TUCKER 5 post
7 23 field error 4
SEE VAXX RFK2
LEFT GOP 6 26
SEE JDV
SEE CONSPIRACY TRUTHER
trifecta key to 11 24 trump 18? JDV PICKED?
attacked by demon 11 24
merri ok
WH ZELENSKY ambush possible bc tucker hanity fox crm
see great replacement --> ILLEGAL VOTER BS 2024
anti-sem // FUENTES
SEE CRM CULT WAR WAR ON XIAN BS WHITE GRIEVANCE RACISM
WHITE GENOCIDE SA APARTHEID BS
see JOK
SEE LIE GASLIGHT J6 REVISION
macho?
don jr trump 16 gop convention rfk2
SCHISM ON FUENTES 11 25 IRAN WAR 3
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SEDER 9 26 SAYS HE IS INDEP NOW? RAT SINK SHIP TRUMP
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Podcast Wars: “Traitor” Tucker Carlson, “evil” Candace Owens, and “pathetic” Nick Fuentes
This week's right-wing podcaster infighting
Written by Noah VanDowe & Ben Van Bloem
Published 10/09/26
Welcome to Media Matters’ regular debrief on the Podcast Wars. This week, many figures directed their ire toward Tucker Carlson following his contentious and controversial interview with former member of British parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg on the Russia-Ukraine war and “Britain’s decision to fight against Adolf Hitler.”
Tucker Carlson is either a “useful idiot” or a “traitor”
Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro called Carlson’s claims during the Rees-Mogg interview “so disgusting and also stupid,” accusing him of “saying it would be better if Hitler had won World War II.” Shapiro also mocked Carlson for suggesting “that nuclear weapons were created by demons” and argued Carlson “hates the West as currently constituted. … This is why I’ve said many, many times that Tucker is the horseshoe right, and he joins hands with the left in hatred for the West.”
Fox host Mark Levin on Carlson: “He's an out of the closet antisemite. I think he hates his own country, our country. And I think in many ways he's a traitor.” Levin grouped Carlson among “a cabal” of “flawed perverts, criminals and crooks and propagandists.”
Reacting to the Rees-Mogg interview, podcaster Konstantin Kisin told his audience to “never go full Tucker,” adding, “Carlson isn't a secret Nazi, he's just ideologically captured and not very bright. A typical podcaster, in other words.”
Right-wing host Steven Crowder said “people like” Carlson and Theo Von “who didn't condemn [Zohran] Mamdani's actions enough” are “either useful idiots or they are acting malevolently themselves.”
Ahead of midterms, a party divided
YouTube host Benny Johnson lashed out at Karl Rove and the “Lincoln Project guys,” calling them “a bunch of retards.” Johnson said they “couldn’t run a Somali daycare in Minneapolis” and concluded his rant by labeling them “left-wing activists.”
On the podcast of David Freiheit, known online as Viva Frei, failed Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback complained that his “real competitor” in the Republican primary election was Fox News. Fishback argued Fox spent “every single day attacking our campaign, but also attacking the arguments, undermining the arguments about affordability when life has gotten less affordable in my state — Fox News of course saying that it hasn’t.”
Nick Fuentes feuds with other extremists
White nationalist Nick Fuentes released a broadside of sexism against “every single female in the conservative movement,” specifically naming Candace Owens and Kim Iversen. Fuentes bemoaned that “every single one of them are closeted feminists.”
White nationalist Stew Peters and conspiracy theorist Jake Shields mocked Fuentes and a variety of other right-wing media figures. Referencing alleged leaked messages, Shields called Fuentes “pathetic” for wanting to earn Tim Pool’s approval, saying, “It's weird how these guys like Nick want to be liked so bad by the people that hate him.” Peters responded by arguing many figures in the media space are “self-serving” or “masochists, like somebody like Andrew Wilson who just has a fetish for being embarrassed and he just loves pain.”
Candace Owens: “Conspiracy theorist, nut, and evil”
Appearing on Theo Von’s podcast, Candace Owens said it was “hard for me to imagine a scenario where no one” involved with Turning Point USA knew Charlie Kirk would be killed, agreeing with the host that “you’d have to have an insider.”
Ben Shapiro ridiculed Owens for the “somewhat substantiated internet rumor about her sexual proclivities,” adding that “the way that she decided that she was going to redeem herself was by appearing with chief mascot of the retardosphere Theo Von, one of the dumbest people to walk planet Earth.” Shapiro further called Owens a "conspiracy theorist, nut, and evil human being,” adding that Von is “going along with” her attacks on Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk “because either he is legitimately a retard or because he's a bad person or both.”
//
09/11/26 10:43 AM EDT
Podcast Wars: A “Jeffrey Dahmer character,” a “twisted harpy,” and a “thug bastard”
09/25/26 2:41 PM EDT
10/02/26
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Tucker Carlson complains that Wikipedia describes white genocide as a conspiracy theory
10/01/26
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Vice President JD Vance used his keynote address to the GOP’s midterm convention to echo one of Tucker Carlson’s most infamous statements, just one week after publicly refusing to distance himself from the right-wing podcaster.
“Two years ago, we have to remember — our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired,” Vance told the attendees in Dallas on Thursday night. After citing factory closures and drug overdoses, he continued: “We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country. And we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.“
Who was “called racist” for suggesting “our country was becoming dirtier and poorer”? That would be Carlson, who declared that immigrants were the cause.
“Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this,” Carlson told his Fox News audience during a December 2018 monologue. “We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.” He then aired footage of what he described as “an endless chain of migrant caravans” in Mexico.
Carlson’s statement that immigrants make the United States “poorer” is incorrect, and his claim that they make it “dirtier” was widely recognized as bigoted. More than two dozen companies dropped their ads on his show in response.
But Carlson refused to back down, repeatedly offering similar remarks and using his Fox show to mainstream other white nationalist tropes and talking points. And a few years later, an enterprising would-be GOP politician adopted the host’s language in a successful effort to win his favor.
On July 1, 2021 — the same day he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate — Vance went on Carlson’s Fox program and told the host that he was running to ensure that his kids “live in the same great country that I lived in. And if we don't do something, if we don't fight back against what's going on in our country, they're going to lose it, they're going to grow up in a country that's much poorer, that's much dirtier, that's much uglier, and where they can't even speak their mind as citizens.”
Carlson fawned over Vance throughout the interview. “I probably shouldn't say this, I'm really glad you're doing it,” he said at its conclusion. “I admire you and I wish you luck, very much. Thank you for doing this. Congratulations.”
Vance would continue to mimic Carlson’s rhetoric on the host’s show, and Carlson in turn backed his Senate campaign on-air — and used his personal relationship with Donald Trump to convince Trump to endorse Vance. Two years later, he helped convince Trump to select Vance as his 2024 running mate.
Since then, Carlson has dived even further into the right-wing fever swamps. He became the nation’s most prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorist; declared that “the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated”; warned frequently of the influence of “demons”; and hosted a notorious white nationalist and a Nazi apologist for friendly interviews. That last point has triggered calls on the right for Vance to disavow or distance himself from the man who helped cement his political career.
But instead, Vance used a September 3 White House press briefing to portray Carlson as merely a “friend” with whom he sometimes has “political disagreements,” and to attack his critics as un-American.
And last night, Vance gave a wink and a nod to Carlson and his audience on the biggest stage available to him.
// mma
Tucker Carlson helped make JD Vance. The VP refuses to condemn his antisemitism.
09/01/26 3:11 PM EDT
JD Vance’s wildly disingenuous response to his Tucker Carlson problem
09/04/26 11:47 AM EDT
09/11/26
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mma
Podcast Wars: Benny Johnson on the “traitors,” Nick Fuentes on the “freaks,” and Ben Shapiro tells us who “dips his head in lard every morning”
This week's right-wing podcaster infighting
Written by Noah VanDowe & Ben Van Bloem
Published 09/11/26
Welcome to Media Matters’ regular debrief on the Podcast Wars. This week, online hosts in the right-wing podcast universe continued to launch vicious personal attacks at their contemporaries, with Tucker Carlson taking heat from a wide range of commentators on the right.
Tucker Carlson vs. ... everyone
Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro criticized JD Vance for refusing to condemn Tucker Carlson over ties to antisemitism, warning the vice president that their relationship “is going to come along with a political and yes, a moral cost.” Shapiro also mocked Carlson’s recent interview with artist Jeff Elofson in which the two decried the existence of algebra, which Elofson called “fake math with letters” used by “good little goy slaves.” Shapiro commented, “Every day, new levels of retardation are reached.”
Carlson attacked Shapiro during his interview with Elofson last week, declaring, “The meritocracy as practiced in the United States is not a meritocracy. … That's how you wind up with a system where Ben Shapiro gets into Harvard.” Shapiro responded, “It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and it will only be uncovered by a man who dips his head in lard every morning.”
Right-wing host Tim Pool responded to Carlson’s interview with Elofson, asking, “I wonder if the goal of Tucker is to demoralize. And I mean that seriously.”
The influencers who are “too stupid” for Nick Fuentes
White nationalist Nick Fuentes took swipes at Carlson and his “idiot brother” Buckley, calling them “scum.” He encouraged his viewers to “decouple” from the “retard right,” condemning “these freaks, the Ian Carrolls, the Jake Shields, the Dan Bilzerians, the Candace Owens, the Tucker Carlsons. ... They're too weird, they're too stupid, they're not even right-wing.”
Laura Loomer takes a victory lap on Milo Yiannopoulos' deportation
After taking credit for the arrest and deportation of right-wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos in August, right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer launched into an invective-filled rant last Friday calling him a “complete tweaker” and a “loudmouth, homosexual freak of nature.” Loomer then slammed “Mr. America First, Tucker Qatarlson” for speaking with Yiannopoulos — an “illegal alien amplifying divisive rhetoric against the president” — on his podcast.
Benny Johnson on Shapiro: “We should never forget these traitors”
Right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson declared he would “never forgive Ben Shapiro” for defending Jimmy Kimmel from pressure by the Federal Communications Commission last year. “We had people that betrayed us, traitors on our own side that betrayed us on behalf of Jimmy Kimmel,” Johnson complained, adding, “We should never forget these traitors, and we should come up with an actual — a list — a full list of exactly who these people are.”
//
09/08/26 12:10 PM EDT
09/02/26 2:39 PM EDT
Rudy Giuliani calls Fox News a “bad station”
08/20/2
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Nick Fuentes claims Tucker Carlson's show was created “to seed the ground for a Vance for president campaign”
09/02/26
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Tucker Carlson helped make JD Vance. The VP refuses to condemn his antisemitism Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/01/26
Vice President JD Vance put his relationship with Tucker Carlson back in the spotlight this week when he was asked about the right-wing podcaster’s history of promoting antisemites at a meeting of Jewish Republicans and refused to condemn his longtime political ally.
“Vance was asked during the fireside chat about right-wing podcasters who have platformed antisemites, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson,” The Washington Post reported of his appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s summit on Monday night. “He declined to criticize Carlson specifically, instead training his fire on podcaster Nick Fuentes, who Vance said ‘really does hate Jews.’”
Carlson spent the last decade diving deeper and deeper into the far-right fever swamp, drawing plaudits from white nationalists for bringing their bigoted talking points and conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” to his then-platform at Fox News. (As Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi, put it in 2016: “Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.”) He also became a GOP kingmaker, helping shape the party’s platform and pick its candidates, and received a plum speaking slot to endorse Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Committee.
But Carlson’s star has dimmed somewhat since Trump’s reelection. His rhetoric has become ever more bizarre and bigoted (he said earlier this year that “the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated” and previously suggested Jewish university donors were behind the “white genocide”). His softball interview with Fuentes last year drew condemnations from fellow right-wingers and drove a media and political firestorm. And he had a falling out with Trump over the Iran war and his sense that the administration has been less fascistic than he expected. Carlson recently called for Trump’s removal from office, while the president posted that the podcaster “is a loser, and always has been!”
Fuentes is, as Vance alluded, a notorious white nationalist whose long trail of noxious commentary includes claiming that “Jews are running society” and “are money changers, bullshit artists, psychopaths, charlatans, grifters, manipulators”; explicitly describing “the Jews” as among “our actual enemies”; saying the Holocaust is “fake”; and proposing the identification and arrest of all members of “American Jewry.” And Vance has been happy to condemn Fuentes in the past, saying during the 2024 presidential campaign, “I think the guy's a total loser. Certainly I disavow him.”
But Fuentes’ star continued to rise after Trump’s reelection in no small part due to the willingness of Carlson to promote him. The former Fox host offered up his platform to Fuentes for an interview that Fuentes himself described as “so friendly” (even as he excoriated the host for being merely “antisemite-light”).
So why did Vance pass — yet again — when the opportunity to condemn Carlson was handed to him on a silver platter? Perhaps because the vice president owes the former Fox host for his political success.
Vance underwent a dramatic transformation as he entered the political arena, using dozens of appearances on Carlson’s show beginning in 2017 to rebrand himself from an elite favorite to a populist culture warrior in the vein of the host himself. Carlson, in turn, lavished Vance with praise, and privately lobbied Trump to endorse Vance’s campaign for the U.S. Senate and, two years later, pick him as his running mate.
It’s unclear, at this point, how close Vance and Carlson remain.
In a May interview with The New York Times, Carlson repeatedly refused to divulge when he last spoke to the vice president, saying, “I don’t want to cause him more problems.”
“I couldn't be a bigger fan of him as a man,” he later added.
//
Of course Tucker Carlson is promoting Nick Fuentes
- 10/28/25 2:36 PM EDT
What are J.D. Vance and Sean Hannity so afraid of?
- 11/14/25 11:40 AM EST
J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s VP pick, owes everything to Tucker Carlson
- 07/15/2
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RUN 2028? PLAN
August 7, 2026, edition of PBD Podcast streamed on YouTube
PATRICK BET-DAVID (HOST): I was expecting, I was actually disappointed. Me and Tucker are obviously not friends. We're not —
ADAM SOSNICK (PANELIST): Yeah.
BET-DAVID: You know, we're not best of friends and all this stuff. Everybody knows he openly — and I called him out and he called me out for, I think he said something about Catholic comments I made. And I told him, I said, look, everybody says I'm taking money. You're taking money. Why don't we just do a full on audit by three different accounts?
