I'll explain the above in a moment. But first...
I've had the pleasure of appearing on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show. But, even if I hadn't, I would watch it. It is by far the most interesting show on cable news. (Don't take my word for it.) By definition, that world's a hamster wheel - let's go live to a press conference, a House vote, a court verdict, a car chase - and much of it doesn't matter a week later, never mind a year or a decade. But night after night Tucker uses the small details of the day to paint the big picture of our times - Big Tech totalitarianism, the crisis of men in rural America, the cultural transformation of immigration, the death of the family, the hollowing out of communities... You can watch a nightly episode a year or two later and find things that resonate on topics that count.
He's not particularly a Trump guy, because he's not particularly a politician guy, regarding the Democrats as deluded but determined and the GOP as stupid and craven. But, when it comes to the policies Trump ran on, Tucker is brilliantly effective - which is why his opponents want him off the air. As I've said on his show from time to time, the left doesn't want to win the debate, they want to cancel it. Because it's easier that way. They'll let you talk about immigration in partisan horse-race terms: the wall, the funding, the court ruling against the executive order... But to do it the way Tucker does - what's the purpose of mass immigration in an automated society with no jobs for the men who are already here? who does it benefit? why are formerly cohesive communities coming apart? - the left wants to shut down those questions, permanently.
So they've besieged his house, and called his daughter a whore at a country club, and organized an advertiser boycott. And the strain of all that is not easy. But he's still standing. So now the George Soros guys at Media Matters have combed through hours and hours - days; in fact, weeks - of moldering tape, and found the ten seconds here and twenty seconds there that they hope will end his career.
Everybody who goes on radio and TV has those moments. When Tucker was at MSNBC a decade ago, he used to appear each week on a radio show called "Bubba the Love Sponge", which is the usual shock-jockery - coarse and unconstrained. I'm Mister Squaresville, not my bag. But it's certainly a lot of other people's. I believe, at the time of America Alone, I was once invited on, but demurred. Around the same time, at the behest of a publicist who thought I needed to get hep and in the groove, I'd been on a show in, if memory serves, Chicago, and, after a quick tour of my book's themes, I was asked to weigh in on the topic of the day, which was, ahem, the fashion for industrial-strength pubic depilation. I dodged the question, because somewhere in the back of my mind I had a vision of the CBC greeting the announcement of my appointment as Governor General of Canada by airing a tape in which I utter the words "hairless pudendum" or some such. And, ever since my salad days in small-town radio, I've been aware that there's always someone on the other side of the glass who for whatever reason keeps the audio with a fading label sitting in a drawer year after year - until one day it proves useful.
But, as I said, I'm Mister Squaresville. So Tucker appeared with the eponymous Love Sponge and his sidekicks for an hour a week, and nobody cared - when he was at MSNBC. When he was at Fox News, suddenly the morning-zoo banter became a vital matter of national importance: He agreed that Martha Stewart's daughter was "c*nty", he strung along with some girls' school lesbian jailbait fantasies, he called Britney Spears and Paris Hilton "whores" ...and the hosts giggled and chuckled, until one of the guys sitting on the box of tapes decided a decade later it was time to destroy Tucker by any means necessary - which these days means by fake outrage and summer-stock pearl-clutching. Now Media Matters has released more audio. The Washington Post's headline:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson uses racist, homophobic language in second set of recordings
Oh, my! When you read down deep into the piece, the "racism" charge rests on pointing out that Obama has a white mother, that Iraq is "a crappy place" that's "not worth invading", and that white men deserve credit for "creating civilization and stuff". As is now traditional, in the daily newspaper of the capital city of the dominant nation on the planet, the authors of the piece don't feel the need to explain what's objectionable about saying any of that - nor to address the question of whether forbidding such utterances might, in fact, be more objectionable, and on a dangerously slippery slope for a free society. As for the "homophobia", that boils down to this exchange:
The host tells Carlson: "I like you. I mean, I'm not trying to f-- out on you or nothing, but I like you. I like you."
"Well I like you too, and I mean that," Carlson replies. "You always say, 'I mean that in a non-f-- way,' but I actually mean it in a completely f----t way."
Bubba the Love Sponge and a co-host each reply: "I wish I knew how to quit you, Tuck," apparently referencing the 2005 drama "Brokeback Mountain."
"Homophobia" is supposed to be an irrational fear of homosexuality. Au contraire, both Tucker and Bubba sound entirely relaxed about it.
This is pathetic stuff, but you use what's to hand. Twenty years ago, David Frum asked me, in apparent seriousness, if I'd received any pushback for my jocular suggestion in London's Sunday Telegraph that Tony Blair should replace the House of Lords with the House of Gays. I thought he was bonkers, but in fact he intuited where we were headed. I see now that I am entirely unfit for public life.
If you go on TV or radio with any regularity, there is always someone sufficiently motivated to comb through hours and hours and hours of footage to compile the two minutes that does you in. I give you by way of example the above video - the soi-disant "smoking gun" compiled by litigious cockwomble Cary Katz and his phony shoutfest-conservatives at CRTV/Blaze TV, from out-takes assembled by their perjurious star witness Paul Kullman (see page twelve here) and poor sap Mike Dunn. Almost everybody has these (this is pretty much the gold standard), and, as with Tucker's tapes, most of them clip a bit here, a bit there in hopes an accumulation of trivialities can be rendered significant.
But I'm bored of the "Gotcha!" culture, whether by Soros goons or a fake conservative like Katz. So I post mine in solidarity with Tucker - and I hope his show runs for thirty years.
