Tag: Tucker Carlson

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Politics Politics Feature

The GOP Convention Begins

Representative David Kustoff (Photo: Chris Davis)

MILWAUKEE — There was something very strange about Monday’s opening night of the 2024 Republication National Convention.

Several strange things, in fact. Oh, there was the usual bashing of Joe Biden, the condemnation of what in reality is now a diminishing inflation, and the traditional GOP homage to private enterprise.

But who could ’a thunk that the most vigorous moment of the evening would be a Teamster official extolling unions and the working class and denouncing, in vivid detail, “greedy employers” and the evils of unbridled capitalism. Shocking as this lengthy speech was, it was clearly not aimed at the arena crowd, which gave it ever more tepid applause, but to a presumably largish TV audience containing Democratic and independent voters as well as faithful Republicans. 

That speech had come not long after remarks from one Amber Rose, a “model and TV celebrity” and a self-proclaimed former “leftist” who could simultaneously praise Donald J. Trump and proclaim that Trump and his supporters “don’t care about Black or white or gay and straight. It’s all love.”

Another surprise was the culminating appearance of the hero/martyr himself, Donald J. Trump, ear heavily bandaged from a rifleman’s attempt on his life last week, sung onto the stage by Lee Greenwood.

Photo: Chris Davis

Equally interesting was the creation of an ad hoc presidential box containing Trump, his new vice-presidential choice J.D. Vance, Speaker of the House Michael Johnson, Black Florida congressman Byron Donalds (one of several GOP African-American officeholders put on display Monday night), and — wonder of wonders — the exiled Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

It seemed to symbolize a new merging would-be GOP hierarchy.

All of the climactic events were an unexpected attempt at blending MAGA attitudes and Republicanism at large with a new approach to traditional Democratic voting blocs.

Can such a realignment hold behind a figurehead whose successful bout with potential death may have redeemed the image of a mad hatter given to reckless self-indulgence, who had clearly tried to sabotage the previous presidential election and endorsed violence, both verbal and physical, in the process?

The week and the convention were still young, and the Democrats have yet to have their own convention. We shall see what we shall see.

Consistent with this overarching effort at self-recreation was the Tennessee delegation’s Monday-morning breakfast, which featured its own efforts toward achieving an image of “unity,” though the mechanics of the process, at least as spoken to by Senator Bill Hagerty, the main breakfast speaker, were essentially limited to the idea of making nice to Nikki Haley.

A quote from the prominent Millington Republican Terry Roland, not a UT-Knoxville enthusiast, on being handed one of the conspicuously orange-hued MAGA hats passed out to all delegates: “I’d rather kiss a donkey on the ass than put this orange thing on my head.”

State Chairman Scott Golden of Jackson, on the other hand, as well as Senator Hagerty, in separate remarks to the state delegation, made a point of glorifying the color orange. It was, in fact, Orange Day for the delegation. 

• Meanwhile, next week: a preview of the forthcoming local election and more, much more about the GOP’s dramatic week of refurbished public appeals.

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At Large Opinion

Rush’s Leftovers

Rush Limbaugh (Photo: Gage Skidmore | Creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m guessing you may have missed it: the second anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s death on February 17th. There were no parades or anything. At least, none that I heard about. His death was little noted or remembered, except for a couple shots fired on Twitter. “Try to live your life so that ‘rot in hell’ isn’t trending at the mention of your death,” posted one. Good advice, says I.

Limbaugh was widely seen as the godfather of today’s vitriolic, hyperbolic, right-wing media subculture, the life force that spawned Fox News and its host of creepy hosts, plus OAN, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and dozens of other “news” turdlets on the web and elsewhere.

Limbaugh spewed lies by the thousands over the course of his career, taking delight in coming up with terms such as “feminazi,” and was a clear inspiration for a certain former president. The homeless were “compassion fascists,” environmentalists were “tree-huggers.” He made fun of Michael J. Fox, imitating the tremors that were a symptom of the actor’s Parkinson’s disease (Sound familiar?). Limbaugh ran a segment called “AIDS updates,” mocking the deaths of gay men by playing Dionne Warwick’s recording of the song “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.” A lifelong smoker, he told his listeners that tobacco doesn’t kill people. He died of lung cancer two years ago as karma tap-danced on his grave.

Current parallel to El Rushbo? Maybe Tucker Carlson, the guy on Fox who thinks Russia is the victim in Ukraine, and says the January 6th riots were just a bunch of peaceful tourists visiting the Capitol? This guy looked through 40,000 hours of videotape and didn’t see any real violence, or at least chose not to put any on the air in his “documentary.” That’s like showing only the starry sky in a film about man landing on the moon, and saying the film proves it never happened.