ANTHONY SABATO JR. (GUEST): That would be great.
...
BET-DAVID: But where I'm going, as a person who loves the game of debate and competition and ideas, I actually am disappointed that he didn't put a better plan together.
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August 26, 2026, edition of The Tucker Carlson Show, posted on YouTube
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): So how did, when Kristi Noem left, was forced out, and then replaced by one of the slowest, famously one of the slowest, but certainly one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate, Markwayne Mullin, which he is. He's extremely liberal and because he's from Oklahoma, like, nobody seems to get that, but he is, particularly in immigration and foreign policy. I mean, it's like giving it to Lindsey Graham. How did that — why would you put Markwayne Mullin, a liberal, a Kamala Harris liberal, in that role?
GREG BOVINO (GUEST): Exactly. I think when we talk about those donors, that donor class, getting someone confirmed, why would you not put a liberal in? You're going to get enough votes from the crazy Democrats. And then you're going to get the support from the big labor RINOs, just like they did with Commissioner Rodney Scott. He sailed through the confirmation.
...
BOVINO: So, that's how, that's how someone like a Mark Mullin is put into a position like that. There are a certain class of people that love a Mullin. Hey, you know, Mullin, what is he listening to? He's listening to Tom Homan, Rodney Scott, worst of the worst in targeting. That's really all he can, that's all he can regurgitate is that --
CARLSON: And so that, for people who haven't heard that talking point, that means we're going after the really bad ones.
BOVINO: The really bad ones. Worst of the, the criminal aliens, the terrorists, child molesters, you know, folks that have committed murder, whatever. The worst of the worst.
CARLSON: People who have criticized Israel, stuff like that. Really, the really bad. The ones who deserve the death penalty.
BOVINO: And, and, and, I will say that that is the opposite of what we should be doing. That is not a threat to your nation. Let me say this again. A lot of people think I'm crazy. That's not the threat to your nation is the worst of the worst.
The threat to your nation is your run-of-the-mill illegal alien that we've just said, the 105 million that don't share your cultures, your values, that don't care about anything related to America, that have been given, that want to be given citizenship. That's far more of a threat. Hey, we can get those criminal aliens anytime. That record's not going away. We can get them anytime. Anytime.
Right now, we've got that window to get that regular run-of-the-mill illegal alien, maybe a landscaper, maybe he doesn't have a criminal record in the US, even though he's still a criminal because he crossed the border illegally, they're all criminals. Probably does have a criminal record in a foreign country that we won't know about. But that is far more of a threat to you, me, and our values, than an MS-13 gang member.
//
06/02/26 2:41 PM EDT
01/27/26 4:03 PM EST
Fox co-host suggests sending Greg Bovino to deal with ICE protesters
- 05/29/26
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In spite of President Donald Trump's insistence that he still knows what MAGA wants, a new piece from The i Paper argued that he is now facing an "insurgency" from the movement he created as he continues to sow divisions.
"With just over two months to go before voters are set to seal his fate in America’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump is once again bucking tradition: instead of uniting his party around him and leading from the front, he has spent days stoking divisions among Republicans that could advance the day when the GOP splits asunder," reporter Simon Marks wrote in the Tuesday piece,
He later added, "last Friday night, the President fired the latest, dramatic salvo in his efforts to retain the leadership of a movement that shows every sign of fracturing beneath him. Amid collapsing trade talks with Canada, fresh revelations of the damage Iran has done to America’s military infrastructure, and several days of primary contest losses for a host of Trump-backed Republican candidates, the President turned his social media blowtorch on 'traitors' around him."
Marks further argued that "Ground Zero" for the MAGA pushback against Trump could be traced back to Wyoming, "America's reddest state," earlier this year, when "five [GOP] lawmakers broke ranks and condemned the President for a social media post in which he compared himself to Jesus." More recently, his endorsed candidate for governor in Wyoming "went down to a crushing defeat" against another Republican candidate "who pledged to lower the temperature of extremist debate in the state."
Marks also highlighted the Florida House race in which "antisemitic influencer Dan Bilzerian" sought to unseat incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, calling him a "Jewish supremacist" and attacking Trump as "nothing but a tool for Israeli hegemony." While Bilzerian did not win the primary, Marks argued that his ability to secure 19 percent of the final vote offered "a fresh indication that Trump and his approved candidates are vulnerable to accusations that the President has betrayed MAGA and sold the movement out."
Elsewhere, three spurned former Trump supporters — Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie and Tucker Carlson — shared a photo of a meeting together, amid rumors that they might be plotting the creation of a new political party to take on Trump and his remaining GOP elite backers. Trump himself was dismissive of this idea, lambasting the group as a bunch of "losers."
"Trump now finds himself confronting a paradox. In many ways, MAGA’s greatest strength since he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015 has been the movement’s ability to portray Republicans as a single insurgency seeking to overthrow an elitist radical-left establishment and the so-called 'deep state,'" Marks concluded. "But today, Trump’s control of MAGA is threatened by a fresh insurgency vowing to overturn the very Republican elite that he now leads. Containing those threats will be no small matter, as Carlson, Massie, Greene and others build support for their version of Trump’s handmade political universe.
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- ### Tucker Carlson: Dan Bongino went “from a critic of the deep state to its most aggressive defender”
07/02/26
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- Amos Barshad @ Columbia Journalism Review: ‘All I Have Is the Power to Talk and Be Heard’
Tucker Carlson on pitying Donald Trump, never listening to podcasts, and planning a new political party—while selling you nicotine pouches.
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LOST E JEAN CARROLL CASE?
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06/18/26
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an 6 26
Speaking for his podcast Can’t Be Censored, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said he is leaving the Republican Party — and he blames President Donald Trump’s ostensible support for Israel.
“I would not support the Republican party, there's no chance I would support the Republican party,” Carlson declared in his Thursday episode, with him reposting the clip on X on Monday. “How could I support a political party that is not loyal to the United States. I voted Republican my entire life, I have been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican party, but there is no defending this. I'm out.”
Carlson argued that, by starting a war against Iran in February, he prioritized Israel’s interests over those of the United States. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, Carlson asserted that the president was unduly influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to enter a war that America has “effectively lost already.” He added that he believes Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was funded by individuals whose “loyalty to Israel” does not align with American foreign policy priorities.
The right-wing podcaster’s split with Trump over Israel is part of a broader pattern on both sides of the aisle. A February poll taken by Gallup found support for Israel has dropped among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. Independents support Palestinians over Israel by 41 to 30 percent and Democrats do so by 65 percent to 17 percent. Republicans still overwhelmingly support Israel, by 70 percent to 13 percent, but this still counts as a 10-point drop since 2024. Overall American support for Israel has fallen from 46 percent to 33 percent in favor of Israel in 2025 to 41 percent to 36 percent against Israel in 2026.
Speaking exclusively to AlterNet, former Harvard law professor, former lawyer for Trump and Zionist activist Alan Dershowitz argued that rising anti-Semitism on both sides of the aisle will compel Israel and the Jewish community to become “stronger” and more cautious about the future.
“The alternative is to be strong,” Dershowitz told AlterNet. “The alternative is to prepare for the worst. The alternative is for Israel to be completely self-reliant, for Jews not to expect help from other people, but to do it on their own, the way they did it when they were the best musicians, the best chess players, the best inventors, the best entrepreneurs.”
He added, "I think Jews have to realize that they're not going to get, they can't count on the kindness of strangers, and they shouldn't give up any of their security in the name of public relations.”
When asked about the rise of anti-Israel sentiment from both the right and left, Dershowitz characterized it as anti-Semitic and compared the current historical moment to the World War II era.
“The antisemite to the right, antisemite to the left have more in common than they are different,” Dershowitz said, then comparing the current movements to those of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. “And that goes back to [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler. Stalin and Hitler had only one thing in common, that they both hated Jews.”
Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s war against Gaza has led to 72,835 fatalities as of May, according to the World Health Organization. The initial Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7th led to 1,195 Israeli deaths, including 815 civilians, as well as 251 additional civilians who were taken hostage, according to Human Rights Watch.
Speaking with AlterNet in March about the tendency to blame Israel for America’s war against Iran, Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna said that one can criticize Israeli government officials without being anti-Semitic just as one can criticize American government officials without hating America. The challenge, he added, is discerning when those criticisms are used to denounce all Israelis, delegitimize Israel’s right to exist or hold Israel to a double standard compared to its predominantly Muslim neighbors.
“I can be critical of President Trump without being un-American,” Sarna told AlterNet. “Most people who criticize President Trump or the Republicans would assure you how much they love America and hold a fundamentally positive view of it. It seems to me that it's deeply important for us to do the same with Israel — that is, to make clear that there is a huge difference between disliking the policies of the Prime Minister of Israel and hating Israel itself.”
He continued, “If you wouldn't equate criticism of the President with hating America, there is no reason — and indeed it is wrong and wicked — to do so with regard to Israel.”
Ironically, Israel itself is starting to turn on Trump, with many Israelis believing that his tentative settlement with Iran will leave the nation as powerful as before and just as capable of attacking Israel directly or through proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah. As restaurateur Daniel Dorfmann, an Israeli in the town of Metulla which is close to the Lebanon border, angrily told The Guardian, “Everyone was very pleased with the war [against Iran] but the US agreement is really not good for Israel … It’s a big mistake.”
While Carlson is officially leaving the Republican Party over Israel, this is not his first deviation from the GOP on policy matters. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Carlson challenged Republicans for seeming to prioritize capital over labor.
“My intention in writing it was to remind the Republican Party that these are now issues of concern for you, because for a hundred years you represented capital over and against labor,” Carlson told Salon at the time regarding an editorial he composed on the need for the party to be more pro-labor. “I mean that’s kind of the purpose of the Republican Party. They used to represent the investor class, right? So the conventional criticisms of the Republicans as the party of management were 100 percent true, obviously.”
He added, “What I wanted to remind Republican lawmakers was that it’s no longer true, that’s not your constituency anymore. You have a new constituency and it’s people who are primarily wage earners and primarily — not low income, but lower income.”
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LAURA LOOMER CALLS FOR THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO INVESTIGATE TUCKER CARLSON AND CANDACE OWENS
06/15/26
https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-loomer/laura-loomer-calls-trump-administration-investigate-tucker-carlson-and-candace-owens)
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In an interview with NBC News in January 2026, Donald Trump said: “Maga is me. Maga loves everything I do.” Until recently, this statement was true. But over the past several months, cracks have begun to appear in the loyalty of the US president’s “Make America Great Again” base.
Two of the movement’s most prominent figures – former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson – have voiced their discontent with the leader they previously lavished with unconditional support.
Greene’s falling out with Trump was rooted in her advocacy for releasing the investigative files related to late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But it also centred on her discomfort with US support for Israel and a sense that Trump had abandoned his “America first” campaign promises.
In December 2025, Greene told CNN that “the dam is breaking” on Trump’s grip over the Republican party. As an example, she pointed to the 13 Republicans who voted with Democrats that month to overturn an executive order that allowed Trump to fire federal employees. Greene resigned from the House of Representatives in January.
Carlson’s more recent break with Trump was equally dramatic. “I don’t hate Trump,” he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview released on April 25. “I hate this war [in Iran] and the direction this US government is taking.” Carlson went so far as to apologise to the public for “misleading” them into voting for Trump in 2024.
In a week when an attempt to assassinate Trump is once again headline news, we are reminded of Carlson’s take on a previous attempt on the US president’s life in 2024. Carlson had invoked “divine intervention” to explain Trump’s survival of that attempt, declaring “something bigger is going on here”.
At that point, the president had religious-right elites firmly on his side. This fervour has dissipated in recent times. But are Greene and Carlson representative of a broader problem for the Maga movement, or are they just a pair of high-profile defections and nothing more?
Putting ‘America first’
The grievances and concerns outlined by Greene and Carlson are real. When Trump ran for president in 2016, he broke with Republican orthodoxy by denouncing the Iraq war as a catastrophic mistake. He promised to extract the US from costly foreign wars and put America ahead of global policing commitments.
His first-term record was somewhat mixed, but the key takeaway was that no new major wars were initiated. On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump repeated these earlier pledges. He said he would end the Ukraine war within 24 hours and keep the US out of new conflicts. Trump has clearly reneged on these commitments.
The Iran war is broadly unpopular with the US electorate. Polls show that more people are against the war than support it. On average, 15% more people oppose than back it, and in some recent surveys that gap is even bigger, with up to 27% more people against than in favour. About 75% of US adults also now describe the economy, which is being affected by higher prices, as “very” or “somewhat” poor.
This dissatisfaction is visible among Republicans voters, though probably not to an extent that suggests support for Trump is in danger of imminent collapse. Recent polling by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicates that, while dropping by 13 percentage points compared to a year ago, 38% of Republican voters still “strongly” approve of Trump’s presidency.
At the same time, there are some signs that Trump’s core Maga base remains largely steadfast in its support, despite the very vocal dissent from some. The same poll found that roughly 90% of Americans who self-identify as “Maga Republicans” approve of Trump’s overall job performance. Another survey by NBC suggests that 87% of these people currently approve of his handling of the war in Iran.
While these surveys are unlikely to capture the full range of sentiment within the Maga movement, they still indicate that Trump retains a solid core of support from members of this group. However, if the conflict drags on and economic pain deepens, the room for elite dissatisfaction to percolate down to the base is likely to widen.
Presidential ambitions
There may be other reasons explaining why Carlson, in particular, has broken with Trump. As Jason Zengerle, a journalist at the New Yorker magazine and the author of a biography of Carlson, put it recently when discussing Carlson’s reversal on Trump: “He’s also sort of making a political move.” Various media outlets have suggested that Carlson may be eyeing a 2028 presidential run.
Some commentators, including White House counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, have drawn parallels between Carlson and Pat Buchanan. In the 1990s, Buchanan challenged President George H.W. Bush over the Gulf war and reshaped the Republican party’s ideological trajectory even without winning its presidential nomination.
