Tucker Carlson

The Star Spangled Naked Teacher!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It’s been a long time since Ethics Alarms had one of its trademark Naked Teacher Principle tales or even one of it’s many variations, like the Nearly Naked Teacher’s Volunteer Principle, the Drag Queen School Principal Principle, the Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle, and the Too Sexy Firefighter Principle, to name just a few. This one, from Alexander, Georgia, has nothing to do with July Fourth, except that I discovered the story this morning. It is certainly past time for one of these posts: the last one under the tag was here, and it was only about the related Naked Mayor Principle, involving the moronic mayor of Minot, North Dakota who accidentally sent an explicit nude video of himself to the city’s attorney.

Above is Maris Nichols, 25, a married Georgia high school teacher, who really likes having sex with students: she’s been indicted for showing at least six students the sweet mysteries of life in her classroom, at a golf course, and in a closet). Two of the teenagers were younger than 16. What puts Maris into the Naked Teacher Principle category is that she is a very provocative OnlyFans performer, and was being blackmailed by some of her students—it is unclear if they were among the one she was boinking—for better grades. They had discovered the OnlyFans channel she owns, operates, and uses to display her excellent Linda Lovelace impression, among other things.

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An Idiot Test For Conservatives: Tucker Carlson Says He’s Starting A New Political Party

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m giving my inner Fredo a workout lately, because so, SO many positions that I have emphasized early and often on Ethics Alarms have been proving blazingly accurate. To be fair, it didn’t take an IQ much higher than Fredo’s to figure out that Tucker Carlson was a huckster, a fraud, a hypocrite, a shameless self-promoter, a liar and a weasel, but for some strange reason—maybe it was the hair?—an amazing number of usually smart people couldn’t see it. Glib demagogues and sociopaths are like that, though: they hypnotize people with their verbal facility and shameless audacity

Tucker’s latest grift is that he says he wants to start a new political party, presumably of dim-witted, gullible, anti-Semitic, isolationist Republicans. He even appeared on MSNow right after renouncing the GOP, knowing well what the network is and the America it wants to create, but never mind, Tucker Carlson literally has no integrity. He’s smarter than Marjorie Taylor Greene (who isn’t?), not as obviously bat-house crazy as Candace Owen, not as pathetic as Bill Kristol, but still: the man is not a serious person. He makes Bill Maher seem like Victor Davis Hanson. Carlson is a trust fund rich kid who never had to do a hard day’s work in his life, and is the kind of pseudo-intellectual not very bright people think is brilliant.

I’ve written way too much about this creep, but I’m proud to say that I declared that Fox News needed to fire him in 2013, a full decade before they did. Since then I’ve caught him in conflicts of interest, rigging his debates, promoting anti-vaxxers, leaking to the New York Times, found him to be a race-baiter and a legal ignoramus, a destructive agent of distrust and division like Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, General Edwin Walker, Alex Jones, and Robert Welch, openly racist, a hypocrite, a conspiracy theorist and a liar, a toadying suck-up, a publicity whore, and a anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, and more. Other than that, however, he seems to be a great guy.

That’s going to be some party he starts.

So What’s With The “Groypers”?

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

I guess because I regard podcasts as a waste of time, the term “Groyper” was happily outside my consciousness until very recently. The main reason I encountered it at all was the latest Tucker Carlton controversy that metastasized into a big PR problem for the Heritage Foundation. Tucker—note please that Ethics Alarms identified him as a principle-free, self-aggrandizing, cynical Ethics Villain years ago, even before his Fox News stardom: See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”—has been cozying up to Hitler apologists, Holocuast-deniers, anti-Semites and white supremacists because, as usual, he’s decided that its where the clicks and “likes” lie among the easily fooled and ignorant. After he had a slobbering interview with white supremacist (above) Nick Fuentes (whose followers call themselves “Groypers“), Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, posted a disgaceful video on social media praising and defending the creep (I mean Carlson in this case) while using terms that sounded like anti-Semitic dog-whistles.

I should have posted on it, but I wrongly assumed Roberts would have been forced to resign by now. The board of Heritage should get cracking: one thing conservatives, Republicans and MAGA do not need is for the #1 conservative think tank to be perceived as backing fascists (referring to Fuentes this time) and lying assholes (back to Tucker).

