Tucker Carlson: The Hilarious Demagogue

People like my posts about famous cultural figures. Of my 3 most popular posts, one was about Elon Musk and another about Jordan Peterson. Let’s see how this one goes over.

Tucker Carlson had the most watched show in all of cable news, as of June 2021 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2021/06/15/tucker-carlson-has-most-watched-show-in-cable-news-as-fox-leads-basic-cable-for-17-straight-weeks/). (Note: No longer, since we just learned that Carlson has left Fox.) Why is this, and what should we think of him?

I. Entertainment

Part of the secret to his popularity is sheer hilarity. See this clip where he ashamedly admits that he was completely wrong about Kamala Harris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Roy9DbEzaPY. (Spoiler: I’m not sure he’s being entirely sincere.)

Even when he’s not joking, he says whatever he says in a highly entertaining way. It’s partly the energy and emotion he puts into it. Most pundits and reporters have a deliberately impersonal, fake-sounding announcer’s voice. Nor would they ever give a guest such an expressive look as the famous Carlson stare of confusion:

Among people with political shows, Carlson is undoubtedly one of the top entertainers, if not the top. He’s as entertaining for rightists as Jon Stewart is for leftists.

II. Calling out the Left

Entertaining delivery isn’t enough, though. People wouldn’t watch his show if they didn’t like some of what he had to say. So Carlson’s popularity is an indicator of where America is at ideologically.

It’s not just Republicans. Shockingly, Carlson had the most-watched cable news show among younger Democrats. In fact, “Fox has three of the top five shows watched by Democrats, while MSNBC has the other two”: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/who-is-the-most-watched-host-in-all-of-cable-news-for-young-democrats-tucker-carlson/.

This is weird because Carlson is constantly attacking the Democrats. To hear him tell it, Democratic leaders have a practically satanic drive to destroy America and all that is good. How could Democratic viewers like him?

My interpretation: The great majority of Democratic Party members are moderate liberals, not extremists. Many are probably fed up with the takeover of their party by incredibly illiberal extremists. The party elites are out of touch with the membership. For example, most Americans, even most registered Democrats, are against affirmative action, yet AA sometimes seems like the only thing that party leaders care about. (https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02/poll-finds-public-doesnt-favor-affirmative-action)

My guess is that most Democratic viewers thus agree with much of what Carlson says against the Democratic elites. They won’t switch affiliation to the Republican party, though, since that has also been taken over by extremists.

III. Racism

So Carlson is popular. But is he good, or evil?

The knee-jerk criticism: “He’s a racist!”, say the SJW’s. But that means nothing since they say that about everything. If an SJW stubs their toe, they shout “racism!”

Actually, Carlson might be the most effective voice against racism in America today.

What? How could that be?

The woke are not effective voices against racism, for two reasons: a) They’re actively promoting anti-white racism; b) anyone tempted by anti-black racism isn’t going to be listening to woke people in the first place.

Carlson, by contrast, is likely to be listened to by people who might be tempted by anti-black racism. They’ll hear him criticizing wokeness, which they will like. Then they’ll hear that what’s wrong with wokeness is that it’s racist. Affirmative action is wrong because everyone should be judged based on their individual merit, not their race. Those points are very explicit in these clips:

• Equity Is Racism

• This Is a Racist Lie

By taking this stance, he’s turning old-style liberalism about race into a right-wing point.

IV. Accuracy

But can we trust Tucker Carlson on the facts?

Sorry to disillusion you, but no. Whatever your political orientation, you cannot trust his reporting. His most amazing stories always turn out to be radically misleading at best. I.e., if you add in more of the facts about the story, it would cause you to draw a completely different lesson, perhaps the exact opposite lesson, from the one you would draw from Carlson’s presentation.

(In fairness, I have only checked claims that struck me initially as particularly unlikely. I haven’t checked on claims of his that sound believable.)

Example 1: UFO’s

For a while, Carlson was doing stories that really made it sound like space aliens are here (though he did not explicitly say that that is the case). He played video clips supposedly showing things that can’t be explained other than by aliens. I searched the internet and, with little effort, found plausible, non-alien explanations for all the videos that mystified Carlson: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/aliens.

Carlson’s team seemingly hadn’t done as much investigation as my half-hour of internet research, or if they did, they decided that talking about prosaic explanations would ruin the story.

