Tucker Carlson: The Fox News host ‘triggered’ by Kamala Harris and Black Lives Matter
Joe Sommerlad looks at the right-wing talking head whose inflammatory rhetoric has seen him tipped – by ex-KKK grand wizard David Duke – as an alternative Trump running mate
Fox News host Tucker Carlson once again found himself making headlines this week after reacting angrily to a pundit correcting his pronunciation of the name of Joe Biden’s new running mate.
Discussing Biden’s announcement of California senator and former presidential rival Kamala Harris as his prospective vice president on Tuesday evening, Carlson was interrupted by Richard Goodstein, a political consultant and guest on his prime-time show Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“Tucker, can I just say one quick thing because this is something that will serve you and your fellow hosts on Fox News well,” Goodstein interjected. “Her name is pronounced ‘Comma’... like the punctuation mark... ‘Comma-la’, OK?”
“So what?” Carlson snapped back.
“I think out of respect for someone who is going to be on the national ticket, pronouncing her name right... is kind of a bare minimum,” Goodstein continued.
“So it begins; you’re not allowed to criticise Ka-MAL-a Harris, or KAM-a-la Harris... or whatever?” Carlson responded, his huffy manner reminiscent of a schoolboy kicking his heels in a sulk after being called out by a teacher for bullying a classmate.
Along with the likes of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Carlson is one of Fox’s big beast anchors, emerging since the ignominious departure of Bill O’Reilly in 2017 to rank highly among the network’s most dependable defenders of the Donald Trump administration.
For much of the president’s reign, Carlson has been an obliging cheerleader, ever-ready to stoke Republican fears about illegal immigration from Mexico in time for the 2018 mid-term elections or to pour scorn on the every move of Democratic Party grandparents Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, not least during last winter’s ill-tempered impeachment hearings.
Carlson has occasionally shown himself prepared to stand up to Trump when in the right mood, most unexpectedly – and credibly – when he appealed to the president to back away from war with Iran following the assassination of the country’s top military commander Qassem Soleimani on 3 January, a moment of disturbing brinkmanship that now feels like a lifetime ago.
His more recent suggestion that Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner harbours “contempt” for the president’s fabled working class base is also very on the nose.
But for close observers of Fox, which has felt like the president’s personal propaganda network for most of his first term, it appears that Tucker Carlson has dramatically escalated his already inflammatory line of rhetoric since the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota on 25 May.
Video of officers kneeling on the neck of the nightclub bouncer as he lay on the curb outside of a Minneapolis grocery store, ignoring his pleas for oxygen for more than nine minutes until they suddenly ceased, sent shock waves across the States and awoke the unresolved anger over police brutality and institutional racism felt by so many for so long.
Scenes of Black Lives Matter protesters taking to the streets by night to express their disgust at the killing spread like wildfire from the Midwestern city to almost every major conurbation across America, and burned for several weeks.
“Triggered” by the footage, as Donald Trump Jr and his fellow Breitbart readers would put it, Carlson took to the air raving like Howard Beale in Sidney Lumet’s prophetic 1976 media satire Network.
Making hay with the handful of opportunists and bad apples who seized the day to go on a hedonistic spree of looting and vandalism, Carlson warned his audience in hysterical, alarmist fashion: “This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives. Remember that when they come for you – and at this rate, they will.”
That remark saw him lose valuable commercial sponsors from T-Mobile and ABC/Disney to Papa John’s, but he continued to rage against the revolutionary fervour undaunted, running heavily edited footage of intoxicated homeless people as an “exclusive” look at life behind the barricades of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a city block occupied by peaceful protesters as part of the Floyd fallout.
Carlson has otherwise largely chimed in with Trump’s own “culture wars” talking points, pushing back heatedly against the toppling of statues of Confederate generals and calls for the renaming of US army bases honouring them.
With the president clearly seeking a sideshow to distract from his own disastrous handling of the US coronavirus outbreak, Carlson has aided and abetted him by running segments pushing unfounded smears about mob violence being carried out by left-wing Antifa activists and “anarchists”.
In doing so, the broadcaster has risked appearing utterly ridiculous at times, notably when taking the sword to cuddly Sesame Street resident Elmo for daring to preach racial tolerance to an audience of impressionable children.
“Got that, Bobby?” Carlson whined in June. “America is a very bad place and it’s your fault. So, no matter what happens, no matter what they do to you when you grow up, you have no right to complain. That’s the message and it starts very young.”
The be-blazered Californian – whose drift to the right has taken him from CNN and MSNBC to founding the opinion site The Daily Caller – has since found himself the subject of a scathing op-ed in The New York Times by Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth after he unwisely and absurdly claimed she “hates America”.
Carlson had, incredibly, called the double-amputee Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient a “coward” and questioned her patriotism after she criticised Trump’s Fourth of July address at Mount Rushmore, in which the president had baited his opponents and accused them of wanting to “overthrow the American Revolution”.
That unedifying display from Carlson was followed – in what was a wretched week for him – by producers having to fire a member of his writing staff, Blake Neff, after he was exposed as the author of several “abhorrent” white supremacist comments on an online forum called AutoAdmit under the pseudonym CharlesXII.
Carlson apologised for Neff’s posts on air, admitting they were “wrong” before taking the opportunity to denounce “the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man” and then abruptly declaring that he himself would be taking a week’s planned leave of absence to go trout fishing.
Since returning from the riverbank, the presenter has continued to rail against the activism he finds so threatening and to scaremonger over the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency. Only stablemate Jeanine Pirro has struck an angrier presence, resembling for all the world a newsreader seen on TV in the background of a cyber-punk biker bar in Robocop denouncing muggers and stick-up artists with rabid ferocity.
Their popularity should not be laughed off, however.
Like Trump, the affluent Tucker Carlson has successfully managed to sell his audience on the illusion that he is really just one of them: a concerned citizen giving voice to legitimate doubts about America’s future course.
His plain-speaking everyman persona allows him to articulate widespread white conservative anxieties about immigration, healthcare reform, political correctness and the brand of progressive politics embodied by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, doing so in a combative and entertaining style that many find reassuring.
Ex-KKK grand wizard David Duke recently suggested Trump would be wise to swap Carlson in for Mike Pence as his next running mate.
While that’s an endorsement even Tucker should baulk at, Duke is hardly alone in thinking such a move would re-energise this president’s flagging re-election campaign, and the presenter is certainly vain enough to entertain the idea, even if only as he carefully parts his mane in front of the bathroom mirror.
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