Greene has floated Carlson for president. In a social media post in March, she wrote: “I SUPPORT TUCKER. Trump doesn’t even know what Maga is anymore.” Carlson, for his part, has publicly dismissed a presidential bid.
But this rebranding exercise, of attempting to seize the Maga label from Trump and attach it to a new vessel, is a significant development. It suggests that “America first” is no longer exclusively synonymous with one figure.
The looming question is whether this seed of elite discontent can grow into something organisationally meaningful before 2028, when Americans elect their next president.
Clodagh Harrington, Lecturer in American Politics, University College Cork
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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RWW
04/30/2026
by
- Hafiz Rashid @ The New Republic: Republicans Begin Their Power Grab After Voting Rights Act Ruling
Republicans nationwide are beginning the push to redraw congressional maps—and erase Black representation.
- Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: ‘When did it come out?’ Trump remains disengaged as events unfold around him
Too often, the president sounds like someone who just wandered into the Oval Office, blissfully unaware of current events.
- Michael Luciano @ Mediaite: Tucker Carlson Burns It Down, Tells Trump, ‘You Have Failed’
Tucker Carlson unloaded on President Donald Trump and the administration, stating flatly, “You have failed.”
- Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: The final report from Trump’s "Anti-Christian Bias" task force reveals... nothing
The supposed evidence of Christian persecution by Democrats is nothing but a pile of petty grievances.
- Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: A Kamikaze Mission to Finally Stop Candace Owens
The right’s anti-Candace coalition is finally here.
- Laura Esposito @ The Daily Beast: ‘Sugar Baby’ DHS Official Accused Trump Aide With ‘Nazi Streak’ of Sexual Harassment
She was pushed out. He got a promotion.
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mma
Fox Business guests ridicule the network’s fantasy of 4-5% economic growth this year: “Dream on”
04/10/26 2:00 PM EDT
Benny Johnson: “Netanyahu should be banned from the White House as far as I'm concerned”
04/10/26 12:18 PM EDT
Laura Loomer takes credit for Trump's attacks on Tucker Carlson: “I'm the one who sent the president all your shit, Tucker”
04/10/26
“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander: Trump “has got to be ripped politically, peacefully, legally, from the Oval Office”
04/10/26 11:49 AM EDT
Tim Pool on Trump's post attacking right-wing pundits: “I don't know that this post was necessary. What is to be gained by attacking these individuals?”
04/10/26 11:05 AM EDT
Alex Jones responds to Trump's attack on him: “I will now stand against this new Trump who by the day becomes more demonic, more twisted, and more sick”
04/10/26 11:00 AM EDT
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AN 3 26
Opposition to President Donald Trump’s war on Iran is to be expected from Democrats and others on the left, but according to a popular far-right influencer, conservatives are divided and “deeply furious” over the conflict. And while much of the conservative messaging on social media has been supportive of the war, he claims that doesn’t align with the conservative discussion offline.
“I’ve never seen such a disconnect between the commentary on this site and what I hear in the real world,” posted Matt Walsh, a far-right commentator with over 4 million followers on X. “I’ve talked to dozens of normal conservatives in real life about the Iran war and I haven’t met a single one who’s actually enthusiastically in favor of it.”
He went on to say that while some conservatives he’d spoken with are “warily optimistic,” the rest are “not only opposed but deeply furious.” Many are afraid to express this fury, said Walsh, because they’re worried they’ll “be shouted down by throngs of alleged American conservatives who allegedly have wanted nothing more than for America to go to war with Iran.”
For Trump and the GOP, Walsh predicted, the political fallout could be catastrophic, as he claims to have spoken with many “VERY conservative lifelong Republican voters who are so furious and feel so betrayed that they’re planning to sit out the midterms…People are pissed.”
Walsh isn’t the only far-right media figure to express outrage over the war on Iran and thoughts on how it could impact the November elections.
Tucker Carlson has been an outspoken opponent of the war, notably giving a high-profile interview to ex-US National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who resigned over concerns about the conflict. Megyn Kelly has voiced criticism of the war but stops short of blaming Trump, claiming he was pushed toward it by more hawkish conservatives. And far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes has told his followers to boycott the midterms over the war.
Online personality Candace Owens agreed with a blunt assessment of the matter: “Not only is Trump losing the war, he has also completely forfeited his legacy and base.”
These far-right voices are speaking out as the latest polls show the stark unpopularity of Trump and his war. Over 60 percent of voters say they disapprove of the war, while the president’s approval rating has sunk to a historical low of just 33 percent.
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RWW
Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: Carlson vs. Loomer: LET. THEM. FIGHT.
The prominent right-wingers are going after one another’s money.
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RWW
02/24/2026
by
- Hafiz Rashid @ The New Republic: Trump Team Quietly Drops Case Against Dems in “Illegal Orders” Video
The Washington U.S. Attorney’s office previously failed to get a grand jury indictment of the group.
- Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: As Trump’s election conspiracy theories take an ugly turn, the search for evidence flails
The key detail the administration’s search for voter fraud shares with its search for weaponization: Looking for mirages inevitably fails.
- Colby Hall @ Mediaite: Kash Patel Is Acting Like a Wannabe Influencer, Not an FBI Director
Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, using a government plane to attend a hockey game overseas. Locker room beer chugging. The sitting president on speakerphone. Reports of a girlfriend traveling with a security footprint. Banners bearing President Donald Trump’s image hanging outside the Justice Department building. All while high-profile cases linger, victims seek justice, cartel violence escalates, and a wannabe assassin was killed by authorities at Mar-a-Lago.
- Tessa Stuart @ Rolling Stone: MAGA Lawmakers Call for Republican to Resign Following Release of Disturbing Texts
House Speaker Mike Johnson won’t say whether Rep. Tony Gonzales should step down, as the GOP clings to a slim majority.
- Will Sommer @ **The Bulwark: Why Won’t the White House Cut Tucker Loose?
He makes life miserable for Trump officials and the drama is endless. But he’s still scoring presidential invites.
- Wiktoria Gucia @ The Daily Beast: MAGA Favorite Sentenced for Blowing Campaign Cash on Vegas Trips
The failed GOP candidate embezzled approximately $250,000.
---
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MMA
02/24/26
02/24/26
02/24/26
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an 2 26
President Donald Trump is struggling to contain a civil war within his MAGA movement over the role of far right commentator Tucker Carlson — particularly when it comes to the issue of US support for Israel.
“Ultimately, Carlson’s perseverance in Trump’s orbit is a remarkable testament to his staying power,” wrote Will Sommer of the conservative publication The Bulwark. “Lesser media luminaries would have been pushed to the outskirts of punditry. The question now is how long the alliance between the administration and Carlson can hold.”
With Carlson and other alt-right leaders like commentator Nick Fuentes clashing with pro-Israel Trump supporters like influencer Laura Loomer and The Daily Wire head Ben Shapiro, The Bulwark observed that the MAGA coalition is straining because of its internal tensions.
“With the United States possibly on the verge of war with Iran, Israel’s greatest enemy, you’d think Carlson—a staunch critic of American support for Israel—would be on the outs with the administration,” Sommer wrote. “Instead, on Monday, he was reportedly back in the White House, a month after he visited to have lunch with Trump and attended a meeting with oil company CEOs.”
Carlson has a long history of parting ways with Trump on important issues. In December, Carlson told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper that Trump is wrong to ignore the ongoing issues in the American economy.
“The one thing that doesn't lie is the economy,” Carlson said. “I mean, it's one of these things that Trump just can't lie his way out of or talk his way out of. And that is extremely problematic because when people go to the polls for the midterm elections, which are going to be here before we know it, they're going to be voting on how they feel on that particular day. And the economy is an incredibly emotional feeling.”
Speaking with this author for Salon as far back as 2019, Carlson criticized Trump’s handling of the economy.
“I don’t think the obvious lesson of the 2016 election was you hire Steve Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, you know,” Carlson said. “I can’t just put it into one sentence. As I sort of read through the exit polling in November of 2016, my first thought wasn’t, ‘You know, they really should hire some more Goldman Sachs people to oversee our economy.’ That didn’t flow naturally from the trends I was watching.”
Loomer, a right-wing activist and passionate Trump supporter, recently attacked Carlson’s influence within Trump’s orbit.
“I’m sick of Tucker attacking Trump and then running to the White House to pretend he hasn’t been bashing Trump for years!” Loomer declared on Monday. “I’m so f------ over it!”
She added, “He called the President yesterday and begged him to be put on his schedule.He was manic on the phone, I’m told, completely belligerent begging to come to the White House today.” Loomer went on to call him “Tucker Qatarlson” and a “neo Nazi Islamic agent.”
Also on Monday, Loomer urged on social media for Trump to “condemn” Carlson.
"Everybody needs to be pressuring the White House to issue a statement condemning Tucker Carlson this week," Loomer said. "His efforts to derail the GOP and his nonstop sabotage of President Trump must end."
Another pro-Trump and pro-Israel commentator, Dave Rubin, claimed that Carlson’s presence in the White House shows Trump sees “that Tucker is obviously trying to destroy MAGA and it appears he’s finally had enough . . .”
In a November article published by the Washington Post, journalist/author Jamie Kirchick unpacked Carlson's friendly relationship with Fuentes, noting that it could create an awkward predicament for Trump’s logical successor for president in 2028, Vice President JD Vance.
"Ironically, the politician Carlson is harming most with his antics is the person he wants to succeed Trump: Vice President JD Vance," Kirchick wrote. "Carlson, who praised Vance in his discussion with Fuentes as one of the very few people on the right who shares his foreign policy views, reportedly played a decisive role in convincing Trump to name Vance as his running mate. Vance, who has since employed Carlson's son as his deputy press secretary, invited Carlson to the White House when he guest-hosted the 'Charlie Kirk Show' following the assassination of its eponymous host. Having benefited from Carlson's scorched-earth campaign against 'the neoconservatives,' Vance now appears stuck with Carlson's antisemitic, conspiratorial, anti-American baggage whether he likes it or not."
Kirchick concluded, "Thus far, Vance has done nothing to distance himself from this kind of politics. When Politico exposed racist and antisemitic text messages sent by members of Young Republican clubs last month, the vice president forgivingly characterized the appalling behavior of these 20- and 30-somethings as ‘what kids do.’”
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OMFG ANTI-COMMIE WATERS INGRA HANTY BEFORE SEE BAD TRINITY
MMA
MAGA media demand Trump put down the Minnesota “revolution”
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 01/30/26
A week after Border Patrol officers gunned down nurse Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, MAGA media’s biggest stars are portraying locals who oppose immigration enforcement officers’ brutal tactics as China-backed “revolutionaries” seeking “the complete overthrow of Western civilization” which they are urging President Donald Trump to put down at all costs.
Horrific videos of Pretti’s killing by masked agents of the state whose activities he had been filming spurred a backlash against the Trump administration’s immigration policy, with polls showing eroding support and some Republican officeholders and right-leaning streamers expressing dismay.
Even some commentators on Fox News, which initially plowed ahead in depraved service of the administration’s absurd argument that Pretti was a terrorist threatening the officers’ lives, backed down a bit. After Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade urged the president to send former Fox contributor and White House “border czar” Tom Homan to take control of the situation on Monday, Trump took Kilmeade’s advice, spurring premature media claims of a “pivot.”
But in this tug-of-war over the president’s brainbox, MAGA stars quickly regrouped and urged Trump not to back down, reverting to the language of war that has characterized right-wing media discussions of Minneapolis for weeks. And the tenor of their coverage has only become more disturbing over the course of the week.
Fox host Laura Ingraham, in her opening monologue Thursday night, claimed that the “mobs you've witnessed in Minnesota and in other far-left-wing pockets of America” are composed of “revolutionaries” who “smear and dehumanize as a prelude to the executions.”
Ingraham went on to argue that “behind all this” is “a national network of socialists, communists, and Marxist-Leninists” whose “goal is to destabilize the West and undermine trust in our institutions and eventually dismantle capitalism and replace it with a Marxist communist framework that eliminates private property in favor of state-owned enterprises.”
“So how do you defeat these well-funded, well-organized revolutionaries?” Ingraham asked. She replied to her own question, claiming, “We defeat the revolution by staying the course, by prosecuting criminal conspiracies to impede ICE and also their funding networks, and by reminding Americans that their safety and U.S. sovereignty will not be negotiated away, not now, not ever.”
Video
Citation
From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
Ingraham further argued that the anti-ICE movement has “Chinese fingerprints all over it.”
The following hour, Fox’s Jesse Watters described Minneapolis as “antifa’s new favorite city” and local protesters as an “ICE watch mafia” with its “own socialist supply lines, logistics, and financial benefactors.”
“They're calling Minnesota a testing ground for a domestic revolution,” he added. “This is more than just about immigration. It's about the complete overthrow of Western civilization.”
Democrats want “more Renee Goods and Alex Prettis,” he added. “They think if they can stack enough bodies, Trump's going to back off.”
Video
Citation
From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime
Watters later hosted MAGA streamer Tim Pool, who argued that “the terrifying thing about Minnesota” is not that federal officers keep killing civilians, but that “we're looking at a leftist base in this country that are being radicalized.”
“My concern is that there's, there's a bloodlust” among the protesters “that's not going to be satisfied,” he added.
Watters went on to say that “there's a certain faction of the left that wants the violence” and suggested that the media “has a little bit more responsibility in situations like this to calm things down.”
Then on Sean Hannity’s program, the host likewise denounced what he termed “the well-coordinated, well-funded, quote, resistance to ICE investigations in Minnesota,” which he claimed is engaged in “an attack on our very system.”
He went on to describe Democrats’ “current anti-ICE outrage” as “pure political theater,” adding that “ultimately, they want to dissolve our borders and fundamentally transform a country and the people that they despise.”
Video
Citation
From the January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' Hannity
The vitriol on Fox’s evening shows is somehow less ominous than that coming from right-wing figures off its airways, though.
Tucker Carlson, who hosts one of the nation’s most popular podcasts, argued on Wednesday’s installment that in
, “we are watching the destruction of the social fabric of the government and potentially of the nation.” He explained that the video of Pretti’s killing “represents chaos” and added: “Chaos is worse than illegal immigration. Chaos is worse than police brutality. Chaos is worse than anything. Chaos equals death. The death of people, the death of the weak, the death of countries.”