Example 2: Cat-Nuns

Another time, Carlson mentioned an alleged incident in which some nuns in a medieval convent became convinced that they were cats and would go about meowing loudly. (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-mass-hysteria-belief-men-pregnant) I believe he intended this as a metaphor for transgender people.

Any time you hear something that amazing, you should be suspicious. I looked up the source of the story, which turned out to be a book published in the 1800’s, centuries after the supposed events. The author says that he heard it from a good medical text, but he does not name the source or any other information about it, so that is the end of the trail. (https://archive.org/details/epidemicsofmiddl1844heck/page/118/mode/2up)

I think that fails the fact check.

Why should we care? It’s not that that story is so important. It’s that (a) common sense should tell you that story sounds bogus; (b) a conscientious reporter would try to check it before repeating a story that sounds like total BS. So Carlson’s team lacks either common sense or conscientiousness about truth.

Example 3: Moussa Diarra

A parking attendant in Manhattan, Moussa Diarra, had a run-in with a thief who was stealing stuff from the cars in the parking garage. Diarra told the thief to drop the loot he had collected and leave. The thief pulled a gun and shot Diarra. Diarra wrestled the gun away and shot the thief back. The police then arrested Diarra for attempted murder and possession of an illegal weapon (the same weapon that he had wrested away from the thief). Diarra woke up handcuffed to his hospital bed. Luckily, after much public outrage, the DA dropped the charges. That’s the story as told by Carlson. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbwEf6asuIo)

Carlson’s lesson: “In our new Soros-inspired justice system, decent people are the criminals, while the criminals are now a protected class.”

Now some additional comments. When the cops arrived, they had no way of knowing what had happened. They show up, they find two men with bullet wounds, and Diarra holding the gun. They arrest both men.

What the hell else are they supposed to do? If they didn’t handcuff Diarra to the hospital bed, and he turned out to be a criminal, conservative pundits would lambast the police for being pro-murder. After the DA investigated further, he determined that Diarra acted in self-defense and dropped the charges. (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/nyc-parking-attendant-recalls-life-or-death-struggle-with-armed-man-at-midtown-garage-exclusive/ar-AA19qVWk)

Notice a couple of things about this case.

1. Carlson isn’t exactly lying—everything he reported about the case is true, up until possibly the statement that the DA “caved to public outrage”. It’s just that Carlson gives an extremely misleading impression, overlooking crucial facts relevant to his conclusion.

2. The misleading presentation is in service of provoking politically-oriented outrage.

Which brings us to the larger issue . . .

V. Demagoguery

Carlson is a world-class demagogue. His messages are expertly calculated to provoke political outrage. Which is good if the outrage is directed at real outrages, but Carlson’s outrage is often groundless: often, his main reason for saying that something is occurring is that it would be outrageous if it were. It resonates with audience members because people enjoy being outraged at their political opponents, so they don’t pause to think about how plausible it is.

Example 4: The Great Replacement Theory

Carlson is famous for the “Great Replacement Theory” (GRT), the theory that Democrats support greater immigration because they are trying to “replace” the electorate with one more favorable to themselves. (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-gives-full-endorsement-white-supremacist-great-replacement-conspiracy)

Carlson explains, “It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s their electoral strategy. And we know that because they say it all the time.” Then he plays video clips of Democrats totally not saying it:

• He starts with Stacey Abrams saying that the “blue wave” is made up of African Americans, white, Latino, Asian, etc., documented and undocumented people.

• Then Julian Castro saying that Texas is going to change from a red state to purple and then blue because of demographics.

• Then Dick Durbin saying that demographics are not on the side of the Republicans, and newer voters are moving away from the Republicans.

• Then Joe Biden talking about how America in its early days had an unrelenting stream of immigration, then how white people would soon be a minority, then saying that this isn’t bad but is a source of our strength.

Notice how none of those things at all assert the GRT. Which is unsurprising—it would be truly amazing if a Democrat actually asserted Carlson’s theory. (They’d probably be cancelled by Wokists if they did.)

You might assume Carlson is just lying about what the Democrats said. But then why does he actually play the clips? He must think those clips appear to assert the GRT. My best guess is that he’s confusing someone’s asserting the uncontroversial parts of the theory with their asserting the controversial part. It’s uncontroversial that America’s demographics are changing. It’s uncontroversial that nonwhite voters tend to skew Democrat. Democrats and Republicans agree with those facts.