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Professor Jacobson Asks, “What Happened To Tucker Carlson?” EA’s Answer: Nothing! He Was Always Like This!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Prof. William Jacobson of Cornell oversees an excellent, well-researched conservative blog that often delves into the world of ethics, often from a legal perspective. One of his current posts is titled “What Happened to Tucker?,” as the Prof. laments what he sees as Carlson’s turn to the Dark Side. “He’s turned out not to be the person I thought he was,” Jacobson writes. “After leaving Fox News, he has done more to normalize Jew-hatred and bring it into the MAGA movement through the “woke right” than any other major ‘conservative’ personality…Something has gone very wrong. Maybe his true self finally was freed of the constraints of corporate news, or maybe something else influenced him. But now he is — in my estimation — a malign force and not just as to Jews and Israel, but also to the Trump agenda which he seems determined to undermine.”

You see Fredo above in his pathetic protestations of intellectual acumen from “Godfather II,” one of my favorite entries in the EA Hollywood Clip Archive, because in this instance, I was way ahead of Prof. Jacobson. Last December I issued this post, in which I quoted from an earlier “Why can’t everyone see that Carlson is an untrustworthy asshole?” essay that said in part,

“ [Tucker Carlson is] a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it.…since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has! Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power.”

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Thoughts On An Unethical Meme…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The meme above appeared this morning in Powerline’s usually amusing and occasionally brilliant “The Week in Pictures.” It was also used to illustrate “Tucker Carlson’s bad history,” an excellent essay by The Washington Examiner’s Dominic Greene on the same topic as the recent EA post about Tucker’s slobbering endorsement of a Hitler apologist and Holocaust denier.

Greene wrote in part,

The latest imbecile to visit Tucker’s virtual shed is Darryl Cooper. Cooper’s eccentric rambles through the thickets of history have won him virality on X. Unfortunately, the virality is akin to intellectual syphilis. Once you’ve convinced yourself that the truth is hidden, nay, occulted by dark forces, you can mask the worst symptoms of infection, but the mind rot is hard to cure. Cooper has convinced himself that Winston Churchill was a “terrorist” installed in power by “Zionists” and “financiers” so he could be the “chief villain” of World War II. Cooper also claims the Holocaust was an accident and that prewar Europe really did have what Hitler called a “Jewish problem,” rather than a problem with Jews.

Carlson introduced Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper blew it by admitting that he’d prepared for his interminable podcast series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading six books and then recited a medley of baseless suppositions, false generalizations, and open “secrets” about the origins of World War II. Had Carlson attempted actual journalism, this tissue of lies would have disintegrated like cheap toilet paper. Instead, Carlson toggled between his customary facial expressions (frowning as if struck by a bolt of historiographical lightning, slack-jawed and mindblown as though he’s still following the Grateful Dead) and failed to question any of it.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the kingdom of the illiterate, Mr. Six-Books is a regular Arnold Toynbee. If your “research” skips primary documents and foreign languages but convinces you that Hitler was misunderstood (he wasn’t), that Churchill was a “terrorist” (he wasn’t), that the Germans invaded Poland without a plan for what to do with prisoners of war (they didn’t), and that the Holocaust was accidental (it wasn’t), you might have an ax to grind — perhaps a double-headed ax with runic symbols. But why is Tucker fawning over a poor man’s Pat Buchanan?

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Observations On Tucker Carlson’s Brilliant Take-Down of an Unethical Journalist

/ Jack Marshall / 89 Comments

I was looking for another version of this video not linked to “End Wokeness,” or “Holy shit!” because what’s good about it has nothing to do with “wokeness.” I couldn’t find one quickly enough, so there it is.

Watch the clip.

