NY Times Exposes Fox News Tucker Carlson as a Racist. Duh -The iPINIONS Journal

The liberal intelligentsia are heaping Pulitzer praise on The New York Times for a series that exposes Fox News host Tucker Carlson as a racist. But count me out. Because this is rather like getting all atwitter over an investigative series that exposes Donald Trump as a liar. Duh.

Here is how the eponymous “Intelligencer” section of New York Magazine reported yesterday on this couch-potato journalism being hyped as investigative:

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Ten years ago, National Review fired longtime contributor John Derbyshire over a column urging white and Asian American parents to warn their children that Black people posed a danger to them. After his firing, Derbyshire, now cast out of mainstream conservative politics, began writing for VDARE, a more marginal far-right organ.

The New York Times published a series this past weekend detailing Tucker Carlson’s descent into white nationalism. The Times amassed impressive detail to support its findings, revealing how Fox’s use of ‘minute by minute’ ratings analysis displayed the popularity of white-nationalist themes, driving Carlson to ramp them up. Its description of Carlson as promoting white nationalism is supported by Fox employees both former (‘He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up’) and current (‘Fox executives wanted to focus on ‘the grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up’ … ‘They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you’’). …

Most alarmingly, it finds that an internal organization chart showed that Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDARE, reported directly to Rupert Murdoch.

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Bingo!

I read the series. And, trust me, it reveals nothing that has not been plain for anyone to see since the day Carlson launched his show seven years ago. More to the point, I preempted every purported revelation in blog commentaries like “Murdochs and the Culture of Misogyny and Racism They Lord Over at Fox News,” July 22, 2020, and in podcast episodes like “Rupert Murdoch, His Fox News, and the Poisoning of America,” December 5, 2012.

But, respectfully, this series suffers a fatal flaw. Because focusing so much on Carlson, as it does, is tantamount to watching a puppet show and failing to see the puppeteer pulling the strings.

Tucker Carlson, like Donald J. Trump, is just a puppet. But the puppeteers pulling their strings are the Murdochs. And it is self-evident that these Aussie interlopers are hell-bent on sowing divisions in America (foremost by stoking racial tensions) that could tear America apart. In fact, they are doing to America from the inside what Vladimir Putin has been trying to do from the outside.

For example, President Biden shocked the world just last month when he called Rupert Murdoch the most dangerous man in the world. He did not do so because of anything Murdoch said. In fact, most Americans have never heard him say a single word.

No, Biden based his indictment entirely on the racist tropes, right-wing propaganda, and Orwellian big lies Murdoch feeds millions of Americans every day by pulling the strings at Fox news.

And here’s a truly scary thought: Trump was clearly a Manchurian president. But Carlson’s show is proving a far more suitable apprenticeship for the presidency than Trump’s reality TV show ironically titled The Apprentice ever did. Because Tucker is using his show to propagate far-right propaganda, peddle self-serving lies, and persecute his critics in ways Trump could only ever dream of doing.

And to top it all off, Murdoch must be thanking God for the diabolical luck of having in Carlson a Trump with brains who can feed viewers dystopian bile in far more palatable bits. So yes, Tucker (that little f**ker) will do his gaslighting shtick. But don’t lose sight of the fact that the Murdochs are the real enemies of the state.

That said, I’d be remiss not to note one cynical way Carlson used his show to stoke the divisions I referenced above. Because many in the media were “shocked, shocked” by the amount of time he dedicated to championing the anti-vaxxer views of Black celebrities like rapper Nicki Minaj and basketball star Kyrie Irving.

As it happens, Biden himself called out this cynicism in mocking fashion at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ dinner. He assured viewers it would not be a super-spreader event because all 2,500 attendees were required to be vaccinated and boosted. And his punch line was that any Republican who didn’t believe him could just ask their favorite Fox News reporter because they were all in attendance – fully vaccinated and boosted, despite the anti-vax propaganda they spew on air.

The problem, of course, is that nobody in the media dared point out that whites like Carlson see Blacks dying disproportionately from Covid as a neo-Malthusian antidote to the “Browning of America.” And, as anyone who knows anything about his show knows, stoking existential fear among whites about Black and Brown people replacing them is a galvanizing feature of his show.

Of course, the irony of ironies is that Fox News had lawyers plead in court just last year that only a fool would believe anything Tucker says is true. In other words, Tucker has even more contempt for his loyal viewers than Trump has for his loyal supporters.

But just as Trump’s supporters were willing to overthrow the government for him; you can bet your life that Carlson’s viewers will be willing to launch a race war for him. And the Murdochs, his puppet master, would like nothing more than to see that unfold.

Perhaps you’ve read about them fleeing Down Under for refuge where their family hails from – where no doubt their hearts never left. Which means they might remain personally unaffected by any public outrage criticisms of Fox News, as contained in this Times series, might incite. Therefore, the only recourse for any sensible American might be to simply boycott everything they own – from Fox News to the Wall Street Journal.