“Major American cities were looted and burned on television. Citizens were beaten and murdered. Works of public art were destroyed by the score. America’s history – those shared experiences that bind us together as a nation – was plundered and completely rewritten by illiterate vandals. Everywhere as they watched, Americans were afraid. Afraid not simply for their safety, but afraid for their jobs, their reputations, afraid for their families.”
Tucker Carlson
His first piece to run in the student paper was titled “Where Have Our Morals Gone?” The idea had struck him, one morning in Econ, as he stared at the girl two rows in front of him. She was still drunk from the night before, and the sour smell of vodka drifted back to him. Her skirt was also unbearably short. He’d spent the whole class thinking: What kind of man was her father? That night he’d sat down to write.
The writing flowed easily, as he could think of an awful lot of immoral acts happening on campus. Sex was cheap and it was everywhere, and he smelled marijuana whenever he went for a walk. The students were practically asking for a moral authority to step in and highlight all the ways they were debasing themselves. And so he wrote.
When the letter appeared, two weeks later, in the April Fool’s issue, he didn’t care, and neither did the fifty odd students who slipped notes under his door. “I hope you’re serious,” one said, while others simply wrote “nice work!” A joke or not, his writing had meant something to somebody.
College flew by, and he flew along with it. He soon discovered the easy sex and cheap drugs he had once written about, and they weren’t so bad. So he pivoted his column, “Advice From Your Father,” to other topics. There was a war, somewhere in the Americas, and his fellow students were disrespecting it. “I didn’t risk my life in Normandy just to hand the world over to dirty communists,” he wrote. The piece was titled “A Globalist Coup.”
One night, on the dorm phone, he called his father. “I want to be a journalist, Dad,” he said. “I’m good at it.” His paternal role on campus had paid off, and his fifty dedicated fans had grown to a few hundred. He was largely despised by the rest of campus, but that was to be expected. They hardly read anything he wrote, or anything anyone else wrote for that matter. The headlines alone stirred them into a frenzy. And he liked that part the best.
He started at a local paper, fact-checking stories by real reporters. The writers were sloppy, and he often had to modify a quote that had been taken out of context. He did not envy these writers, whose lives were spent tracking down sources and checking references. It was the opinion page he admired, written by a guy named Sandy. Sandy’s weekly column, “On Justice,” was the only place he could go to hear the truth about the country. “Liberal mayors are handing their cities over to drug lords and welfare queens and are eroding the American way of life.” He couldn’t have put it better himself if he had written it.
A few years later, he did write it. Then he wrote a similar opinion column for a major Midwest paper, and eventually for a national magazine. His opinions were everywhere, and they were informed by the decay he saw around him, and by his fans. “You’re the only one telling the truth about this country,” said many of his letters. Others were more bitter, and some were plain ugly, but he took them as a sign of how far the country had fallen. His words were the true gospel of a silent majority.
America changed, and the media landscape changed with it. One day, he got a call from a cable news show, asking him to be a correspondent. “What does that mean?” he asked. “We want the you from the pages to come through on the screen.” And so it did. Things were relatively quiet in America, but still there were truths to uncover: the neoliberal trade agenda, sexual depravity in the Oval Office, the sham of the environmental movement. Television, he discovered, was a much better place to share his wisdom. He didn’t have to spend as much time thinking of what to write. He just spoke his mind.
When a black president was elected to office, he grew uneasy. His fans were saying one thing, and he was thinking another. But at that point, his fans measured in the millions, and all he had were his fans, so he chose their side over his own. “America has elected an under qualified, foreign alien to its highest office. God save us all,” he said the night of the inauguration, and his fans inferred the rest.
Across eight years of this new presidency, all he did was criticize. There was a health care bill, protections for illegal immigrants, and a lopsided deal with Iran. He found himself returning, time and again, to where it all began: the morality of the country. The president was an atheist, a race-baiter; he was soft on crime and supportive of gays. And it was his job, every night at eight, to remind the American public of who this man, sitting in the nation’s highest office, really was.
Then, after eight years, something happened. A new president followed, one who violated everything he had ever written about in his column or spoken about in his show. For a brief moment, he thought his fans might see the hypocrisy of this new guy. But they didn’t. They embraced the new president, and so he followed suit. Gone was the moral underpinning to his show, and in its place was something else: fealty.
At this point, he often thought, the ship was driving the captain. After years in the business, he was less sure than ever what his audience wanted. All he knew was that he had to give it to them. So when the country erupted over the death of man in Minnesota, three years into this latest presidency, he had to pick a side. His audience wanted a crisis, so he gave them a crisis.
“Major American cities were looted and burned on television. Citizens were beaten and murdered. Works of public art were destroyed by the score. America’s history – those shared experiences that bind us together as a nation – was plundered and completely rewritten by illiterate vandals. Everywhere as they watched, Americans were afraid. Afraid not simply for their safety, but afraid for their jobs, their reputations, afraid for their families.”
He broke with a president and party he had thought himself glued to, and in doing so he became completely unmoored. That night, lying next to his wife, he couldn’t shake the questions. Where was his loyalty? And who was the real Tucker Carlson?
Ignore the politics. For anyone grinning ear to ear at the prospect of a Fox News bashing, this isn’t it. I could find a similar rant on MSNBC and you know it.
What I’m interested in is this: How did we arrive at Tucker Carlson telling us that “voting is for fools?”
I can’t say for sure whether Tucker’s beliefs are sincere, but 27 years of cynicism tells me that they probably are not. Regardless of his motivation for the segment or for his media persona in general, I find the video unmooring. Just as my fictitious Tucker felt unmoored by his betrayal of principle. When I watch the video I see a puppet operated by an invisible hand. What’s his agenda? Who the hell knows!
We give these voices immense power, and we assume they will wield it responsibly. Or maybe I’m naive, and nobody assumes anything of the sort. But at the very least, I assume that they know what they’re doing with it. But they don’t seem to have the slightest clue. The demagogue on that screen is not directing the mob so much as trying to catch a falling knife.
It is easy to discard cable news as useless trash. But voices like Tucker’s are how many Americans consume information. And if it’s not on cable, it’s on the opinion page of your newspapers and the Twitter feeds on your iPhone.
I had fun imagining how the Tucker we see today was created – maybe I should have set the whole thing in a lab somewhere – but I am not really trying to understand his motivation. Politico has already covered how over-saturated the Tucker Carlson Motivation industry is. I also don’t think there’s any value in it: Tucker could be a political chameleon who believes every single thing he says, he could be a heartless opportunist, or he could be some combination of both – and it wouldn’t make a difference.
Here’s what I’m getting at: Guys like Tucker Carlson are given immense platforms to preach their anger, mistrust and fear on a daily basis. They’re either leading the mob or being lead by it. Is that really what we want?