The controversial part of the Great Replacement Theory is the claim that Democrats are deliberately engineering demographic change for the purpose of changing the electorate so they can gain more power. Of course no Democrat has ever suggested that.

But then, why else would leftists support immigration?

Gee, I dunno. Maybe because it totally fits with everything else they believe? If you don’t understand that a leftist would think immigration, especially of “people of color”, is good for the country, then you haven’t understood anything about their ideology.

The actual basis for the GRT: it’s calculated to provoke fear and rage.

Example 5: Global warming

Tucker has discovered proof that no one believes in climate change: Obama bought a beachfront house, and many Democrats live on the coasts. Also, many rich Democrats fly on private jets. See: https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-china-will-have-control-of-our-energy-grid/, at 4:21-5:07.

Obviously, then, the Democrats are just lying about the climate to gain more power.

Before fully embracing this argument, as compelling as it seems, maybe we should just check one thing? If global warming is real, how much ocean level rise is expected?

A mid-range estimate from the IPCC is around 2 feet of rise by 2100 A.D. So Carlson is assuming that if you think the ocean will be 2 feet higher in 80 years, you wouldn’t buy any property on either coast. I doubt that’s even true of beachfront houses; not many houses are under 2 feet elevation.

So why does he say this? He could just say Democrats are wrong about global warming, or the extreme activists are exaggerating it. But then he’d probably have to discuss the scientific evidence, and even if he succeeded, you still wouldn’t feel enraged. The best way to provoke rage is to claim that the Democrats are deliberately lying to you. They agree with the climate skeptics, they know that their agenda is bad for the world, but they don’t care because they’re evil bastards.

Example 6: Nuclear war

In fact, the Democrats are so mind-bogglingly, demonically evil that they actually want a nuclear war with Russia. That’s right, they want everyone, including themselves, dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MJDvr-1Z-A (esp. 10:56 on):

“But even the Chinese are not crazy enough to want nuclear Armageddon. . . . They don’t want their customers to blow themselves up, and they understand that they’re coming incredibly close. Only [U.S. Secretary of State] Tony Blinken and lunatics like Toria Nuland really want that.”

Again, Carlson could just say that the Biden administration is taking excessive risks in their desire to weaken Russia. But then you wouldn’t feel outraged. The way to provoke fear and outrage is to say that the Democrats are deliberately trying to kill all of us.

It’s a little bit hard to explain why they would want that, so he doesn’t.

Example 7: Trump

On his show, Carlson frequently appeared to be a Trump-supporter, and he also appeared to think that the 2020 election may have been stolen. But thanks to the Dominion/Fox lawsuit, we now know that he is no Trump-supporter at all. Some messages sent by Carlson to other people at Fox:

[Referring to Donald Trump:] “I hate him passionately. ... I can’t handle much more of this.”

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”

[Referring to the Trump years:] “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

[Referring to the Trump lawyer who claimed that Dominion had rigged the voting machines to help Biden:] “Sidney Powell is lying. F—ing b—.”

(Sources: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/private-fox-news-text-messages-emails-released-dominion-suit-rcna72693, https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-told-sidney-powell-her-election-claims-cruel-reckless-2023-3)

Normally, it’s bad and foolish to assume that your opponents really know that you’re right and therefore must be lying. E.g., many people (perhaps including some of you readers!) don’t know how bad Trump is; many actually think Trump is good for the country.

But from the above quotes, Carlson is not among them. He really knows that people like me are right about Trump. Yet he still puts on a public face as a Trump-supporter. What’s going on?

My interpretation:

1. Carlson is afraid of Trump. Carlson on Trump again:

   “What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

   Trump is “a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.”

   —https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/02/17/tucker-carlson-trump-demonic-force-destroyer/

2. Is he also lying about the rest of his ideology? No, there’s no reason to think that. Contrary to popular opinion, hatred of Trump completely fits with conservative values. Carlson probably hates Trump because Carlson is a hard-core, ideological conservative. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, see: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/right-critique-of-trump

   A Right-Wing, Populist Critique of President Trump

I suppose Carlson thinks that it’s better to pretend to support Trump, so that he won’t get “destroyed” by Trump and he can continue putting forward his right-wing messages. But it definitely seems like a Devil’s bargain.