Carlson
that Minnesota activists “want the chaos,” adding: “This is proof that what you're watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you're watching are the beginnings of a color revolution, of a kind of insurrection against federal authority.” He further claimed that if that revolution is not stopped, the result will be “civil war” and “killing at scale.”
“We have to hold the line,” Steve Bannon likewise argued on Wednesday. “There can be no de-escalation at all. You don't need to bring down the temperature. Raise the temperature. Put them under pressure. They're the ones that are cracking.”
“This is an inflection point,” he added. “You blink now and you're going to blink forever. You bend the knee now, you'll bend the knee forever. If we stand in the breach and say, screw you, we're fighting for the country, right?”
And Nick Fuentes, the increasingly prominent white nationalist streamer, argued that if the “radical intervention” Trump is overseeing does not succeed, “all of white civilization just collapses.”
“You have to put yourself in the position of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the year 2100 and look around at your majority-minority country that looks like South Africa, where it's just trash and graffiti and filth and homeless people and vagabonds and criminals,” Fuentes explained. “And then you have to go back in time to now when we can prevent it. And then think about what you're willing to do to stop this. And then killing a stupid fat lesbian and a male nurse doesn't seem so bad, does it?”
“Do you know what 'Sieg Heil’ even means?” he concluded. “It means ‘hail victory.’ And not to go like full Nazi or something, but there is no substitute for victory. We have to win; they have to lose.”
//
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01/27/26
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MMA
January 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Peter, you wrote a whole book about how China is infiltrating the United States, the silent coup. And this has Chinese fingerprints all over it in my view, and it's not like you're going to have a direct line to the CCP. But given what you've witnessed and the revolutionary goals on the websites of some of these organizations, what's your sense?
PETER SCHWEIZER (GUEST): Yeah, there's no question there's an international component to it and China's involved. There is an organization linked to the CCP in China called the Center for the Study of Marxist Parties in Foreign Countries. And what they do is they track these political activities. And they've been running articles, analyses on their website in China, which is restricted, talking about color revolutions in the United States and how it might happen. They cover groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation. They cover groups like the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, both who are neck deep in this action in Minneapolis and have been involved in many other protests.
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization has pledged its allegiance to the CCP. They have fraternal party ties, which means they're very close. And the political director of that party, Mick Kelly, lives in Minneapolis. He's been investigated in the past by the FBI for possible involvement for direct terrorism. He was never charged. But these are radical groups, same thing with PSL, sympathetic, tied to China. Its members have flown to China. So, this is part of something that China directly encourages, wants to see happening. And they are monitoring the situation in the United States as it relates to all kinds of social unrest like this.
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MMA
Tucker Carlson: “The defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated”
Carlson: “White and non-white benefit alike from systems created by whites because they're more humane, they're more just, they're more fair, and they're more — much more efficient and, and cleaner, obviously”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 01/22/26
Video
Citation
From the January 19, 2026, edition of The Tucker Carlson Show,posted on YouTube
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): I keep going back to this, but I'm just, I am a little bit confused because this is the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated, and I would like to know why. Do you have any guesses?
PETER BRIMELOW (GUEST): As I say, I think, Tucker, I think it derives from emotion rather than any kind of rational calculation. I mean, if you look at what's happened in South Africa, or for that matter, in every big American Black city — that's majority Black. I mean, they can't want it to be able to get into a situation where the water is putrid and nothing works and all that kind of thing. But they do. You know, the purpose of a system is what it does.
CARLSON: That's right.
BRIMELOW: And the purpose of, you know, non-white government is to produce non-white government and non-white results. Unless, of course, you're Chinese. I mean, because Singapore's run Japanese, they're, they're run very efficiently.
CARLSON: They are. It's just interesting that people move here because it's a white country and we —
BRIMELOW: They seem to run it into the ground. Yes.
CARLSON: Well, all of us benefit, white and non-white, benefit alike from systems created by whites because they're more humane, they're more just, they're more fair, and they're more — much more efficient and cleaner, obviously.
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MMA
Laura Loomer advises JD Vance to distance himself from Tucker Carlson
Loomer: Vance “definitely has a Tucker Carlson problem” and has to understand “that a large portion of the MAGA base doesn't like Tucker Carlson”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 01/15/26
Video
Citation
From the January 14, 2026, edition of Loomer Unleashed streamed on Rumble
LAURA LOOMER (HOST): Our country is suffering because, unfortunately, our vice president is friends with Tucker Carlson, and Tucker Carlson has unfettered access to the White House. Right? That's crazy. I mean, it's crazy how you can be a simp for Islam and a simp for Islamic terrorism and then just be friends with the vice president and get to crash the oil executive meeting because the vice president invites you to lunch. Right? That's what's unfortunate.
...
LOOMER: I like JD Vance. I respect JD Vance. I get along with JD Vance, but enough is enough, okay? You know, as somebody who wants to be president of the United States, I would hope, and I would actually expect JD Vance to have the moral clarity to tell Tucker Carlson that he's not allowed to come back to the White House, right? This is the type of moral clarity we expect to see from people who want to be president of the United States, and that's not an attack on JD Vance. But eventually, he has to decide what he cares about more: his friendship with an unhinged, lunatic mouthpiece for Qatar or being president of the United States. Because we all know he wants to run for president in 2028. And that's great, that's fine, right? Go ahead, run for president.
But I need to know, and I think a lot of people want to know if Tucker Carlson's going to be some kind of advisor to him, why he keeps on having Tucker Carlson come to the White House for these lunch dates, whatever they are. I don't know. Blaming it on Donald Trump, saying that it's Donald Trump meeting with Tucker Carlson. It's not. It's the vice president. I got the White House to confirm that to me as well. So, definitely has a Tucker Carlson problem. And look, he can run for president. That's fine. You know, we have primaries in this country. It's great. We're gonna have a primary, JD Vance is gonna run for president. Okay, great. But, you know, you want to run for president, you have to also understand that a large portion of the MAGA base doesn't like Tucker Carlson. And we don't wanna see Tucker Carlson on the campaign trail. We definitely don't wanna see Tucker Qatarlson in the White House.
//
01/15/26
12/19/25 4:53 PM EST
12/19/25
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AN 12 25
After Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10, his widow, Erika Kirk, became the organization's new leader. Many MAGA Republicans were quick to blame liberals, progressives and Democrats for the murder — even though countless Democrats, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) to former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, wholeheartedly condemned it. But MAGA figures also attacked each other.
In an article published on December 15, Salon's Amanda Marcotte examines the feud between Erika Kirk and far-right MAGA podcaster Candace Owens.
"The swift anointing of Charlie Kirk's widow Erika as the new head of TPUSA did nothing to prevent the explosion of infighting that has been rapidly consuming the world of online MAGA media in the months since her husband's killing," Marcotte explains. "If anything, it's backfired. As I predicted, (Erika) Kirk is turning out to be a weak and ineffectual leader, persuading even more people in the very online right that now is their moment to get ahead in a crowded field. The rhetorical slugfest is growing increasingly ugly to watch. But in the process, MAGA is revealing what is likely the movement's biggest weakness: It's dominated by hustlers who are more interested in making money and growing their brand than they are in MAGA as a political project."
Owens is a major conspiracy theorist, and Marcotte notes that she has been "generating a seemingly endless number of conspiracy theories" about Kirk's death.
"Owens' rhetoric about Erika Kirk has grown increasingly personal," the Salon journalist observes. "Most shockingly, she keeps implying Kirk was involved in her husband's murder, and accusing her of defrauding TPUSA donors. Last week, Owens released a video saying Kirk doesn't have the strength to lead TPUSA, which follows pointed comments she made in early December about how 'in love' Charlie Kirk had been with a woman she says he dated before meeting his wife. The success Owens is having with this behavior is causing a lot of rifts."
Marcotte continues, "Tucker Carlson, who has long believed the future of MAGA is in getting ever-nuttier, has sided with Owens, going on the popular show hosted by Theo Von to insinuate the FBI is lying about who killed Charlie Kirk…. Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool, who typically loves spreading disinformation, turned on Owens, calling her a 'degenerate C-word' and an 'evil scumbag.' Even white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who hated Kirk when he was alive, has claimed he wants to 'expose' Owens, and has unleashed racist and misogynist abuse at her."
Marcotte argues that the "blizzard of conspiracy theories pushed by Owens and Carlson" has "destroyed the ability of GOP leaders to exploit Kirk's death in the manner they had intended."
"Owens is a classic case of a Frankenstein's monster, turning on the very people who created her," Marcotte writes. "Although it's a shame to see so many Americans continue to follow her down the rabbit hole, if it's causing the MAGA movement to turn on each other, then that’s a result all democracy-lovers can cheer."
*Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.
===
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12/08/2025 rww
by
- Sean James @ Mediaite: Nick Fuentes Tells Piers Morgan He’s ‘Tired of Pretending’ Hitler Wasn’t ‘Really F*cking Cool’
White nationalist Nick Fuentes has no regrets calling Adolf Hitler “really f*cking cool” — and said he is “tired of pretending” the Nazi dictator wasn’t.
- Tessa Stuart @ Rolling Stone: The War Over Nick Fuentes Is Over. He Won
The right tore itself apart over Tucker Carlson’s interview with the white nationalist. Trump shrugged. Now he's everywhere.
- Ian Ward @ Politico Magazine: What I Learned Discussing Israel with Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene
Not so long ago, intra-MAGA debates over Israel were confined to subterranean meeting rooms, where conservative conference attendees hash out internecine disagreements.
- Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: MAGA Straight Up Imploded This Weekend—And It’s Beyond Messy
Tucker Carlson, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Benny Johnson are just more proof that the MAGA base is fraying at the seams.
The online MAGA-verse were at each other’s throats more than usual this weekend, as right-wing commentators Benny Johnson, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Tucker Carlson were all points of controversy.
The first tiff started on Saturday, when Yiannopoulos—who has made a name for himself as an openly gay far-right bigot—accused multiple conservative influencers like Johnson and Charlie Kirk of being closeted gay men on Tim Pool’s podcast with swindler and former MAGA Representative George Santos, who is also gay.
“One of the most distinctive things about the right-wing in this country is its homosexual overtones. Benny Johnson posts pictures of his children every two days—it’s weird. And everybody knows what went on with Benny Johnson in those lobbies and those hotel rooms at SAS. Everybody knows,” said Yiannopoulos.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Santos replied.
“Men, younger men. Not underage, at least I don’t know that. His wife was crying drunk in the lobby three SAS’s in a row about how her husband was upstairs with boys,” Yiannopoulos claimed. “Go ask her.”
“Come on, Milo, aren’t you ever scared of getting sued?” Santos asked.
Yiannopoulos insisted he was telling the truth, and that he’d never been sued.
On Sunday, Johnson threatened to sue him.
“I am duty bound to take action to protect my family against those who maliciously defame and attack us. More to come on that soon,” he wrote. “Pray for healing for some really sick and delusional people. Jesus is about redemption. The legal system is about justice. Happy Sunday.”
Yiannopoulos responded in a message addressed to Johnson and his wife, Kate:
“I know more about defamation than any lawyer you will hire. Benny is a public figure. Malice is a nonstarter. I have receipts, and the truth is a total defense against any claim of defamation or libel. Do you want to lose a defamation case to MILO YIANNOPOULOS OF ALL PEOPLE about whether or not you are gay? Do you want to even fight one? The people who have poured money into making you a big deal are about to lose their entire investment,” he ranted.
“I know more about your marriage than you think I do,” he continued, “and I have evidence, and I have witnesses. I know who to subpoena. I know what questions to ask. About nocturnal liaisons dangereuses with chaps in assless chaps and about being caught in flagrante delicto at conferences attended by students, some of whom may have been under 18 (I guess we’ll find out!).”
Yiannopoulos also claimed that Turning Point USA may have faked Charlie Kirk’s death.
Meanwhile, other far-righters—mostly Islamophobes and Zionists—were at pundit Tucker Carlson’s throat for his purchase of a property in Qatar.
“Speaking on stage at the Doha Forum in Qatar, Tucker Carlson told Qatar’s Prime Minister Al Thani that he is buying a place in Qatar this week because he’s an ‘American”; and he will live and go wherever he wants,” MAGA crank Laura Loomer posted on Sunday. “Qatar is the financier of the Muslim Brotherhood and they continue to allow HAMAS officials to live in Doha, where Tucker now wants to buy a place to live.”
“Let me explain the joke: Qatar is a bloodthirsty, terror-supporting slave state, and Tucker Carlson is rubbing it in your face that he’s an unregistered foreign agent for them,” another account wrote.
It’s clear that Trump’s base is fraying at the seams. From those questioning the validity of Trump’s “America First” and our fealty to Israel, like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson, to those like Yiannopoulos spreading conspiracy theories only Candace Owens would touch, it’s clear that whatever base of hatred Trump still has is fractured.
:{December 8, 2025/
- Aymann Ismail @ Slate: The Passion of Scott Presler
A rising MAGA star is desperate to leave his past behind. That might be impossible now.
- Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley @ NBC News: ICE has arrested nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records, data shows
More than a third of the roughly 220,000 people arrested by ICE officers in the first nine months of the Trump administration had no criminal histories, according to new data.
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RWW
12/02/2025
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- Zack Beauchamp @ Vox: The alt-right won
Trump’s call to ban “Third World” immigration proves it.
- Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: Trump Calls Ilhan Omar “Garbage” as His Team Breaks Out in Applause
Donald Trump went on a particularly racist tirade about the Democratic representative. And his entire Cabinet enjoyed it.
- Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott @ Wired: DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now
Contrary to popular reports, DOGE has “burrowed into the agencies like ticks,” government sources tell WIRED.
- Isaac Schorr @ Mediaite: Highbrow Conservative Organization Had Students Dine With Alex Jones
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a highbrow educational organization for conservative students with a long history of intellectual activism, invited students to a dinner with Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones this past spring that its president, Johnny Burtka, described as being “unforgettable.”
