The last time I was compelled to write about Tucker Carlson following his surprise firing by Fox News, I wrote,
The outpouring of conservative support for Tucker Carlson is quite nauseating, and shows an unfortunate infestation of bad judgment and ethics corruption when the necessary conduct is to recognize that an ideological ally is neither trustworthy nor honest. One report yesterday, pointing to the Fox News’ ratings crashing with Carlson’s exit, noted that younger Fox News viewers had led the stampede. Carlson is a demagogue with dubious motives, and the young are especially vulnerable to demagogues. I regard it as unethical for a news organization to put demagogues on the air for exactly that reason.”
Yesterday, Carlson premiered his new show on Twitter, and was kind enough to confirm that analysis, far from the first Ethics Alarms has made marking the one-time Golden Boy of America’s only conservative-biased network as a cynical, manipulative, self-promoting and untrustworthy narcissist.
You can watch Carlson’s Alex Jones imitation here. Only a deliberate conspiracy-monger would say this for public consumption:
… What’s happened to the hundreds of billions of US dollars we’ve sent to Ukraine? No clue. Who organized those BLM riots three years ago? No one’s gotten to the bottom of that. What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still classified. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money? How did he die? How about JFK? And so endlessly on. Not only are the media not interested in any of this, they’re actively hostile to anybody who is. In journalism, curiosity is the gravest crime.”
It’s signature significance. Luckily I was never “in” on Carlson, so I don’t have to re-post Kramer’s “I’m out!” moment from “Seinfeld” for the second time in two days. To state the most obvious dishonesty here, Carlson is a co-founder of The Daily Caller, which has its own investigative reporting arm. What’s stopping his own news organization from investigating these matters, if he seriously thinks they need attention?
We have “no clue” where Ukraine aid has gone? Sure we do: some of it has gone into the war effort, and lot of it has gone into to the pockets of Ukranian officials, as such foreign aid usually does when we give it to dicey governments. “Who organized the BLM riots?” Is that really a mystery? Oh, I get it: Tucker wants people to believe it was Democrats trying to bring down Trump and the GOP. Funny that they picked mostly Democrat-run cities to do their worst. “What exactly happened on 9/11?” Oh! Tucker’s a Truther now! That figures. “How about JFK?” “How about JFK?” Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories have been a cottage industry since 1963, and not one credible individual has come forward with real evidence showing that JFK didn’t die because Lee Harvey Oswald got lucky and killed a President.
I’m surprised Tucker didn’t suggest that FDR deliberately let Pearl Harbor be attacked.
Making these kinds of insidious suggestions is designed to destroy citizens’ faith and trust in their nation and history, make gullible, ignorant people fearful and paranoid, and most of all, as in the case of all demagogues, increase power and influence of the sower of this cultural salt in the national soil.
The main substance of Carlson’s diatribe is his familiar lament that Putin is being unfairly vilified by the mean old media and politicos when Zelenskyy is the real bad guy. “This morning, it looks like somebody blew up the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine. The rushing wall of water wiped out entire villages, destroyed a critical hydropower plant, and as of tonight, puts the largest nuclear reactor in Europe in danger of melting down. So, if this was intentional, it was not a military tactic — it was an act of terrorism,” Carlson began. Then he went on to conclude that Ukraine did the deed.
It’s not an act of terrorism. It was an act of war—you know, like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire-bombing of Dresden and every time the U.S, used napalm in Vietnam. Ukraine is fighting for its very existence as an independent state, and one of the most effective strategies if it is going to win is to make it clear to the Russian people that it will not hesitate to take whatever measures it deems necessary to survive, and that if they don’t want to suffer themselves, they need to put pressure on the dictator who started the fight.
Carlson’s Twitter show wasn’t responsible journalism or punditry, and, as always with him, who knows if he believes any of it? If Fox News continued to feature this kind of garbage, no matter how popular it was with young viewers who have neither the perspective nor the education to see Carlson for what he is, the network would be what progressives accuse it of being: a right-wing version of MSNBC.
Without Carlson weaving his webs, however, there are no equivalents of Al Sharpton, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes and Lawrence O’Donnell (among others) on Fox. Just some scattered dolts like Sean Hannity. It’s bad, but not that bad.
