Opinion: In
office, Trump was the greatest threat to U.S. democracy. Now it may be Tucker
Carlson.
Opinion by
Columnist
Feb. 12, 2021 at 1:05 p.m. CST
When Donald Trump was
in office, he posed the most dangerous threat to American democracy. With the
former president now golfing full-time, the most dangerous threat may well
emanate from the Fox “News” Channel — and specifically from its top-rated host,
Tucker Carlson. He seems to be on a mission to make America’s worst problems
even worse.
Carlson has a long history of pushing vaccine conspiracy theories that endanger
people’s lives. On Tuesday night, he attacked covid-19 vaccines, claiming without providing any evidence that “the way the
authorities handled the covid vaccine did not inspire confidence,” “all these
people [were] lying about it” and “the most powerful people in America worked
to make certain that no one could criticize it.” He never did say what these
lies supposedly were — he just left his audience with the impression that the
vaccines are part of a plot against them by powerful, shadowy forces. One fact
Carlson did not mention: His boss, Rupert Murdoch, has already been vaccinated. His conspiracy mongering is likely to
discourage Fox News’s elderly viewers — who are at the highest risk of dying of covid-19 — from getting safe and effective
vaccines that could save their lives.
Having done his level
best to injure public health, the next night Carlson sought to exacerbate
racial and political divisions. On Wednesday, he argued that “they” (whoever they are) are lying to “you” —
the Fox News viewer — about the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. “The known
facts bear no resemblance to the story they’re telling — they’re just flat-out
lying,” Carlson said. He didn’t say what the real story was — perhaps, like
half of Republicans in a recent poll, he thinks antifa was responsible for
the assault?
Rather than try to
make his case for an alternative reality, Carlson segued into a diatribe about
the Black Lives Matters rallies last year that were sparked by the death of
George Floyd in Minneapolis. He claimed that protests “changed this country
more in five months than it changed in the previous 50 years” — and it was all
based on “an utter lie.” Floyd wasn’t “murdered by a cop,” Carlson told
viewers. He “almost certainly died of a drug overdose, fentanyl.”
This is the claim
advanced by attorneys representing the cop who pressed his knee onto Floyd’s
neck for roughly nine minutes, but it’s not true. The medical examiner ruled that Floyd’s death was a
homicide. While Floyd had fentanyl in his system, the cause of death was “cardiopulmonary arrest
complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” A
private autopsy requested by Floyd’s family found he died of asphyxia, or suffocation.
That Carlson is
spreading dingbat, dishonest conspiracy theories from such a powerful perch is
certain to have deleterious, even deadly, consequences for the country.
Already his promotion of “Stop the
Steal” lies helped to lead to the attack on the Capitol that left five people
dead and at least 138 cops injured. That is why I, and other commentators such as Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, have called for
Fox News to exercise greater restraint — and, if it doesn’t, for the cable
systems that carry it to drop its programming.
This provoked another
Carlson diatribe. On Thursday night, he claimed that there was a plot involving everyone from House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) to Post
owner Jeff Bezos to, well, me designed to “silence” Fox News. To make his case,
he employed his trademark combination of hyperbole, paranoia and ignorance.
He bizarrely compared
Pelosi and Schiff to the Ottomans, who, he said, “destroyed the cities they
captured” because “they enjoyed it.” Perhaps Carlson is thinking of the
Mongols? The Ottomans were not city-destroyers — as he would know if he visited
Istanbul, Cairo or Belgrade. He’s just casually maligning Muslims along with
Democrats.
Carlson is full of
off-the-wall analogies that demonstrate his invincible ignorance of history.
“The moment they took power, Democrats began a kind of Counter-Reformation
against the free Internet,” he claimed. “They started the most sweeping mass
censorship campaign in the history of this country.” (Guess he’s never heard of
the 1798
Alien and Sedition Acts or the 1873 Comstock Act or the 1917 Espionage Act.) Later, he compared the Democrats to
the “Red Guards.” He can’t decided if the targets of his ire are militant
Catholics or militant Communists.
Carlson went on to
paint Fox News as a lonely, embattled champion of free speech: “Everyone else
in the media is standing in crisp formation, in their starched matching
uniforms and their little caps, patiently awaiting orders from the billionaire
class. And then there’s Fox News off by itself, occasionally saying things that
are slightly different.”
Pretty rich coming
from a TV star who is reportedly paid $10 million a year by a giant corporation controlled
by two billionaires, Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan.
No one is trying to
punish Fox News for expressing “slightly different” views. I am a staunch
believer in free speech. I spent most of my life in the conservative movement.
(Carlson and I were once affiliated with the same magazine — the Weekly
Standard.) I welcome a debate that features conservative views.
But that is not what
Carlson represents. He is peddling lunatic conspiracy theories that endanger
people’s lives and shred our social fabric. The executives at Fox News — and at
the cable systems that carry it — should be ashamed of themselves for beaming
this dangerous claptrap into millions of homes.
