Guest post by David E.
Tucker Carlson is now the most popular talk show host in America. His nightly show on Fox News, which has been running since 2016, now draws around four million viewers per night, more than anything else on Fox, CNN, or MSNBC. So why are people tuning in?
Jason Hill has written an insightful article, from which we’ll quote extensively (emphasis added).
A friend of mine last week said to me, wide-eyed and indignant “Did you hear all the horrible things Tucker said about black people? He’s such a racist.”
“No,” I responded, “I didn’t hear about them because I’m pretty sure he never said them. He’s not a racist. He’s a diehard American patriot.”
This, I think, is the real place to start regarding why the left-wing media and their herd-like followers who have never watched an episode of Carlson’s show hate him so much. Above all, Carlson loves America. He’s a patriot who hates to see the way in which cancel culture, woke fascists, crazed left-wing cultural post-modern Marxists and socialists are destroying this country.
Carlson is able to see with great lucidity the connection between what happens in the classroom and how it translates with lightning speed into the boardrooms and corporate offices and mainstream culture in general, into toxic policies that undermine the existential and moral health of American citizens. He sees that our universities are transmission belts of culture, and he spends a lot of time as a news person on intellectual issues.
Carson functions like a wholesaler as opposed to a retailer in the realm of integrating seemingly disparate phenomena in our culture. The Left will always hate him for that, for the simple reason that they navigate themselves through the world by two forms of disingenuous behavior: stealth and obfuscation.
Carlson just has a way of shredding the hypocrisy and unexamined narratives under which so many conversations are conducted. He dares to name the consequences of nefarious actions taking place. He justifiably points to the looters, rioters, vandals and Black Lives Matter advocates who are breaking up the USA economy and whose organizers are all openly admitting that they are trained Marxist social disruptors. …
This leads to perhaps the most important issue for why Carlson is hated. He is a brilliant man. He’s not only the smartest man on television, he’s an intellectual in his own right. He asks smart questions, he thinks in terms of fundamental principles, his analyses, if not always correct (who among us is infallible?), do not stem from piecemeal thinking, but from a consistent and well thought-out philosophic and political ideology.Unlike many television personalities who are mere talking heads and pundits, and who rant and shout and emit emotional vibrations, Tucker is an advocate of reason and logic; he knows like a good moral persuader when to judiciously use rhetoric and emotional appeal to buttress his points. But the thrust of his positions starts from basic premises and he works his way down to an often apocalyptic conclusion.
In today’s culturally bankrupt environment, Carlson comes across as close to a moral Olympian pugilist as we are likely to see on national television. …
If you claim to be a moral foundationalist as Carlson does, holding that there exists an objective sense of right and wrong, leftists will label you an imperial fascist, and a purveyor of racist tropes. Yet these same leftists are the first to declare with absolute certainty, while hiding behind relativism, that slavery is responsible for every problem black people experience today, from obesity to hypertension; that gender pronouns are oppressive and discriminatory; and that failure to support “sex-reassignment” in children from as early as thirteen years of age is conclusive proof that one is a transphobe. …
There was a time as an independent conservative when I held out hope that there was some semblance of rationality left in the left-wing factions of this country.
Today, when a conglomeration of left-wing voices can lump Black Lives Matter adherents as the moral equivalents of Martin Luther King Jr., when it can authorize the dismantling and defunding of the police — law enforcement that protects safety and individual rights — there is no hope any longer for reasonable people to have so-called reasonable disagreements.
When Rutgers and the University of Chicago have declared essentially that grammar is racist, that English as a discipline has had a long history of providing aesthetic, rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness, there is no lower rung in education hell to sink into.
The collapse of our civilization is all but imminent. …
Doesn’t this sound like Trump?
Tucker does not yield one inch to his adversaries. He is confident, indignant, incendiary for the cause, and he does not care what people think of him. People, in general, will hate you for possessing these traits.
Progressives will always hate Tucker Carlson because they and Tucker hold irreconcilable moral positions. The latter is the bearer of moral values, the other of anti-values. Tucker loves America, reason, capitalism and the self-sufficient human being who assumes responsibility for his or her life. Leftists just downright hate America and will poison it with every anti-American, anti-reason philosophy they can excavate or create.
Tucker Carlson is today’s media prophet who sees the existential wasteland ahead of us filled with rotting corpses — and the best among us struggling on the dustbin of history to rebuild what the destroyers and looters, long dead, left in their wake.
The polarization is near total now, led by the media. A new Gallup poll reveals the media’s increasing partisanship through the responses of its consumers:
- For Democrats, a near record high 73% have a great deal, or fair amount of trust in the media.
- For Republicans, an all-time low of 10% trust radio, TV, and newspapers. Just 3% of the GOP has a “great deal” of trust in media institutions.
As the media increasingly says things only lefties want to hear, the left trust it more and the right trusts it less.
In this political climate of fantasy versus reality, are the political establishments really going to interrupt their carbon dioxide fantasies with truths about the climate models?