Ethics Alarms 
“…who knows if he believes any of it…”
Exactly. I’d say the odds are that he personally has only the vaguest notions about any of those events or issues. It is hard to fathom why he hasn’t directed his considerable investigative assets toward answering some of those questions. I did appreciate his beginning to air the January 6 video (a process which, inexplicably, died on the vine) but generally I find him smug and narcissistic, made even worse by his declarations of shunning smugness. He’s more an entertainer in the genre of political theater than a serious seeker of the truth. It is always easier to gin up controversy than to settle it.
Easier, and more profitable….
Ukraine is fighting for its very existence as an independent state, and one of the most effective strategies if it is going to win is to make it clear to the Russian people that it will not hesitate to take whatever measures it deems necessary to survive, and that if they don’t want to suffer themselves, they need to put pressure on the dictator who started the fight.
This would suggest that the government and media which claimed Putin blew up the Nordstream pipeline was lying because it would only hurt his ability to wage war. We should also keep in mind that it was NATO members that were creating a perceived threat to Russian sovereignty by moving toward Ukranian inclusion into NATO. I don’t have to wonder what we would do if China negotiated a protection deal with Mexico whereby, they would put military assets on our border. This is little different than when Kennedy provoked the Cuban missile crisis by putting our missiles in Turkey. No one ever learns.
We have elected officials who are far more dangerous in their demagoguery than Carlson. (not a worst thing rationalization but simply a need to call out the more dangerous) The American people do want an accounting of the billions spent to fight a proxy war with Russia. I want to know exactly how much is being syphoned off and lining the pockets of the Ukranian oligarchs and why we are continuing to enrich them when we have insufficient resources to deal with domestic issues. Why should I care if two two-bit nations fight each other when we are taking our eye off our real adversary that is China. We are depleting our own defensive capabilities to while still keeping our military industrial complex humming. Something is wrong.
As for the BLM aka Antifa riots of 2020 the FBI is doing nothing to ferret out who financed the operations. Where are the fraud charges against Colours and her family members who enriched themselves under the BLM banner? Who brought in the pallets of bricks during those riots and dropped them off at various locations and who bought and distributed all the frozen water bottles used as projectiles which injured hundreds of police officers? Billions in property damage but no long-term prison sentences yet they were able to indict and convict people on sedition charges who were not even in DC on January 6 in record time. These are legitimate questions.
Perhaps the attack on Carlson is misplaced. Perhaps the attack should be on the consumers of hype media. Carlson’s job as well as others in the media is to get eyeballs on his show. That is what he is doing and doing it well. People who watch Carlson, Joe Scarborough, Maddow or Hannity do not care to be informed, they wish to be validated. Any new information they get they use to advance their arguments against the other side. Very few people integrate ideas or synthesize the information they receive into a balanced understanding – I am guilty of this as well. There is a reason there are no objective information shows on TV because the public won’t support them with their eyeballs and NPR has found a home in the Democrat party.
Quotation marks should be around the first paragraph. It was taken from Jack’s post.
I agree with you on both Ukraine and BLM.
The whole Ukraine business reminds me of the problem with Chiang Kai-shek (and Madame Chiang) during WWII. The Japanese were our enemy. We were officially at war with them. So was China. But the government of Chiang was corrupt and a bunch of money provided by the U.S. was funneled into the lifestyle of Chiang, Madame and her Soong relatives. In the U.S., he became known as “Cash My Check” for his constant appeals for money. FDR couldn’t get Madame Chiang out of the U.S. fast enough during her famous visit (It’s also quite possible she had an affair with Wendell Willkie).
The U.S. has a soft heart when it comes to those we perceive as underdogs fighting against an aggressive Goliath. That soft heart has gotten us into military situations that are difficult to extricate ourselves from, particularly when dealing with less-than-noble governments (as well as those less-than-noble governments that are not willing to expend much of their own military resources to fight).
We have a right to hold our leaders accountable for sending billions in taxpayer money to line the pockets of Ukrainian oligarchs, especially during record inflation and spiraling debt in our own country.
Your point about BLM is equally valid. Someone financed these riots. Someone made sure the fodder was provided for these bad actors to facilitate the violence in city after city. Who runs the cities is relevant only in the way in which they chose to permit or refuse to contain the rioters or prosecute violent offenders in any meaningful way.
They should be held accountable, as well. But questions aren’t wrong.
Admittedly, I have no idea what he means by 9/11. It may not mean he’s a Truther. It may be. He should have been clearer on what he was aiming at. As for JFK. I admit I’m at a loss there, too, unless he was just trying to provide conspiracy balance to his 9/11 reference. Or maybe he knows something we don’t.
