There are so many awful commentators on the right.  Tucker Carlson is one of the worst and one of the most popular, with over 2 million viewers of his smarmy daily Fox “News” show.  I hate watching him but feel the need to report on it, especially for those of you who sensibly avoid listening to his diatribes.

Last week Carlson spent a lot of time spouting racist tropes about Afghan immigrants.  He started one show (Aug. 18) by making fun of clips by CNN and MSNBC commentators calling such sentiments racist because Afghans often are white in skin color.  It’s still racist, Tucker, and anti-refugee and xenophobic, which you didn’t deny.  Carlson’s first point was that an Afghan refugee raped and murdered a girl in Austria and gave another such example in Germany.  How outrageous and irrelevant as an argument!  He then extended this by claiming that crime increased in Germany in 2015 after a wave of immigration from Afghanistan and Syria.  Even if that were true, there is no reason to believe immigration was the cause.  Then comes his clinching argument:  he claims “90% of new crimes in Germany were committee by asylum seekers.”  Fact check: There is nothing on the internet that even remotely supports this LIE.  Carlson then goes on to claim that Afghan refugees are destabilizing European countries.

Carlson’s show is so often just one lie after another. In this post-Trumpian era that denies facts and truth, any claim is fair game. And generalizing from one or two examples is OK.  Later in that same show, he had Sean Parnell on, a Senate candidate in Pennsylvania.  Parnell led a platoon in Afghanistan and said that they worked with an Afghan interpreter for a year who turned out to be a spy for the Iranians, implying that we shouldn’t give special visa status to those Afghans who helped the U.S. in the war effort.

Carlson continues with Fox’s anti-immigrant tirade reporting on housing prices and shortage in the U.S. and arguing it is caused by all those immigrants coming into the country.  He intimates that Biden will allow millions of Afghans, who come from a very different cultures, to flood our country with Ilhan Omars (Democratic Representative from Minnesota) who hate America.  What nonsense!  There won’t be millions, our country was built by immigrants who came from very different cultures, and we’re back to an “America – Love it or Leave it” mentality that doesn’t allow criticism.

In another show last week (Aug. 20), Carlson starts by declaring Biden is “senile,” “dazed and confused,” “can’t think clearly,” and his family and friends knew this when he ran for the office.  He then goes after CNN, saying it is a political organization, not a news organization (talk about projection!), and its head tells all commentators what they may say and not say.  His guest, a journalist, Glenn Greenwald, says CNN is “controlled by the CIA.”  Later in the show, Carlson goes back to his repeated point that the FBI was involved in fomenting the Jan 6 insurrection, again with no basis in fact.  But Tucker stares into the camera and says something like “this is true, everyone knows it.”

Toward the end of the show, he has Chris Rufo on, from the right-wing Manhattan Institute.  Rufo single-handedly has made critical race theory (CRT) a national focus in schools with his extremist characterizations (see my blog, June 24).  Now Rufo is going after “woke” corporations (see my blog on wokeness, June 15) that are doing anti-racist training.  The Fox banner is that “toddlers can be white supremacists” because Rufo reports that somewhere in the Bank of America’s training program it mentions that racial biases can develop as early as in 3-5 year-old children (which I am sure is true).  If you don’t watch Carlson, I hope all this gives you a sense of how his show is just filled with one hate- or fear-fueled lie, mischaracterization, and distortion after another.  I feel the need for a bath just writing about it.

A Note on Bill Maher

I don’t like juxtaposing Bill and Tucker.  Carlson is simply awful.  As I’ve said in earlier blogs (June 15 and 24), I do like Bill in many ways, but he really gets a lot of things wrong (in my view, of course).  His show last week (Aug. 20) is no exception.  One unfortunate parallel between the two is about race.  For both of them, claims of racism are too pervasive.  Carlson said (Aug. 18) that “fighting racism is the universal justification for every bad idea” the Democrats have.  On Bill’s show writer, Andrew Sullivan complained that too often “racial oppression is the single meaning of America.” While Bill didn’t say this, his comments, then and before, signal his agreement that racism is too often seen in every issue.  Sullivan goes on to comment that “yes, America is about racism, but it’s also about other things like free speech and freedom of religion.”  Bill approvingly chimes in that “things have changed a lot” – his usual point of how anti-racists don’t recognize the progress we’ve made.

Bill says, “We are giving up on a color-blind society, that should be our goal.”  To me, perhaps that should be a long-term goal, but not for the foreseeable future.  Given the extent of racism, we need a very race-conscious society, as exemplified in CRT and the type of anti-racism corporate training that both Bill and Carlson criticize.  A passage from my book, The Conscience of a Progressive, makes that clear:

“Another example [of how racism is built into government] is the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action policies in favor of “color blindness.”  Chief Justice John Roberts spoke for conservatives (and some liberals) when he said: ‘the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’  Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in defense of affirmative action, counters: ‘the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination'” [p. 107].

Two closing comments on Bill’s show.  First, he said that Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan couldn’t have been worse if Trump were President.  While it was and is bad, it certainly could have been worse with a bellicose Trump leading to considerable violence on withdrawal.  Second, Bill really is bad on the virus.  He starts the show by setting a bad example by shaking hands and hugging Sullivan.  Sullivan (who initiated it) has been on the show 27 times and is another example of Bill’s frequent middle, muddled conservatives who, according to Bill, spout common sense.  Back to the virus:  Later in the show, Bill says he doesn’t want a booster.  He says he didn’t want the vaccine, which he took “for the team.”  But a booster, he says, is for the immune compromised and elderly, not for him (he’s over 60).  What nonsense!  The vaccine’s efficacy attenuates over time and a booster becomes necessary – “for the team, Bill,” where the team is the public health of our country and planet!  Of course, the U.S. and other countries getting their third shot when much of the rest of the world hasn’t had any is quite problematic.