Once Upon A Time

 A number of conservative students at our school had a somewhat legitimate beef with the outside speakers being overwhelmingly "liberal." They wanted to bring in a conservative voice to balance the roster, but they were not suggesting we bring in some MAGA nonsense (this was around the time of the 2016 election). One of the student's parents knew a guy whose children had applied to our schools (in fact, I interviewed their daughter briefly) and was a prominent conservative voice.

That person was Tucker Carlson.

At the time, Carlson was simply MAGA-curious, the bow-tied scion of William F. Buckley who knew how to pander to the white supremacist crowd without ever actually putting on the pointy hood. Since then, he has become, as the Times piece notes, the pre-eminent voice at Fox, by becoming its most racist voice. He has moved from the more coded language to actively using the language of white supremacists.

Tucker is a preppy shithead who struggled for years to find a place for himself on cable news. He bounced from CNN to MSNBC (!) until landing at Fox. Like so many "conservative" voices, he was like a junky who starts out just doing a little Vicodin on a Friday night to take the edge off and two years later, he's scoring heroin and fentanyl in exchange for hand jobs in an Arby's parking lot. By embracing what the "conservative movement" always was - a fear fueled grievance about uppity dark people and women who don't know their place - he has become the star he always wanted to be. 

Last night was "nerd prom," the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Fox News was there. The fact that there was undoubtedly some pearl clutching about gibes about Fox personalities acting as Trump's press operation just goes to show how broken some of the brains in our media are. They circle the wagons around the very people who are working to undermine democracy. This piece in Politico reads like farce.

Tucker Carlson realized that he could make bank by becoming a racist carnival barker, scaring old people about the Brown People under their beds. And he won't pay a price for it.