- Brian Kaylor @ Public Witness: Pentagon Preachers Proclaim a Lord of War
The most significant way Hegseth’s establishing his faith is with monthly Christian prayer services held at the Pentagon during work hours. Far from interfaith events, the gatherings have been sectarian and evangelistic. And in a hierarchical structure like the military, when the Secretary of War invites people to come to an event and speaks during it, such an invite might not seem very voluntary.
- Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: Here Come the Nick Fuentes Clones.
Given Fuentes’s popularity, it was probably only a matter of time before an outlet asked itself: Rather than tying ourselves into knots about this, what if we instead just got our own Nick Fuentes?
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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a highbrow educational organization for conservative students with a long history of intellectual activism, invited students to a dinner withTucker Carlson and Alex Jones this past spring that its president, Johnny Burtka, described as being “unforgettable.”
According to a new report about the organization’s transformation under Burtka’s leadership from The Dispatch’sJohn McCormack and Michael Warren, ISI invited eight college students to an “exclusive retreat and dinner with Tucker Carlson” at Carlson’s home in southern Florida.
From McCormack and Warren’s story:
Founded nearly 75 years ago, ISI is a prominent conservative collegiate intellectual institution in the United States. ISI also runs the Collegiate Network, a collection of alternative conservative newspapers on college campuses across the country, and the eight student journalists had been selected by ISI to attend the retreat and dinner because their campus newspapers were top-performing publications. After a Journalism 101 session at the Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota, the students filed into a shuttle for a 90-minute trip to Carlson’s home on Gasparilla Island, where Carlson dispensed career advice.
“Thanks to @TuckerCarlson for joining three generations of @amconmag editors/executive directors for a dinner with campus journalists from @ISI’s @collegiatenet,” ISI President Johnny Burtka posted on Twitter alongside a photo of himself, Carlson, then-Collegiate Network Executive DirectorDan McCarthy, and The American Conservative editorCurt Mills. “It was an unforgettable evening that our students will cherish for years to come.”
One person left out of Burtka’s photo was Carlson’s special guest at the dinner that night: Alex Jones, who appeared on Carlson’s podcast that aired the next day, April 9.
ISI’s ties to Carlson — and through him, Jones — are especially notable given the recent blow-up at The Heritage Foundation over its president’s attacks on critics of Carlson, who recently conducted a friendly, softball interview with white nationalist leader Nick Fuentes.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” remarked Chris Long, one of Burtka’s predecessors, after being told about the meal with Jones.
Per McCormack and Warren’s reporting, Burtka also blacklisted conservative writer Kevin Williamson from ISI events over ideological difference, and promoted Curtis Yarvin, an explicitly authoritarian political thinker who has admitted to not being “allergic” to white nationalism.
Long and former ISI board chairman Thomas Lynch resigned from the board after a failed attempt at ousting Burtka last month.
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11/20/2025
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When Tucker Carlson conducted a softball interview with Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic,Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist Nick Fuentes last month, a collateral controversy erupted when Heritage Foundation's MAGA president Kevin Roberts rushed to release a video defending Carlson and insisting that conservatives should not be trying to "cancel" Carlson or Fuentes.
As a result of Roberts' video, the Heritage Foundation quickly found itself wracked by conflict as staff revolted, allies cut ties, and board members resigned. The person responsible for the whole debacle, according to reports, was Heritage's chief of staff Ryan Neuhaus, who was demoted as a result and eventually resigned from the organization entirely.
On Tuesday, Neuhaus appeared on Tim Pool's podcast, where he defended Roberts' and the Heritage Foundation's initial response to the Carlson/Fuentes interview.
"I don't think I need to explain anything for Dr. Roberts," Neuhaus asserted. "I think he's a good man. I don't think he's necessarily apologized for the statement. I think he stood by the fact that we should not engage in cancel culture."
"There are people behind the scenes that are trying to do that, that are trying to tell people who you can and cannot platform, and trying to police speech," he continued. "Maybe that post-World War II liberalism sentiment prevails in some circles, but those of us who are actually conservatives and are trying to conserve the ideals of the American founding, one of those is primarily free speech."
"When there's bad ideas, you hash them out and you point out what's bad about them and then you point out what's good and you redirect people towards what's correct," he continued. "I think President Trump put that in his own way the other night. President Trump said it himself, 'Why would I tell Tucker Carlson who he can or can't have on a show?' Ironically enough, [if] you want to talk about who's on people's shows; nobody was freaking out when Patrick Bet-David had Nick Fuentes on his show a month before. That doesn't mean that everyone's endorsing Nick Fuentes's idea."
When co-host Elaad Eliahu compared Carlson's interview with Fuentes, which was a friendly chat seemingly aimed at whitewashing Fuentes' radicalism, to the hostile and contentious interview Carlson conducted with Sen. Ted Cruz earlier this year, Neuhaus dismissed the concern by insisting that "Ted Cruz is a presidential candidate" whereas with Fuentes, "Carlson [was] interviewing some random internet guy with an internet following."
"There's no reason to make excuses or arguments for why Tucker did what he did or didn't do," Neuhaus said. "All of that's up to Tucker. And Tucker, at the end of the day, it's his show. How he performs it and how he does it; either his viewership will decline or it will increase based upon what he does and who am I—some random guy in America—to be like, 'Tucker, don't do that'? He's not going to care what I think and he doesn't need to care what I think."
When Eliahu wonder if "the MAGA coalition is sustainable" given all the infighting that is taking place, Neuhaus issued a dire warning.
"I think it has to be," he said. "I think if not, then you lose 2028 and you go to the gulags."
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11/17/2025
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- Chris Cameron @ The New York Times: Trump Defends Tucker Carlson After Nick Fuentes Interview
President Trump defended Mr. Carlson’s friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, an openly antisemitic white supremacist. Hours later, Mr. Fuentes wrote “Thank you Mr. President!”
- Jack Revell @ The Daily Beast: Trump, 79, Crashes Wedding to Ramble About Heaven
The president made himself the guest of honor at a Mar-a-Lago wedding.
- The Throckmorton Initiative: Tucker Carlson and Eric Metaxas Fight Over Bonhoeffer
There is so much infighting right now among MAGA types that I can’t really keep up. One battle that caught my eye is a fight over Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Most of what is being said is wrong in one way or another, hence I want to rehearse some important points about the German theologian who was murdered by the Nazis.
- Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig @ MS Now: Kash Patel’s girlfriend being protected by FBI SWAT agents as security perk
Agents on a detail with the country singer would presumably be unable to respond or delayed in responding to other incidents, according to sources.
- Cheyanne M. Daniels @ ProPublica: Heritage board member resigns over organization's defense of Tucker Carlson
Robert P. George said he and the foundation’s president were at an “impasse.”
- Zack Beauchamp @ Vox: Inside the war tearing the Heritage Foundation and the American right apart
A Heritage insider alleging “openly misogynistic and racist” conduct shines a light on the right’s inner workings.
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Fox News host Mark Levin lashes out at supporters of “Fuentes and Bannon and Alex Jones and Tucker”
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11/06/2025
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- Andrew Kaczynski and Steve Contorno @ CNN: Fierce backlash within GOP after Tucker Carlson gives White nationalist Nick Fuentes a platform
Nick Fuentes, the well-known White nationalist and Holocaust denier, has ignited a civil war within the Republican Party — and inside one of Washington’s most prominent conservative think tanks.
- Clyde McGrady @ The New York Times: Nick Fuentes’s Rise Puts MAGA Movement in a ‘Time of Choosing’
After Mr. Fuentes’s interview with Tucker Carlson, Republicans are considering just how far his views are from the nationalism embraced by President Trump’s followers.
- James Kirchick @ The New York Times: How Tucker Carlson instigated an inevitable war within MAGA
Finally, the battle lines are being drawn as conservatives grapple over a bigotry in their midst.
- Jane Lee, Isabella Corrao, Harrison Ray and Rob Savillo @ Media Matters: Fox News demanded that presidents know whom they pardoned. Then Trump said he didn’t know the crypto tycoon he pardoned.
Fox News has spent 1 hour and 23 minutes discussing Biden’s use of the autopen while airing only 3 minutes of coverage on Trump's pardon of founder of Binance. Trump claimed on 60 Minutes that he knew “nothing about” the pardon.
- Ryan J. Reilly @ NBC News: Jury acquits D.C. 'sandwich guy' charged with chucking a sub at a federal agent
Sean Dunn faced a single misdemeanor after federal grand jurors refused to indict him on the felony charge sought by prosecutors.
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11/05/2025
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In the wake of Tucker Carlson's softball interview with Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic,Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a controversy erupted when Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts came rushing to Carlson's defense while insisting that nobody on the right should be trying to "cancel" Fuentes.
Now Roberts is himself facing criticism for his defense of Carlson and, seemingly by extension, Fuentes. While Roberts is now trying to dodamage control, Fuentes himself is gloating, saying on his program last night that Roberts' position shows that those who follow Fuentes and share his views, known as groypers, are welcome at Heritage.
"Heritage Foundation is an institution," Fuentes said. "If an institution says, 'Tucker Carlson fans welcome,' then that means that institution becomes a safe harbor and a springboard for people that are sympathetic to me and Tucker. At this point, what's the difference? It's a distinction without a difference. People that are sympathetic to us will go and they will work there as interns, as employees, as communications people, whatever, and they'll get a resume, they'll get a job, and then they'll go and work in other places. They'll work in the Trump administration, they'll work in Congress, they'll work in policy positions. And all of a sudden, you have people that agree with Tucker and agree with me, or agree with Tucker's decision to talk to me, working in the corridors of power. And who knows, in 10 or 20 years, maybe at the highest levels."
"What this signifies is that Heritage, the accreditation institution, the brain, the priestly class that promulgates the Republican dogma, if that institution says that groyperism is up for debate—it's on the table, it's not canceled, we should talk about the ideas, and we should defend the people that defend the groypers or talk to the groypers—it signifies that, one, that place is a safe harbor," Fuentes celebrated. "So a groyper could go to work at Heritage and maybe feel welcome and comfortable and he won't be fired. And you might have a groyper at Heritage who is going to be writing a policy paper about, who knows, foreign policy, education, immigration. They might be considered like an expert and maybe they'll go on to be a legislative director for a senator, and they might be writing laws for the U.S. government. It's conceivable."
"If the president of Heritage says, 'Tucker is in the Big Tent,' then that means that Tucker and Nick Fuentes sympathizers are allowed to be employed at Heritage," Fuentes continued. "And thus, they might be in the position to determine the dogma. They can write the doctrine."
"Congratulations, guys, we have penetrated the outer wall," Fuentes gloated. "The outer wall has crumbled."
"We won the argument," Fuentes declared. "We beat censorship. We beat cancel culture. Our ideas are mainstream. We won the debate. We won the hearts and minds of millions of young men, and they're everywhere. Thirty to forty percent of the White House are groypers. You lost! Wilt Chamberlain, [Ben] Shapiro, Mark Levin, you lost. You lost the conversation. We won, and now we're taking it to the next level. We graduated. Congratulations, everybody."
Fuentes said that he had served as a "human battering ram" to "blow the door open" to the conservative political establishment and now groypers must rush in through the breach and take over those establishments.
"What happens next, now that we're inside the building?" Fuentes asked, rhetorically. "Now we got to lock the shit down."
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RWW
11/05/2025
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- Edith Olmsted @ The New Republic: Trump Melts Down as Republicans Suffer Massive Losses Everywhere
Donald Trump posted his way through his party’s humiliating losses.
- The Free Beacon: Heritage Foundation President Apologizes to Staff for Video Refusal to Cancel Tucker Carlson and Throws Shade at Former Chief of Staff
'I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop,' Kevin Roberts told employees at an all-staff meeting on Wednesday.
- Ben Lorber @ The Nation: Nick Fuentes Has Officially Breached the MAGA Gates
How the right’s crisis over US support for Israel has provided the white nationalist with the opening he needs to be welcomed into the MAGA fold.
- Media Matters: Mark Levin: on “grifters” like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Steve Bannon: “If you're a racist and a bigot and you don't believe in equality, your party will pay the price, and it should”
Levin: “I'm fighting like hell against the Tucker Carlsons and the Fuenteses and the Bannons and the others who are myopic, who — they're dancing with Hitler and Stalin and bigots and racists and segregationists."
- Jordain Carney and Jennifer Scholtes @ Politico: GOP senators hold firm on filibuster after Trump’s hard sell
“I’d never vote to nuke the filibuster,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters.
- Isaac Schorr @ Mediaite: Nancy Mace Completely Loses It After She’s Called Out by Both of Her Home State GOP Senators Over Airport Fiasco
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) completely lost it on Tuesday night after Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) both threw her under the bus over the recent incident at Charleston International Airport bedeviling her gubernatorial campaign.
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National Review Senior writer Noah Rothman blasted Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ embrace of MAGA influencer Tucker Carlson, and the alternative media host’s “friendly interview with avowed racist Nick Fuentes.”
After Carlson posted his interview with Fuentes Monday, conservatives urged the foundation to distance itself from Carlson due to Fuentes’s being the founder of a group of internet trolls that praise Hitler and white Christian nationalism.
But that’s not what Roberts did, said Rothman.
“My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always,” Roberts said instead. “When it serves the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”
Rothman called this a “strawman — and a familiar one, at that.”
“It gets a beating whenever rank Jew hatred encounters even the mildest dissent, allowing purveyors of the world’s oldest hate to retreat into a more defensible posture,” Rothman argued. “‘We were only critiquing the geopolitical entity of Israel, and your obsession with one of many nation-states marks YOU as the monomaniac here!’ The notion that those who object to anti-Jewish slurs insist upon ‘reflexive’ — read, thoughtless and tribalistic — support for the Israeli government’s every act is false.”
Additionally, said Rothman, Israel’s military policies did not inspire Roberts’s statement. It was “Carlson’s generous efforts to elevate the profile of an unapologetic racist and antisemite” that is the issue to which Roberts is responding.
Equally cowardly is Roberts’ attempt to “evade direct engagement with the subject he pretended to address” by swearing off “cancelling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians,” said Rothman.
“I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But cancelling him is not the answer either,” Roberts argued. “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas in debate.”
Only there was no disagreement with Fuentes by Carson.