When it comes to smoking, TC actually ramps it up a notch from Rushbo, declaring not only that smoking won’t kill you, but it’s actually good for you, it’s “all-American.” And he’s a ceaseless promoter of Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so much so that clips of his shows are featured nightly on Russian television. Most troubling, perhaps, is that he is a promoter of the “great replacement theory,” warning his viewers that “If we continue on this trajectory, eventually there’ll be no more native-born Americans,” i.e. white people. Cue immigrant-bashing from the next guest. It’s hardly worth mentioning that Tucker continues to push Donald Trump’s Big Lie on the 2020 election.

The question with these kinds of propagandists is always this: Do they believe their own lies or do they just expect the idiots who make them rich to do so? The money’s good either way, but maybe the slight moral edge, if there is one, goes to the propagandist who actually believes his own drivel. We’ll never know if Limbaugh bought the garbage he spewed into America’s airways every day. But given the revelations in the ongoing Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, it is quite provable that Carlson and his employer are lying all the way to the bank.

And it’s all because ol’ Rushbo discovered America’s dirty little secret: There is a dark, racist, proudly know-nothing subset of our citizenry that only wants to have its bigotry and anger reinforced. They are like addicts who want to hear sobriety is for losers, smokers who want to believe smoking makes them healthy, ignorant mouth-breathers who want to believe their skin tone makes them superior.

The whole ecosystem needs to perish, beginning with those organizations who reap millions of dollars knowingly spreading the venal lies that are ripping this country in half. The public airways, including cable TV, need to be brought back to the pre-Limbaugh days of the Fairness Doctrine, when some semblance of truth was required of news organizations, when “equal time” on an issue was mandatory. The current Wild West of “news,” with its blend of anger-tainment, disinformation, propaganda, and profit over truth, needs to die. Karma is waiting.

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At Large Opinion

Saving Grace

Barack Obama (Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

It was in late June 2015. I was on vacation, visiting my son Andrew in New York City. The news had been filled for days with the horrific events in Charleston, South Carolina, where a racist teenager named Dylann Roof had walked into Emanuel AME Church and gunned down nine Black parishioners in cold blood.

We decided to drive out to Montauk for a few days to try and change the vacation narrative. The first night, we went to watch an indie film being screened in a local park. It was a perfect summer evening and a small crowd was spread about on blankets and folding chairs, waiting for the film to begin, chatting, staring at their phones. I was one of the latter, scrolling idly, when a tweet with a video of President Obama caught my attention. It was the moment when the president broke into “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Obama began singing alone, then a few parishioners joined in, and then the sound swelled like a great wave cresting, as everyone in the congregation lifted their voices. As I watched, I felt tears flooding my cheeks. The president had somehow tapped into the unspeakable pain of that moment and transformed it into hope, into love, into catharsis. I will never forget it.

Just 10 days earlier, the man who would become Obama’s successor had ridden an elevator down to the basement of Trump Tower and announced his intention to run for president. His first words into the cameras were a lie: “Wow,” he said. “That is some group of people. Thousands!” Puzzled reporters looked around, noting the several dozen spectators, some of whom, it was later discovered, had been paid $50 to attend and wave signs. Trump then went off on one of his now-familiar verbal rambles, concluding by saying of Mexico: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. They’re not sending their best.”

Trump didn’t invent the stubbornly embedded strain of American racism that still plagues this country, emerging and receding through the centuries like a blood tide. But Trump was the first president to give permission to the white people who are decidedly not “America’s best” to voice the angry, suppressed, evil part out loud — and act on it. In a few short years, the specter of white supremacy has gone from anonymous, ignorant men burning crosses in the Southern woods to the mainstream of the Republican Party — and into the brains of who-knows-how-many disturbed young men with easy access to high-powered weapons.

The latest rallying cry is the “white replacement theory” — the belief that people of color are going to somehow pour across the border by the millions, register to vote (even though they wouldn’t be citizens), and take over the electorate, thereby making white people a minority. It’s a fiendishly clever plot, no? Laughable or not, it’s now the principal topic on Tucker Carlson’s racist fever-fest on Fox News. And mainstream Republicans have taken the cue, openly espousing the theory, even using it in their ads. The message isn’t subtle: Poor, dirty, non-English-speaking brown and Black people are going to “replace” you noble white people and take all your stuff. And the Democrats are behind it all!