I can’t stand listening to any of the mainstream news media because they paper over major questions with flimsy excuses and nonsensical explanations for serious issues. Aside from who the insults are directed at, there really isn’t much difference between mainstream left and mainstream right news media. They are both pushing the exact same narrative on most issues, while arguing over minutiae. They have the same basic positions on everything from the Ukraine war to the debt ceiling, from China to the January 6 investigations. So much information is left out or skimmed over and deemed non-important. The war over ideological viewpoint on issues is the only difference in the coverage of the issues.
When you move away from mainstream sources, there is extreme skepticism of the government on all sides of political spectrum, and the analysis of the issues takes on far greater scope of information and viewpoints. Constant news media lies and dissembling has pushed a large portion of the population out of reading mainstream news sources and into reading the much more colorful and information rich patchwork of alternative sources hidden from search engine discoverability. The blog posts and articles in this sphere of the news are much, much longer, contain a lot more information, and spend far less time insulting people than the ones in the mainstream sites. They are packed with facts, dates, times, actual sourcing, video documentation and links to real information that actually says what the writers say it will say when you go look. The writers seem far more interested in informing people than in arguing over partisan talking points, and do crazy things like change their minds when they encounter information that runs counter to their preferred narrative or acknowledge when an ideological opponent has a good point. There are a lot of people reading this set of alternative news sources, and they are not on the same page as the people reading the mainstream material. The disconnect in information knowledge makes some of these people sound like conspiracy theorists even though they are not.
Of course, not all alternative news media sources are good sources. When reading this alternative section of the news, it is necessary to be discerning and savvy because of course some of it is just crackpot insanity and doom mongering. Not everyone can handle discernment and savvy, so some people are off in the weeds amongst the actual conspiracy theorists believing crazy shit like 5G towers can control their thoughts, viruses don’t exist and the earth is flat. Anyone with half a brain ought to be able to figure out that the crackpot sites are crack pot sites (pro tip, if the site is hawking weird vitamin supplements, healing crystals or copper protection bracelets the site is a crackpot scam), but there are a lot of people who cannot scrounge up half a brain.
My point of view is that Tucker Carlson is pandering to the people reading alternative news sources, but he isn’t discerning between the people who read 15 different economics blogs and the people who read healing crystal websites. I don’t know if that is because he can’t tell the difference or if he simply doesn’t care that there is a difference.
Some of the stuff he is talking about only sounds like it is crazy because he is assuming everyone he is talking to already knows what he is talking about. Some of what he is talking about sounds crazy because it is crazy.
For me, seeding Truther conspiracy theories is a permanent deal-breaker. It’s either amazingly stupid or evil: in Tucker’s case, I gravitate to the latter. [Here’s how deeply I feel this way: I gave up on my favorite Red Sox blog because the bloggers were Truthers, as excellent as their baseball commentary was. (I think they may have banned me first, though not because of that, but because I was too vociferous in condemning their weird love of Manny Ramirez despite his many ethics offenses….)]
I can understand that point of view. Climate change existential crisis zealots cause me to eliminate sources from my list pretty much the same way. Reason got themselves thrown out of my reading list for repeatedly publishing articles arguing that the climate change crisis required everyone to give up their libertarian principles and embrace extreme government control to save the planet. Permanent deal breaker.
I classify 9/11 truthers amongst the crackpots, and I don’t read authors or frequent websites that countenance such theories. This is more because I don’t feel I need to make myself dumber than because I it offends me. I guess it is a deal breaker for me, as well, but on stupidity grounds rather than because I’m offended by it.
Null Pointer wrote, “I can understand that point of view. Climate change existential crisis zealots cause me to eliminate sources from my list pretty much the same way. Reason got themselves thrown out of my reading list for repeatedly publishing articles arguing that the climate change crisis required everyone to give up their libertarian principles and embrace extreme government control to save the planet. Permanent deal breaker.”
It’s interesting that you brought climate change propaganda in that way, and for good reason. Here’s my contribution to that reasonably justified climate change deflection.