“This, too, is preposterous,” Rothman said. “… Carlson conspicuously declined to challenge Fuentes’s ideas on any substantive level,” as Carson has happily done for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“As we wrote, amid the rise of right-wing antisemitism, it is ‘a time for choosing.’ This video suggests Roberts is making his choice,” said Rothman.
Read the National Review article at this link.
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Tucker Carlson’s Softball Interview is the Latest Stop on the Nick Fuentes P.R. Tour
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10/29/2025
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Podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted more than two hours of his online show Monday night to soft-pedaling the extremism of the unapologetically racist, misogynist, antisemitic, and anti-democracy online personality Nick Fuentes.
Carlson’s friendly interview was the latest and biggest stop in a recent string of right-wing podcast appearances with hosts that have allowed Fuentes to whitewash his well-documented bigotry and extremism—thus furthering Fuentes’ stated strategy of pushing the Overton window and the entire conservative movement far to the right.
Echoing other hosts’ justification for platforming Fuentes, Carlson claimed that his goal was to let his audience hear for themselves what Fuentes thinks. The audience got to hear Fuentes claim, “I’m not one of those haters,” but they didn’t learn why that statement is so wildly at odds with Fuentes’ long and well-documented record.
Listeners who made it through the entire interview did get to hear Fuentes express his contempt for women and his theories about how young men are being ruined by marijuana, feminism, and pornography. (On that front, Carlson and Fuentes agreed that porn is making “a lot of people” gay and trans.)
The two commiserated at length over what they see as their mistreatment by the Republican establishment over their criticism of Israel. They apologized for each having previously accused the other of being a fed. Carlson suggested that the way Fuentes talks about American Jews and Jewishness itself as a problem made it easier for their critics to dismiss all of them as antisemites.
But, shamefully, Carlson never raised any of the most viciously and sometimes violently antisemitic statements Fuentes has made—like saying Jews should not be allowed to hold public office—or his frequently expressed admiration for the genocidal Adolf Hitler. Fuentes even gave him an opening when he described the Hitler-loving Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) as one of his two heroes—the other being Trump.
Carlson never asked about Fuentes’ own description of “what it would like to build a society based on our distinct worldview” – in which contraception, fornication, homosexuality, and pornography are illegal and women can’t go to school, be part of the workplace, or vote, and are burned at the stake for being witches.
Carlson couldn’t even be bothered to follow up when Fuentes revealed his soft spot for dictatorship in this country. Fuentes said he could remember the date of a particular incident because it happened on Josef Stalin’s birthday, which he said is “an important date to me.”
Fuentes described himself as a fan and admirer of Stalin, an extraordinarily brutal dictator responsible for systematic suppression of freedom and for millions of deaths. Carlson seemed surprised by Fuentes stanning for Stalin, and said, “We’ll circle back to that,” but he never did, and thus never explored Fuentes’ clearly expressed desire to replace American democracy with a fascist totalitarian white Christian nationalist dictatorship.
You’d think that would be a worthwhile topic for an interview supposedly designed to let people hear what Fuentes thinks.
Fuentes’s authoritarian impulses were revealed once again when the two talked about the increasing tensions over the Trump administration’s violent attacks on immigrants in Chicago and the growing public resistance to them.
“I see all the ingredients of, like, a low-boil civil conflict, full-blown civil war, and I’m not that guy, but I see all the ingredients there for that to happen,” Fuentes said. Carlson agreed, saying “I do, too.”
Carlson asked how Fuentes would handle things if he were president. “They have to crush the other side,” Fuentes said, adding that it was necessary to “utterly confront” the left “and defeat them and remove hope from the equation.” If you do anything less than that, he said, you’re simply antagonizing and energizing the other side. “That’s right,” Carlson agreed.
“If I were Trump, I would say, ‘Screw 200 National Guard. Arrest the mayor of Chicago. Arrest the governor. Shut it down. Make it clear … Bring in the troops and say the federal government is supreme. The immigration law is the law of the land. If you’re not on board with that you’re going to jail.”
Carlson’s chummy interview with Fuentes has generated some criticism from right-wing pundits.
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MMA
10 28 25
Tucker Carlson’s friendly sitdown with Nick Fuentes is drawing harsh criticism from elements of the right, but it seems utterly inevitable given the former Fox host’s trajectory over the last decade.
Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer and Holocaust denier who just weeks ago called for the expulsion of American Jews and Muslims, was once verboten in GOP circles. But in recent months he has become increasingly prominent, drawing millions of views in a series of interviews on right-wing podcasts.
On Monday, he scored his biggest platform yet with an appearance on Carlson’s show, which has one of the largest audiences among news podcasts. Over the course of their two-plus-hour conversation, Carlson let Fuentes retell his origin story in a manner that soft-peddled his bigotry; the pair found common ground over their shared disdain for Christian Zionists and right-wing Jews, and their contempt for liberal women and support for patriarchy; they buried the hatchet over each previously believing that the other was “a fed”; and they agreed to disagree over Fuentes’ tendency to attack Carlson’s allies.
In short, it was a massive win for Fuentes — and one that everyone should have seen coming. Carlson, who is a close ally of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, has spent years drawing similarly extreme and noxious individuals into the Republican tent and bringing their views closer to the mainstream.
Carlson is the epitome of the GOP’s country-club class: His father was a political appointee in the Reagan and Bush administrations, his stepmother an heiress to the Swanson foods fortune, and he spent decades as a magazine journalist and a host and commentator on PBS, CNN, MSNBC, and finally Fox News. But in late 2016, he began drawing a following among the most bigoted corners of the online right, drawing praise from the likes of former Klansman David Duke.
White supremacists realized early in Carlson’s rise — and were happy to say publicly — that Carlson was, in the words of the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, “literally our greatest ally,” someone willing and capable of taking their talking points from far-right internet fever swamps to Fox’s huge national audience.
Over the next several years, Carlson helped turn far-right conspiracy theories like the great replacement into right-wing dogma while running cover for white nationalist explosions like the 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia. And after leaving Fox and striking out on his own he became even more openly radical, promoting Hitler apologia and explicit antisemitism.
And Carlson hasn’t just brought extreme ideas into the GOP — he’s often sought to sanitize the once-fringe elements of the right. In effect, he has turned himself into a single degree of separation between the White House and people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and false flag aficionado Alex Jones — and now, Fuentes.
The unfortunate reality is that the party that turns Carlson into a kingmaker can’t possibly maintain a cordon against even the most extreme and bigoted figures. And that means the future of the GOP — and, perhaps, the future for American Jews — is grim.
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10/02/25 1:29 PM EDT
01/05/17 12:58 PM EST
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:{Aug. 10, 2025,
By Matt Gertz, senior fellow for Media Matters for America
Fox News hosts elevated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help return President Donald Trump to the White House. They then greased the skids for Kennedy’s confirmation as secretary of health and human services. But as he works to demolish American health care research, they are nowhere to be found.
Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic who once described Covid-19 shots as “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” announced on Tuesday that he is terminating nearly $500 million in federal contracts supporting the development of next-generation vaccines and other treatments based on mRNA technology. “After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses,” he said in a video posted online.
Before the pandemic, Kennedy was not a natural fit for the Fox audience.
But Kennedy’s announcement drew harsh criticism from infectious disease experts and other scientists. They warned that the cuts could stall treatments for everything from respiratory illnesses to cancer, leave the nation more exposed to pandemics, undermine public trust in vaccines and threaten U.S. global leadership in medical advances.
While Kennedy’s announcement was widely discussed on MSNBC and CNN, as well as by national broadcast, print and digital outlets, Fox News has almost entirely ignored it. A single 30-second news brief on its “Special Report” program represents the entirety of the Trumpist propaganda network’s coverage through Thursday, according to a Media Matters review.
Fox News may not want to claim credit for Kennedy as he stifles crucial medical research, but it certainly deserves it. You can’t explain the evolution from Trump’s first administration, which fast-tracked the development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 through Operation Warp Speed, to the second term’s anti-vax, “Make America Healthy Again” schtick without talking about the network’s role in turning the GOP base against vaccines and toward conspiracy theorists like Kennedy.
'Misinformed' or 'speaking in the wrong terms': Doctor rebukes RFK Jr. over cutting mRNA research
05:03
When pharmaceutical companies began rolling out the vaccines produced under the Trump administration in late 2020 and early 2021, Fox News’ stars could have used the unique influence they have over their viewers to encourage them to get their Covid-19 shots. But Trump had lost his re-election bid, and the network that had worked so hard to keep him in office instead pandered to anti-vaxxers by turning against the vaccination campaign helmed by his successor, President Joe Biden.
Led by its then-prime-time star Tucker Carlson, the network incessantly promoted misleading and false claims about safe, effective vaccines with the potential to save their viewers’ lives — day after day, month after month, year after year. The network uplifted conspiracy theories, gave airtime to conspiracy theorists and culture war vaccine opponents, demagogued against efforts to get more people to receive these lifesaving shots, and propped up ineffective cures as potential substitutes. Fox News continued to broadcast these segments even as more Republican parts of the country, with lower vaccination rates, suffered higher Covid-19 death tolls, as The New York Times’ David Leonhardt detailed.
All of the fawning attention on Kennedy from the right had the impact one would expect.
Before the pandemic, Kennedy, the scion of a Democratic dynasty who once called for a boycott of Fox News host Sean Hannity and described him as a fascist, was not a natural fit for the Fox audience. But with the Covid-19 vaccine campaign underway, his decades of work undermining vaccines and his attacks on the new mRNA vaccines in particular suddenly made him attractive to the right.
When he began his presidential campaign in March 2023 — with Carlson’s show as his launchpad — MAGA media stalwarts saw an opportunity. They treated Kennedy’s bid, first in the Democratic primary and then as an independent candidate, as a potent spoiler candidacy to boost Trump’s return to power. Kennedy became a constant presence on the programs of pro-Trump commentators. Fox provided him with more airtime than many would-be Republican standard-bearers received.
All of the fawning attention on Kennedy from the right — alongside mainstream news coverage of his bizarre history, such as his claim that a parasite in his brain had triggered memory loss — had the impact one would expect: Kennedy became more popular with Republicans than Democrats. As polls increasingly showed that he was pulling support from Trump, though, MAGA media figures like Hannity abruptly turned on Kennedy. After Carlson reportedly helped to facilitate Kennedy’s decision to drop out and endorse the once-and-future president, Fox hosts resumed showering the anti-vax champion with praise.
‘Explosive’ conservative non-doctor turbocharging RFK Jr’s healthcare coup
05:52
As Election Day approached, talk turned to what reward Kennedy could expect in return. Paul Dans, the former head of Project 2025, floated Kennedy’s name for HHS secretary — and that’s precisely the position Trump nominated him for.
Not everyone on the right was willing to accept Kennedy’s ascent. The editorial boards of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and New York Post denounced the decision and called for Senate Republicans to vote down his nomination.
Murdoch’s print voices lost out to his cable news shouters.
But Fox News hosts were elated. As Kennedy’s nomination moved through the Senate, they touted him as a “reformer” and “true health care crusader” who had “the skills, knowledge, and experience” needed for the job.” When Kennedy said he wasn’t going to take away anyone’s vaccines, Fox said he wasn’t going to take away anyone’s vaccines.
Murdoch’s print voices lost out to his cable news shouters — the Senate confirmed Kennedy on a near-party-line vote, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, the sole Republican vote against him.
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RFK Jr. is truly terrible at his job
Jake Scott
And lo and behold, once confirmed, Kennedy continued the anti-vax project to which he had dedicated years of his life. He yanked $2 billion in funding to vaccinate children whose families may not be able to afford immunizations. He downplayed the importance of vaccination for quelling a measles outbreak even as measles cases hit record highs. He replaced the members of a vaccine advisory board with his own picks — some of whom were notorious vaccine critics — who plan to review the childhood vaccination schedule and scrutinize its components. And now he’s terminated federal funding that could have fueled a new wave of cures.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services itself has become a grave threat to public health. That is the regrettable but inevitable consequence of Fox News’ cynical exploitation of its viewers. The network’s hosts should take a bow — they earned it.
Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections.
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MMA 8 25 ANTI-SEM?
- ...## Tucker Carlson’s guests have been discussing starvation in Gaza
- Right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson has recently hosted multiple guests who have talked extensively about the realities on the ground in Gaza.
- U.S. Green Beret veteran Tony Aguilar discussed his deployment in Gaza on behalf of a security contractor and talked in detail about “mass starvation” in the Gaza strip.Aguilar continued, “The narrative of there's no starvation and there's no hunger going on in Gaza, that is negligent. That is shameful that anybody would say that.” YouTube, *The Tucker Carlson Show*, [7/31/25]
- Carlson also hosted political scientist John Mearsheimer, who labeled Israel’s actions a genocide and asked, “You're going to build a ghetto. You're going to put, you know, 2 million people in a ghetto and continue to starve them. Is this sustainable?”Mearsheimer also claimed, “The Israelis are executing a genocide in Gaza.” YouTube, *The Tucker Carlson Show*, [7/30/25, 7/30/25]
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trump ambush fail; bulwark chill wht wine jacob zuma and other wacko min party; agr min wht ~ 30 yrs to ANC 525
afriforum // KKK term 1, tucker
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Written by Matt Gertz
:{Published 06/18/25 mma
President Donald Trump appears to be careening toward a U.S. military strike on Iran as current and former Fox News figures — from posts on the network’s airwaves, elsewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem, and within his administration — fight to influence his decision.
For years, Trump's obsession with the Fox universe has driven policy decisions, administration staffing, and countless stream-of-consciousness social media posts. Now, the network will have an outsized role in determining America's potential involvement in a spiraling regional military conflict.
The George W. Bush administration spent months “following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein” before finally launching that war in March 2003. That strategy — based on cooked intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction dishonestly sold to American people — resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. service members and more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians as well as a massive financial cost.
Two decades later, Trump seems poised to join Israel's attack on Iran, with the stated goal of preventing that country from acquiring nuclear weapons that the U.S. intelligence community says it is not seeking. The president on Tuesday threatened to assassinate Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bragged that the U.S. is involved in securing the airspace over that country, and called for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” all while the U.S. military is marshalling forces in the region. And that push has come with little effort to convince the public, which overwhelmingly opposes U.S. military involvement in Iran, of the necessity of such a course.