The 18-year-old who murdered 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, last weekend wrote 180 pages of drivel citing the replacement theory as justification. It’s just the latest iteration of the American white supremacist horror show, which also includes the murders of worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the killings of Hispanics at a mall in El Paso, and the deadly “Jews will not replace us” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. All were committed by white men citing the replacement theory bullshit.

Trump began his campaign with a racist trope, and he continued to stoke racism at every turn for five years, including after the nazi march at Charlottesville, where he notably cited “good people on both sides.”

That whirlwind has hit the barn. We live in a country where baseless fear-mongering and racism spark mass murder, a country where it’s easier for a teenager to obtain weapons of war than a beer, a country gravely in need of healing, and yes, maybe even a hymn. We are an Amazing Disgrace.

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At Large Opinion

Stumped by Ignorance of Covid

And another one bites the dust.

It’s become almost a daily story in the media: Some outspoken anti-vaxxer dies of Covid. Some are repentant in their final days, like conservative radio talker Phil Valentine of Nashville, who, after coming down with the disease, changed his tune and urged his listeners to get vaccinated — before he died on a ventilator. Others have gone to meet their maker still insisting that a) Covid was a hoax, b) the vaccines don’t work, or c) they really just had the flu.

Three conservative radio hosts have died in recent weeks: Valentine and two Florida talk-show mainstays — Marc Bernier and Dick Farrel. All three disparaged the vaccine, masks, and distancing; trashed the CDC; and told listeners not to fear Covid. Bernier tweeted: “Now the government is acting like Nazis, saying ‘get the shot.’” Farrel tweeted: “Why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks, where the virus came from, and the death toll?” He also called Anthony Fauci “a power-tripping lying freak.”

This week, Joe Rogan, aka the “little ball of anger,” the most popular podcaster in America, announced that he’d contracted Covid. Rogan, unsurprisingly, is also an anti-vaxxer. He claims that he is taking a horse dewormer to treat his case. I hope he is as lucky as he is stupid.

But it’s not just radio hosts who are dying from denial of science and common sense, who are losing the ultimate bet, making the deadly choice to pick ideology over science and medicine. It’s evangelical ministers, politicians, anti-mask leaders, and other assorted right-wing spokespeople, now dead because they bought the bilge being spewed by Valentine and their cohorts, and, even worse, by prominent talk-show blatherers with national audiences, like the loathsome and hypocritical Tucker Carlson (who’s been vaccinated) and Laura Ingraham (also vaccinated), to name just two. Their lies are quite literally getting people killed.

Several country music stars and boomer rock heroes like Eric Clapton and Van Morrison are also virulent and outspoken in their anti-vax, anti-mask positions. The latter two have written horrible songs about losing their freedom. To be idiots? Most of Kid Rock’s maskless band caught Covid at the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally last month. (South Dakota’s Covid infection rate went up 700 percent following the gathering.)

Locally and statewide, we are seeing the results of a low vaccination rate and anti-mask sentiment, due mostly to ignorance and ideology. Parents in this county and this state are intentionally sending their children to school, unmasked and unvaccinated, convinced that all these deaths, these ever-rising case numbers, these young people dying in our hospitals, are somehow a Joe Biden/Anthony Fauci plot to take away their freedom. Their own children (and ours) are being sacrificed on the altar of know-nothing ideology, aided and abetted by GOP state governors, including our own absurdly incompetent Bill Lee, who when asked how he planned to deal with the fact that Tennessee now has the highest infection rate in the nation, answered that he didn’t plan to “change strategy.”

“Strategy?” No, Bill. “Strategy” is a plan, a course of action, a way to take on a problem sickening and killing the people in your state. Sitting on your ass and saying that “parents know best” is not a strategy. You are an embarrassment, a wanna-be DeSantis, a mini-Trump with the charisma of a pine-stump.

King Arthur and the Black Knight

All this reminds me of nothing so much as the fight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the Black Knight refuses to allow King Arthur to pass. In the ensuing sword fight, the knight’s left arm is hacked off. “’Tis but a scratch,” he proclaims, fighting on. When his right arm is severed, he still refuses to surrender.

“Look, you stupid bastard,” says Arthur. “You’ve got no arms left!”

“’Tis but a flesh wound,” says the knight.

Then a leg is sliced off, then the other. Still he persists, shouting insults and threats, a noisy torso on the ground. “The Black Knight never loses!” he shouts.

Empty words. From a stump. Seems familiar.