoln Project are the true Republicans .
Shilling to the Far-Left’s narratives does not mean they believe them.
The Lincoln Project is against deficit spending under Trump even when the defended it working for Bush/McCain/Romney/Biden.
@Paul L.:
Which is exactly why the GOP has been calling themselves the “law and order party” for decades now. The whole party has a rigid authoritarian aspect to it that was reinforced when 9/11 occurred. The GOP is no ally of yours if you want meaningful reforms in the criminal justice system in the USA. Sadly a lot of democrats like Manchen aren’t your ally either. The powers that be aren’t interested in giving the little guys a chance because then they might not know their place in other matters.
Every attempt at police reform has been labeled as “defunding” by the so called liberal media. I saw first hand talk about reallocating resources to more effectively respond to emergency calls being called “defunding” by the local media.
The only time the GOP cares about deficit spending is when they can use it to club democrats. As a GOP vice president said “Deficits don’t matter”…
This is the most ridiculous claim
@Matt:
Democrats in Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois passed laws such as the Law Enforcement Bill of Rights pushed by the Police unions to protect police from being recorded in public.
Democrats had to repeal in a panic their laws to hide police records from the public in New York and California.