The Fox propaganda engine is driving this chaotic process. Trump reportedly became more interested in U.S. military action because he saw favorable Fox coverage of Israel’s initial attacks on Iran, while more recent segments have stressed the importance of U.S. involvement. Fox host Mark Levin and his former colleague Tucker Carlson are waging a scorched-earth battle for Trump’s ear, with Levin apparently gaining the advantage. And top administration officials with roles in a potential conflict — including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — are in their positions in the first place because Trump approved of their previous work at the network.
It remains unclear what the president will decide to do and how any of it will play out for the country and the world. What seems likely, however, is that the Trump administration will undertake its Iran policy with the same inconsistency that characterized his tariff policy; the same low quality of staff work that got a reporter added to a text chain where top officials shared info about a forthcoming U.S. strike; the same lack of care for the lives of foreigners that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people; and the same disinterest in following the law on display in his deportation plan.
And Trump’s action, regardless of what it is, will receive sycophantic cheers from his propagandists at Fox.
The Fox-Trump feedback loop is powering Iran policy
A June 17 New York Times story detailing how Trump had shifted from trying to restrain an Israeli attack on Iran while overseeing negotiations with its leaders to supporting Israel’s strike and considering U.S. involvement highlights the role of a key player: Fox.
“When he woke on Friday morning, his favorite TV channel, Fox News, was broadcasting wall-to-wall imagery of what it was portraying as Israel’s military genius,” the Times reported. “And Mr. Trump could not resist claiming some credit for himself.”
Under typical circumstances, a U.S. president shifting the nation’s military posture based on a few cable news segments would sound fantastical. But under Trump, major aspects of federal policy regularly turn on what he is hearing from his favored TV personalities. Fox hosts understand their influence and regularly seek to influence Trump’s decisions, both through their programs and in private conversations with the president.
Fox’s hosts thus wield incredible power over Trump’s actions. And in recent days, those figures have been using their platforms to tell the president that U.S. strikes on Iran are both important and likely to succeed with little cost. They know which buttons to push and are banging on them as hard as they can.
“Trump's favorite TV network has staked out the pro-war position – and it isn't making as much room for debate,” CNN’s Brian Stelter reported on June 18. “Guest after guest on Fox has played to Trump's ego — simultaneously praising the president and pushing for US intervention through his television screen.”
Carlson and Levin go to war
Carlson and Levin are waging a scorched-earth campaign against each other, with each presenting their own views as the true America First position as they seek to influence Trump’s decision-making.
Carlson, a proponent of the right’s white nationalist and Holocaust-denying wing who tends to oppose foreign military interventions in favor of attacks on domestic enemies, claims that bombing Iran would “shut down Trump’s three core promises.” Levin, a staunch advocate for deploying U.S. power in the Middle East, argues that American intervention would be consistent with Trump’s policy of “peace through strength.”
Levin currently appears to have the upper hand. Politico reported last week that Levin made his case to Trump directly at a June 4 meeting:
During a private lunch with the president at the White House last Wednesday, conservative talk show host Mark Levin told Trump that Iran was days away from building a nuclear weapon, an argument Trump’s own intelligence team has told the president is not accurate, according to an intelligence official as well as another Trump ally familiar with the matter. Levin urged Trump to allow the Israeli government to strike Iranian nuclear sites, which Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would torpedo the diplomacy.
Carlson subsequently lashed out at Levin and other Fox figures whom he (accurately) described as “warmongers.” He wrote on June 13:
The real divide isn’t between people who support Israel and people who support Iran or the Palestinians. The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it — between warmongers and peacemakers. Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now.
Levin replied, calling Carlson “a reckless and deceitful propagandist” who “promote[s] antisemitism and conspiracy nuts” (all obviously true). He added: “It doesn’t occur to you that your supposed sources are disloyal to POTUS. You and they are undermining him and you just declared your break from the President.” In a series of subsequent posts, he denigrated his former colleague as “Chatsworth Qatarlson” and accused him of “rooting for Iran” and “trashing our president.”
Carlson responded in a June 16 appearance on his ally Stephen Bannon’s program in which he claimed that Levin is “terrible on TV” (true) with a screen presence reminiscent of “listening to your ex-wife scream about alimony payments” (sexist but at least directionally correct). He further claimed that Levin’s appearances on Fox demonstrate that what the network is “doing is what they always do, which is just turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and just trying to, you know, knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them submit to where you want them to” (extremely accurate).
Trump, for his part, weighed in on Sunday, June 15, saying of Carlson’s critique of his Iran policy, “I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.” In a Monday night post, he described Carlson as “kooky” (another accurate characterization), adding, “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Levin swiftly highlighted both comments on social media.
Levin took a curtain call on Hannity’s Fox show on Tuesday night, screaming, “You’re either a patriotic American who’s gonna get behind the president of the United States – the commander-in-chief, or you’re not!”
Many key administration roles are filled by former Foxers
Several senior administration officials who will play key roles in advising Trump on whether and how to conduct military strikes and then implement that policy are wildly unqualified people who got their jobs because the president liked their Fox appearances. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the 23 former Fox employees Trump has appointed to his second administration.
Gabbard, a former Fox contributor from the Carlson wing of the MAGA movement who lacks “the typical intelligence experience of past officeholders,” said in congressional testimony earlier this year that it was the conclusion of the intelligence community that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
Trump, however, apparently preferred Levin’s lunchtime claim that Iran was actually days away from a bomb, telling reporters on June 17, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having a weapon.” The president, Politico reported Tuesday, “has increasingly mused about nixing Gabbard’s office completely” and, according to one source, “thinks she ‘doesn’t add anything to any conversation.’”
Trump promoted Hegseth from Fox & Friends Weekend co-host to the leadership of the Pentagon, and based on his past Fox commentary, he is likely a voice in favor of military action. His early leadership of the Defense Department is not encouraging for how such action might go — he has driven off his senior staff, discussed U.S. strikes in private texts that subsequently leaked, and oversaw a costly and ultimately ineffective campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Other relevant former Foxers include Mike Huckabee, the former network host Trump installed as U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Tammy Bruce, the former Fox contributor currently ensconced as the State Department spokesperson.
No matter what happens, this much is certain: A bunch of current and former Fox News employees are essentially deciding whether the U.S. is going to war.
//
11/13/24 11:34 AM EST
11/19/24 7:30 AM EST
04/23/25
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an 5 25
Noor Bin Ladin, a right-wing influencer, stridently declares “I don’t want to eat the bugs” on a talk show hosted by a former adviser to US President Donald Trump. Laurent Duplomb, a senator from the conservative Les Républicains party in France, informs his colleagues that the French would be eating “insects without their knowledge”. Bartosz Kownacki, an MP from the nationalist Law and Justice party in Poland, suggests that opposition politicians write “instead of chicken, eat a worm” on their election materials, arguing that “this is their real election programme”.
Thierry Baudet, a leader of the far-right Forum for Democracy party in the Netherlands, shouts “No way! No way!” while holding up a bag of mealworms in front of protesting farmers. Politicians in Lega, a far-right party in Italy, warn that the European Union is planning to “impose” the eating of insects on citizens in the bloc – and a Lega electoral campaign includes a billboard-sized image of a person popping an enormous cricket into their mouth, next to the caption, “Let’s change Europe before it changes us.”
During the 2020s, commentators and politicians across the right-wing political spectrum have amplified an Internet-based conspiracy theory that elite forces are conspiring to make us all eat insects. Often rallying under the slogan “I will not eat the bugs,” right-wing and far-right figures have come out in force against human consumption of insects. Many of these people assert that the EU is planning to force bug-eating on the general public while devastating traditional agriculture and meat consumption under the guise of the European Green Deal, the bloc’s plan to eliminate greenhouse gases by 2050 and decouple economic growth from resource use. Opposing insect-eating has become a symbolic way to protest EU environmental policies, express scepticism of and hostility toward Brussels, and villainize political opponents. Closer inspection reveals that the conspiracy theory underlying such opposition has much older and more sinister resonances.
“Spreading disinformation”
Insect eating (entomophagy) remains a minor practice in Europe and North America, although alternative protein sources do play a role in the EU’s move toward a sustainable future. So far, the European Commission has approved frozen, dried and powdered forms of Tenebrio molitor (yellow mealworm larva), Locusta migratoria (migratory locust), Acheta domesticus (house cricket) and Alphitobius diaperinus (the lesser mealworm larva) for human consumption. But the market for insect powder in foods like bread, pasta and sports bars remains small. Although insects are common food in many parts of the world, consumers in the West, where insects are more commonly used to provide protein in animal feed, are reluctant to eat bugs for historical reasons based in ideas of uncleanliness and primitiveness. So, based on the facts, there seems to be little to no reason for statements such as those made by Rumen Petkov of Bulgaria’s ABV party, who said that EU approval of insect consumption is a “crime against Europe” and that the European Commission is “prepared to kill our European children”.
What led to the rapid spread of this conspiracy theory? Noor Bin Ladin’s remarks give us a clue. During her talk show appearance, Bin Ladin described her words as a message for Klaus Schwab to take to his “masters”. Schwab is the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum. Early in the Covid pandemic, Schwab and the WEF produced a set of proposals titled “the Great Reset”, which called for an overhaul of various world systems to produce a stakeholder-driven capitalism that would lead to a more socially and environmentally responsible future. Conspiracists seized on and branded “the Great Reset” as a new iteration of a conspiracy theory known as the New World Order – an imagined global governance system meant to control the lives of everyone. Both the Great Reset and the New World Order lead back to much older and broader antisemitic conspiracy theories that hold that elite Jewish financiers run the world with their hands on invisible levers of power. All these narratives tap into feelings of futility and hopelessness about the future.
US right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson called a 2023 episode of his show, which included a heavy focus on Schwab and the WEF, “Let Them Eat Bugs”, a title that gestures at the remark allegedly made by Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, when she heard about people suffering from a lack of bread before the French Revolution: “Let them eat cake”. With this title, Carlson is aiming to emphasize that the elite are hopelessly out of touch and have contempt for farmers and the average man, whom they want to force to eat bugs. Like the French bedbug scare in late 2023, right-wing alarm around insect-eating has connections to the spread of anti-EU Russian propaganda. Russian news outlets have suggested that Europeans are so poor and food deprived as a result of sanctions connected to the war in Ukraine that they have been reduced to eating insects. As the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) writes, insects are “delicious treats for actors with interest in spreading disinformation against the EU”.
Symbols for dehumanization
The desire to stir up fear about the minor level of European and US insect consumption is not based on the risk of rapid growth in the insect market, but on the power to arouse disgust and fear itself. Insects have long been used as symbols to stir revulsion and paint opponents as objects of physical and moral disgust. During times of political extremism, insects have featured repeatedly in efforts to distance, devalue and dehumanize minorities. Armenians were called locusts during the Armenian genocide, and Jews were compared to lice in Nazi Germany. In the period prior to the ethnic genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, some Hutus repeatedly called Tutsis “cockroaches” on public radio. The right wing’s current fetishization of insect-eating serves as a narrative to cast political opponents as morally repulsive, even if not labelling them as bugs themselves.
For some figures on the right, insect consumption symbolizes the worst of Eurocentric liberalism – seen as a movement so void of a positive political vision that the only possible future it offers is one of impoverishment and bug-eating. They point to an elite who they claim will go on feasting on meat while forcing mealworms and fly larvae on the rest of us. It’s a potent image. At a moment in which people on the right and the left seem unable to imagine a better political future together, it becomes easier to demonize climate policy-minded leaders as a group of disgusting hypocrites plotting to create a society of contrived scarcity where the general population is reduced to eating bugs.
Meanwhile, since 2015, scientists have been releasing papers warning that the global food system shows risks of genuine structural problems. In a future of environmental disruption, trade wars and real risks of food shortages and famine, we may need all the calories we can get – insect-based or otherwise.
Out of curiosity, I bought a bag of cricket flour last fall. The crickets resulted in a delicious, nutty-flavoured cecina, well… crickcina. So far, none of my friends will try it. They’re missing out.
D. D. Moore, Visiting Fellow, Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, *European University Institute
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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SEE LIE GASLIGHT
texts Fox hosts sent during the Jan. 6 riot don't match how Fox covered it on air
:{December 15, 2021
Heard on All Things Considered
By
Fox hosts sent desperate messages during the Capitol riot, urging Trump to act. The messages are a stark contrast to the way Fox has covered the insurrection on air.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Fox News is in damage control mode.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "HANNITY")
SEAN HANNITY: Now, all riots, obviously, are bad - all of them. And on this program, we strongly condemn the violence on January 6, just like we condemned all of the violent riots from the summer of 2020.
KELLY: That is Fox News host Sean Hannity talking about text messages that he sent then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on January 6 as rioters were storming the U.S. Capitol. The messages were released earlier this week by the House committee investigating January 6. Over and over, they reveal Fox News hosts - Hannity, also Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade - pleading with Meadows to get his boss, then-President Trump, to stop the attack. The messages also stand in stark contrast to the way Fox has covered the insurrection on-air this past year.
And I want to bring in two voices to examine that disconnect - NPR's Tom Dreisbach, who's been covering the attack and its aftermath. Hey, Tom.
TOM DREISBACH, BYLINE: Hey.
KELLY: And NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik. Hey, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: David, you start and set the stage a bit further for us. What are some of the other text messages that have now come to light?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, they heard from Brian Kilmeade. He's one of the hosts of "Fox & Friends," an opinion show in the morning - very popular - and somebody in contact with the former president and his advisers. He texted on that day, please get him - meaning Trump - on TV destroying everything you have accomplished. Laura Ingraham wrote, Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy. Interesting choice of words - all of us. Sean Hannity - simply - can he make a statement - meaning Trump - ask people to leave the Capitol? Of course, that didn't happen until many hours later. In fact, too late to have a meaningful effect on what was there.
Very different from the tenor of what you heard subsequent to that. Let's hear from Laura Ingraham - what she had to say on the show the night of the attack, suggesting to her audience of who really might be behind that siege of the Capitol.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS")
LAURA INGRAHAM: Now, they were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd. We'll have more on that later.