Observations:

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I Hate to Say “I Told You So,” But I Told You So: Tucker Carlson Had Shown Himself To Be Exactly What Ethics Alarms Said He Was…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

… a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it. Of course, Tucker had already proved that, but because he was fairly articulately bloviating cherished right-wing talking points and arguments every night on his top-rated Fox News show, conservatives and Republicans were blinded to his rather obvious flaws. (Do I have to post the Cognitive Dissonance Scale again? Nah, I’ll just link to the tag this time…)

Upon the arrival of Carlson’s 100th show since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has. Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power. Sooooo….(From Unherd)

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Recipe for Confusion: Take A Trump Ad-lib, Spoon in a Measure of Tucker Carlson Demagoguery, and Mix Both into JFK Assassination Conspiracy Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Again, I must invoke Curmie’s versatile “Oh bloody hell!”

I have been studying Presidential assassination history and conspiracy theories since before I had to shave, and I have little patience with those who misrepresent, distort or exploit these events. Just two days ago, I was pointing out that the much-admired Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins” was a blight on the culture despite my belief that entertainment should have a wide margin for creative license. The musical—the songs aren’t bad—is based on the absurd premise that John Wilkes Booth’s motivation for his decision to assassinate Lincoln is a mystery, and that, like other POTUS assassins and attempted assassins, he was trying to make a difference in a society that had ignored and marginalized him. That’s just crap for most of the historical killers and wackos portrayed in the show, but especially Booth. “Was it bad reviews, Johnny?” a balladeer croons. Of course not, you idiot: no assassin ever made his motivations clearer than John Wilkes Booth.

He was a dedicated Confederate partisan; he blamed Lincoln (correctly) for not letting the South go its own way, he was crushed that the South was headed for defeat, and believed that if the Union government could be decapitated (the plot was to kill Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward and General Grant in a single night) the South might yet prevail—and his plan might have worked. No mystery! But our history is constantly misrepresented to the historically ignorant and illiterate, that is to say, most of the public, often for the selfish purposes of rumormongers and worse.

You know, like Tucker Carlson.

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Three Ethics Dunces I Try To Ignore Turn on Each Other

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Few pundits are as worthy of being ignored as Jon Stewart, Mary Trump and Tucker Carlson. Unfortunately, they imposed themselves on my consciousness, which really is needed elsewhere, by turning on each other for saying things one or more of them didn’t like. In doing so, they again drew my attention to the unethical habits of people who should not have the influence on public opinion that they do.

I briefly and reluctantly defended Tucker Carlson against hypocritical critiques from the Left that there was something unseemly about his interviewing Vladamir Putin, when liberal journalists have been interviewing various international villains for decades without similar criticism. It’s the typical double standards tactic that we now see constantly from our corrupt punditry. Jon Stewart piled on in his return to Comedy Central, where he again is posing as a comedian playing a pundit and a pundit doing comedy simultaneously. Stewart’s “clown nose on, clown nose off” act is tedious and obnoxious as well as corrosive: I hold him responsible for the all-progressive political propaganda organs that the late night talk shows have become, dividing the country by taking the unsustainable position that only conservatives are ridiculous.

Stewart also should be held responsible for further lowering the civic literacy of the younger generations, who regard him as a trustworthy source of news, and he is not. Stewart chooses which items to talk about according to what he thinks his leftward fans will laugh at, not what they need to know. As a comedian, he does not feel any obligation to be fair or to include facts that might weaken his jokes. He would have no obligation, except that he aspires to be taken seriously when he wants to be.

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Stop Making Me Defend Tucker Carlson!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m reasonable sure I have made my ethical assessment of Tucker Carlson clear for years now: he’s an opportunist, he’s a demagogue, he’s ambitious and it is impossible to determine what he really believes. He’s also glib and articulate, and I could not care less what he advocates or opposes, since he makes such calculations based on ratings and their perceived usefulness in giving him fame and power.

However, lately Carlson is taking flack because he is in Russia, apparently preparing to interview Vladimir Putin. The criticism is across the partisan and ideological spectrum. The Left, predictably, detests Carlson and would criticize anything he did. But conservatives are attacking him too. Bill Kristol, the NeverTrump director of Defending Democracy Together, said sarcastically, “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital on CNN that Carlson is “either remarkably stupid or consciously evil.” “He’s not stupid,” replied CNN’s John Harwood. Adam Kinzinger, who along with Liz Cheney served as one of the only two Republicans on the House select committee that turned the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot into an extended “Get Trump!” kangaroo court, pronounced Carlson “a traitor”.

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