I’ve been diving into the issues related to climate change for a while most recently I’ve been diving into atmospheric carbon, that they profess is the source of all climate change. Plus looking into the hard pressure from the President, his administration and the apocalyptic climate change activists to ram electric vehicles down the throats of “We the People”. By the way, that’s exactly what the EPA is currently in the process of trying to do right now by trying to force a new standard on vehicle manufacturers that limits the manufacturers vehicle fleet of vehicles to 82 grams CO2/mile average, the average of some fleets can easily be well over 300+ grams CO2/mile average and that’s getting good to really good MPG by 21st century standards. This EPA push will force manufacturers to produce many electric vehicles vs fossil fuel vehicles and dramatically increase the MPG of every fossil fuel vehicle in their fleet to achieve that overall carbon footprint to 82 grams CO2/mile average. Are you okay with a riding lawnmower engine to power your SUV? Companies like Acura with four basic models they sell will likely no longer be able to sell their vehicles in the USA if this proposed new EPA standard becomes the standard and is enforced.
My goal of diving into this was to move beyond atmospheric carbon propaganda and the associated propaganda and proposals to ram electric vehicles down our throats. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never purchase an electric vehicle unless the government outright bans them and forces the public to permanently destroy all of them; but hey, it’s been stated that I’m a stupid arrested-development man-child, so what could an ignorant fool like me possibly know. 😉 😉 😉
Okay, my extrapolation of the reasonable deflection is complete.
Oops, I forgot a couple of words…
“As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never purchase an electric vehicle unless the government outright bans and forces the public to permanently destroy all fossil fuel vehicles; …”
There, now it’s clearer than mud.
Where has the Ukrainian aid gone? Well, the Bandidos motorcycle gang has been selling our heavy weaponry (like Javelin missiles) on the black market in Europe recently. They are using this money (and possibly the weapons) to go on a multi-state attack on rival biker gangs across this country. You can see these attacks in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico….
Why don’t we have coverage of that? These aren’t the only incidents, just the first ones in those states. So yeah, we armed outlaw biker gangs with antitank and antiaircraft missiles. Good job, President Honorius.
https://www.yahoo.com/video/weapons-meant-ukraine-hands-finnish-164400692.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-police-seize-weapons-raids-bandidos-biker-gang-2021-07-01/ (who can pick out the fake news reporting in this one?)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/3-motorcyclists-fatally-shot-targeted-gang-attack-texas-authorities-sa-rcna79846
https://www.foxnews.com/us/oklahoma-city-shootout-biker-gang-surrounded-bar-gunned-down-rivals-attack-from-behind-court-docs
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-investigate-shooting-red-river-new-mexico/story?id=99657876#:~:text=Three%20people%20were%20killed%20and%20five%20others%20were%20injured%20when,in%20New%20Mexico%2C%20police%20said.
I saw that Tweet last night right before I crawled into bed and knew he was going to get a pointed reply this morning from me. Then this morning I saw this post from Jack after I woke up and he said much of what I was thinking last night, so when I got some time to post a reply I used a little bit of Jack’s opinion in my reply to Tucker.
I’m quite tired of prominent public figures using their bully pulpit to promote conspiracy theories and others ignorantly talking about things that they clearly know nothing about. It’s all advocacy bullshit.
That said…
I’ve been saying for quite some time that,
This statement fully applies to what’s happening with the war in Ukraine. For me to believe that this time they’re telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth would be forcing myself to completely ignore a verifiable pattern of years of outright deception, I won’t do that. I don’t believe the left’s Ukrainian war propaganda but that doesn’t mean I believe the Russian war propaganda either.
Before some trolling fool says I’m an idiot for not fully depressing the pressing the “k” key…
“I saw that Tweet last night right before I crawled into bed and knew he was going to get a pointed reply this morning from me.”
Yes, absolutely: nobody should trust the news media, and Tucker is, if not Exhibit A why, at least P or Q. Of all people, he is ethically estopped from making that point, justified as it is.
I wrote above, “For me to believe that this time they’re telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth would be forcing myself to completely ignore a verifiable pattern of years of outright deception, I won’t do that. I don’t believe the left’s Ukrainian war propaganda but that doesn’t mean I believe the Russian war propaganda either.”
About Ukraine, spend the time to watch the following video and pay particular close to the information regarding the Ukrainian war. It’s a long video but it is relatively interesting.
I hope that video posted correctly, if not, go to Twitter and find Tucker Carlson’s page and then find the interview with RFK, Jr., it’s titled “Ep. 16 RFK Jr. explains Ukraine, bio-labs, and who killed his uncle”.
After watching the video I have a new level of respect for RFK Jr. I’m not sure I actually like him or think he would make a good President, but my level of respect for him increased and in politics today that’s saying something.