Why Tucker Carlson remains a giant that the establishment media can’t pull down
The jungle of the US media kingdom appears to be divided between two powerful entities – the pro-establishment behemoth often referred to as the mainstream media, and Tucker Carlson. And against all odds, Carlson appears to be winning.
It would be difficult to name a single person, aside from the rabble-rouser Donald J. Trump, who is more disgusting and/or terrifying (depending on who you ask) for the establishment media than Fox News host Tucker Carlson. This one man is considered such a threat that the New York Times in May spent a boatload of ink to assassinate his character in a 20,000-word hit piece. Ironically, the article backfired as it laid bare the reasons Americans no longer trust the ‘legacy media’.
Straight from the Grey Lady’s mouth: “‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ has presented a dominant narrative, recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste. The ruling class uses fentanyl and other opioids to addict and kill legacy Americans, anti-white racism to cast them as bigots, feminism to degrade their self-esteem, immigration to erode their political power. Republican elites, however improbably, help to import the voters Democrats require at the ballot box. The United States, Mr. Carlson tells his viewers, is ‘ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.’”
Those sentiments, which the piece dismisses out of hand as some wild conspiracy theories, are shared by tens of millions of average Americans whose trust in journalists and politicians is now at an all-time low.
Tucker Carlson Tonight is the second-most-watched show on cable news. In September, the 8pm opinion news-talk show averaged 3.09 million viewers. The concerns he raises, night after night, resonate with a lot of Americans, and if you attack and dismiss his work, you are attacking the millions of Americans who can relate. It’s as if the establishment media wants those concerns to disappear – and the public is on to it.
In a recent Gallup poll, it was found that just 34% of Americans trust the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” When you break down that shocking number, however, it becomes clearer why Tucker Carlson enrages the establishment so much: 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, and 27% of independents say they trust the fourth estate. Naturally, those 70% of Democrats do not enjoy having their cherished belief systems exposed and ridiculed every evening by Mr. Carlson, nor do their loyal media outlets want to be exposed as a politically charged propaganda machine working on behalf of the Democratic Party.
Consider, for example, the recent Black Lives Matter movement. Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop, the entire country lost its collective mind in a bout of liberal insanity. In the coast-to-coast riots that broke out, not only were the American people expected to take a knee to this violent movement (which has since been exposed as a fraud that arguably never helped a single black person, apart from those who founded the organization to buy mansions), they were expected to endorse the defunding of the police. Carlson wasn’t buying any of it.
“This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives,” Carlson said. “Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.”
“Anyone who has ever been subjected to the rage of the mob knows the feeling,” he continued. “It’s like being swarmed by hornets. You cannot think clearly. And the temptation is to panic. But you can’t panic. You’ve got to keep your head and tell the truth… If you show weakness of any kind, they will crush you.” He was speaking from experience, too – back in 2018, Antifa protesters besieged his home, threatening his family and vandalizing his property.
Carlson’s lonely voice in the media wilderness sparked a massive backlash, with corporations, also heavily invested in the BLM movement to the tune of billions of dollars, pulling their advertising from his show, while establishment media shock troops quickly portrayed the Fox News host as a cold-blooded racist. Fortunately, Carlson has enough of a conservative base who agreed with his message and he survived the onslaught.
More recently, Carlson has come under liberal fire for his ‘support of Vladimir Putin’, who is now embroiled in a bitter conflict against Ukraine. Here, the Fox News host has shown incredible courage, for no other person in the world of politics since Genghis Khan has been more vilified than the Russian president. Carlson asked a simple thing of his audience: To consider what Putin has done to them personally that makes him such an object of visceral hate.
“It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.”
Not only did Carlson ask his listeners to think twice about Vladimir Putin being propped up as the premier global villain, he suggested that the real enemy of the American people is none other than Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who has otherwise won fawning admiration from across the media spectrum.
At a time when the US-Mexico border is wide open, and inflation is spiraling out of control, only Carlson had the audacity to ask the simple question that millions of other Americans are also wondering: “Why are we still funding this?” Since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the US and its EU allies have forked over to Kiev around $126 billion worth of aid, a number almost equal to Ukraine’s entire 2020 GDP. And it seems that with every passing day, the Ukrainian leader demands more. And while it has been reported that much of the funds being sent to Ukraine never make it to the soldiers, it is the American people who must deal with the inflationary pressures from the limitless spending. How did Zelensky react to that news? Carlson quoted the Ukrainian leader as saying: “Inflation is nothing. Who is thinking about inflation? These things are secondary.” Secondary to what, you ask? Maybe like funneling the wealth out of the country to Cote d’Azur?
“Ukraine’s leaders aren’t really hiding it anymore, they have total contempt for us,” Carlson said. “They just want our money. They don’t care about the United States even a little bit. This is not democracies uniting in solidarity. This is a scam.”
Incidentally, is it any wonder, then, that Russian television has demonstrated an admiration for Carlson’s work, which is unique in that it is not tainted by raw anti-Russian propaganda? Just this week, the New York Times published an article alleging that Carlson and other US conservative voices had become “fixtures of internal news roundups, scripts and broadcasts” on various Russian news broadcasts. Apparently, this was supposed to demonstrate, once again, the nefarious relationship that exists between the Kremlin and the Republicans. In reality, it just shows how desperate the liberals have become to target Carlson and the Kremlin to help the Democrats advance on the political battlefield.
The establishment media would undoubtedly boost their ratings out of the basement if they started talking like that too, but because they have never in the past 20 years reported on an American war they didn’t like, it certainly will never criticize a US proxy war where the only thing the country loses, at least so far, is billions of dollars in taxpayer money. After all, as many of these warmongers want to believe, Ukraine could be Russia’s ‘Afghanistan War’ that is said to have brought down the Soviet Union, or just maybe the equivalent of the humiliating defeat America suffered in the Vietnam War. Either way, it doesn’t matter because the defense industry stands to gain enormous profits, which is what this is all about.
Whether they like it or not, Tucker Carlson remains a rare voice of candidness and honesty representing the genuine concerns of millions of Americans, which the establishment media would prefer to memory-hole.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