FOLKENFLIK: You know, I think what you heard was an incredible diminishment of how serious it was in terms of what Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity had to say to viewers on their airwaves in front of millions of viewers and a kind of erasure of then-President Donald Trump as a player in all of this.
KELLY: And I want to bring in Tom on that in just a second. But David, one more to you. Now that these text messages are out there in public as of this week, how long before Fox hosts address this, took any of this on and covered it on-air?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it took about 24 hours for Hannity and Ingraham to address it themselves. Amazingly, right after those texts were released, Hannity had Mark Meadows on the air with him on the show - didn't touch it.
KELLY: Yeah. And Tom Dreisbach, jump in here because I want to hear just a little bit more about how the - these months, between January 6 and now, just how big has the gap been between what Fox News hosts were saying on-air and what they were texting privately to top White House officials?
DREISBACH: Well, I think what the text messages revealed in many ways is how broadly the narrative around January 6 has shifted. In the moment that it was happening and immediately afterwards, the event was almost universally condemned on the right, including by President Trump. It's important to remember what Donald Trump himself said in taped remarks the day after, on January 7.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.
DREISBACH: That was January 7. Now and as soon as this summer, Trump was saying something completely different. He was describing the rioters who have been arrested and charged with crimes as political prisoners. And he says that January 6 was actually just a protest.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: I reverse it. The insurrection took place on November 3 - that was Election Day - and before and after. That was, to me, the insurrection. And the - January 6 was a protest.
KELLY: So what's going on with this evolution? Is this Fox coverage mirroring an evolution in what Trump and his loyalists have been saying or are they driving that evolution? Or do you think it's some of both?
DREISBACH: It's a little hard to say who's driving it. It's sort of a chicken-and-the-egg issue, who is in control of this narrative. But I would say that early on, the seeds of this counter-narrative were being planted. As you heard, Fox hosts like Laura Ingraham were arguing that leftists or antifa were actually causing the violence, even though rioters who were there that day say that is completely false. Then there was this narrative that the violence was being overblown in order to discredit Trump and his supporters.
Most recently, what we've seen is from folks like Tucker Carlson - Fox host - this argument that is largely based on conspiracy theories that federal agents must have been instigating the attack that day, causing a sort of false flag so they could launch a, quote, "war on terror" against Trump supporters. And at this point, I should say there's really no evidence to support any of those narratives
KELLY: Well, this prompts a wider question. David, is Fox News - should we be calling it Fox News? This is a TV channel. They track current events. Are they performing journalism?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, I think we can answer that question just by looking at what's happened in recent days. Fox News at no point is addressing the fact that, you know, these opinion journalists who are primetime stars are acting essentially as fully part of the Trump political circle. They're never addressing that. That's not - you know, you're still supposed to admit facts against your rooting interest as an opinion journalist. It's not happening here. The way to think about Fox News right now is as a highly profitable political operation to which some journalists are appended, some of them trying to do honest reporting.
KELLY: Well, and some journalists jumping ship, as we saw with Chris Wallace this week.
FOLKENFLIK: That's right. Wallace raised objections about Tucker Carlson's documentary that Tom alluded to about January 6 itself, that it was filled with lies and unfounded conspiracy theories. He objected to the CEO, Suzanne Scott, and got nowhere with it.
KELLY: And this brings me to my last question, which is all of this matters because a whole lot of people are watching and listening to what Fox broadcasts. Tom, you have spent the last year talking to people connected to the riot. How closely are they watching? How entrenched are these alternate narratives?
DREISBACH: Well, just today, PolitiFact declared that lies about the January 6 attack on the Capitol are the lie of the year. I think that's a recognition of just how entrenched these views have become. I talk to people who were at the riot, who have admitted to breaching the Capitol of their own will. And after the Tucker Carlson series aired on Fox, on Fox Nation, they started questioning their own experience not based on what they saw or did that day themselves, but based on what they saw on TV.
And we are seeing some of that playing out in the broader public. You look at polling, and a majority of Republicans think too much attention is being paid to the attack on the Capitol now. And the number of Republicans in the public who say it's important to prosecute the rioters is going down by about 20 points, according to Pew Research, over just the last several months.
KELLY: NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach and NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thanks to both of you.
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mma
The right’s decade-long lurch toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia
Written by Matt Gertz
:{Published 03/06/25
President Donald Trump’s actions over the past few weeks have drawn cheers from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government — and with good reason.
Trump falsely blamed Ukraine for the war that began with Russia’s 2022 invasion and described Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” then threw him out of the White House following a public confrontation. His administration over the same period began working with Russia on terms for a ceasefire with Ukraine, attempted to extort Ukraine for partial U.S. control of its rare mineral rights, voted with Russia against a United Nations resolution condemning its “aggression” in Ukraine, floated U.S. sanctions relief for Russia, and on Monday cut off military aid to Ukraine.
The remnants of the right-wing media still somewhat in step with the values of Ronald Reagan have spoken out against Trump’s Putinist turn. But its more popular and influential members are lining up behind the president and praising his actions.
The right-wing commentariat’s decade-long shift from near-universal antagonism to Russia to eager amplification of Kremlin propaganda has helped create the environment for Trump’s recent moves selling out Ukraine in favor of an effective alliance with Putin.
As late as 2012, the GOP and its propagandists were still uniformly anti-Russia. When former President Barack Obama told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate on the issue of missile defense after the November election, his words were seized upon by right-wing commentators across the spectrum, from far-right outlets like Breitbart.com and The Gateway Pundit to the staid conservatives of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board to the pseudopopulists of Fox News, where hosts repeated the attack for years.
But following Obama’s reelection, a faction of the right changed course. Initially they were a fringe group seeking to rehabilitate Putin — a dictator who assassinated political opponents and defiant journalists — as a contrast with the purportedly elite Democratic president and what they deemed his excessively pro-LGBTQ policies. But the faction grew over time, drawing support from pundits like Sean Hannity, who sought counternarratives to excuse Trump’s Russia ties and attack Joe Biden’s Ukraine ones, and Tucker Carlson, who seemed to simply favor Russia’s success in its invasion of its neighbor.
The shift toward Russia became so prominent that in recent years, GOP lawmakers have sounded the alarm about pro-Kremlin propaganda infesting their party’s communications apparatus. And now, we are seeing the devastating consequences.
2013-2014: The right launches love affair with “macho man” Putin, calls him “one of us”
The right’s Putinist turn began as a revolt against a potential future of equal rights and dignity for LGBTQ people and escalated as the movement came to champion the brutish Russian dictator as an anti-Obama.
Putin signed sweeping laws during the summer of 2013 which banned the dissemination of “gay propaganda” and prohibited same-sex couples in Russia and foreigners from nations with marriage equality from adopting Russian children. This triggered widespread condemnation and even calls to boycott the impending Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.
When Obama added his voice, saying in an August appearance that he had “no patience” for countries that impose laws “violating the basic morality that I think should transcend every country,” a faction of right-wing media responded by siding with Putin.
“Our moral and cultural elites have put Putin on notice: Get in step with us on homosexual rights — or we may just boycott your Sochi games,” wrote the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. “What this reveals is the distance America has traveled, morally and culturally, in a few short years, and our amnesia about who we Americans once were, and what it is we once believed.”
Buchanan added that Putin was trying to restore the “moral compass” of the Orthodox Church. After quoting a Putin remark praising Christianity’s influence on Russia, he wrote: “Anyone ever heard anything like that from the Post, the Times or Barack Hussein Obama?”
(Putin’s opposition to marriage equality made him “one of us” in “the culture war for mankind’s future,” Buchanan suggested later that year.)
Right-wing commentators over the following years began praising Putin as the polar opposite of the caricature they had created of Obama as an effete, indecisive intellectual. In disputes between Putin and Obama — between Russia and the United States — they started hewing to the Kremlin line.
Amid U.S.-Russian altercations over the Syrian civil war, Matt Drudge deemed Putin “the leader of the free world,” while Tucker Carlson argued that he was “riding to President Obama's rescue.”
As Russia invaded Ukraine the following month, right-wing pundits like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly dissected photos of shirtless “macho man” Putin on a horse and a helmeted Obama on a bicycle. While Russian troops were occupying the Crimean Peninsula, Rudy Giuliani was telling Fox’s audience that Putin is “what you call a leader” because “he makes a decision and he executes it quickly,” while Obama has “got to think about it” before taking action.
At times, the right’s Kremlinist corps would make explicit its desire to have the Russian running the U.S. instead of Obama.
“Can we get like Netanyahu or like Putin in for 48 hours, you know, head of the United States?” former Fox host Kimberley Guilfoyle commented in August 2014. “I just want somebody to get in here and get it done right, so that Americans don't have to worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group that's murderous and horrific like ISIS.”
- ### 2015-2016: Trump’s Russia ties trigger right-wing excuses
While the right-wing media’s pro-Putin faction was not yet dominant, it included one particularly influential figure: Donald Trump, the reality TV star and real estate mogul who had become the GOP front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination.
Trump touted Putin on the campaign trail as a “powerful leader” who “represented his country” better than Obama did the U.S. That praise, along with Trump’s known past (and secret contemporaneous) business interests in Russia; his hiring of campaign advisers notorious for their ties to the country; his waffling on NATO’s security guarantees; his open call for the Kremlin to intercede on his behalf; and the clear (and ultimately successful) effort by Russia's government to help him win the 2016 election triggered widespread concern about his ties to the country as he ascended to the Republican nomination and then the presidency.
Trump’s pro-Russia stance was unacceptable for some in the right-wing media — but not the stars of Fox, who made excuses for his actions.
In July 2016, for example, Trump called on Russian intelligence services to follow up their successful hack of the Democratic National Committee by finding Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said during a press conference. “You will probably be rewarded mightily.”
National security experts were horrified. But on Fox, the comment was played off as either a joke, a misunderstanding, or a media lie.
“The media has got the whole thing wrong,” Hannity claimed. “They’re purposefully distorting this whole thing, which is what they do.”
“I think what he was saying was they already stole them. They have them. Can you please return them to us,” offered Carlson.
Both Greg Gutfeld and Bret Baier told viewers that Trump had been making a joke.
However, the Kremlin seemed to take Trump both seriously and literally.
“Russian officials began to target email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices ‘on or around’ the same day Donald Trump called on Russia to find emails that were missing from her personal server,” PBS reported of an indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller two years later.
As the extent of Russia’s pro-Trump campaign came into focus, the most devoted Trumpists waved it away.
Carlson posited that claims that Russia had been behind the leaked Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks were “a lie” and repeatedly argued that the U.S. intelligence community was pushing an “unsubstantiated claim” that cyberattacks on American political institutions were “a Russian propaganda effort.”
Hannity put forward a similar thesis about the allegation of a Russian hack-and-leak effort to benefit Trump. “I'm just assuming this is another liberal media fake news story that they're all falling for, and it's politically motivated,” he claimed.
- ### 2017-2020: Trump defenses lead to a tightening embrace of Russian propaganda
The Trumpist right’s fervent need to defend him at all cost led to its inexorable adoption of pro-Russian narratives over the course of his presidency. During Trump’s four years in office, three main threads braided together into a rope yoking pro-Trump media figures to Putin.
First, Trump continued to habitually praise Putin and take inexplicably pro-Russian actions over the course of his presidency. In response, pro-Trump media figures defended him by explaining away or ignoring what other press outlets and even members of Trump’s own party considered abhorrent.
Trumpist commentators became practiced in responding to the president’s public statements about Russia, arguing that in contrast to his rhetoric, his “actions” against Russia had been “tough.” When Trump shocked the international community by standing next to Putin at a 2018 press conference in Helsinki and validating the Russian dictator’s false claim that he had not interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s media allies touted his “very strong” performance and criticized the “mass hysteria” to the contrary. And damning reports about Trump sharing classified information with the Russian ambassador at the White House and meeting with Putin without a note taker or translator were downplayed or avoided altogether.
Second, Mueller’s investigation created a steady stream of damaging stories for Trump as the special counsel successfully indicted and prosecuted some of the president’s closest aides, revealing both the breadth of the Kremlin’s effort to bolster Trump’s campaign and the eagerness of Trump’s allies to participate. In response, Trump’s media supporters, led by Fox’s Hannity, developed a sprawling counternarrative in which Mueller’s Russia probe was the result of a “soft coup” by a shadowy cabal of journalists, Democrats, and “deep state” operatives.
Night after night, Hannity and his anti-Mueller crew put forward a series of bogus premises: “The media has been corrupt and lying to you”; “so-called Trump Russia collusion” is a “tinfoil hat conspiracy theory,” while Democrats had committed the “real collusion” with Russia; Trump was the victim of “the biggest abuse of power corruption case in American history”; and a second special counsel was needed to “expose” all of the above and ensure that the perpetrators “go to jail.”
With Trump amplifying such claims and rewarding Republicans who promoted them, these talking points became the heart of the GOP’s Mueller rebuttal. The counternarrative even led to the appointment of a special counsel for an “investigation of the investigators,” albeit one who turned up remarkably little of note.
Third, Russia’s campaign to sway U.S. elections on Trump’s behalf continued as the president sought reelection in 2020. Right-wing media figures like Hannity and John Solomon responded by participating: They teamed up with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the minions of a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, and a sanctioned Ukrainian lawmaker described by the U.S. government as “an active Russian agent” to concoct and disseminate purported evidence that former-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly by pushing Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who was supposedly investigating Biden’s son’s business interests.
This disinformation campaign was flagrantly false — U.S. policy called for firing the prosecutor, who was viewed as unwilling to prosecute corruption by U.S. diplomats, foreign governments, international bodies, and Ukrainian anti-corruption groups.
But the right-wing narrative caught Trump’s eye. He subsequently tried to condition vital military aid to Ukraine and a state visit by Zelensky on the Ukrainian president announcing an investigation into the Bidens. The revelation of Trump’s conduct ultimately triggered his first impeachment — during which his media allies settled on the conclusion that the president had done nothing impeachable.
As Trump’s Fox propagandists scrambled to defend his conduct, one host broke new ground by suggesting that the U.S. shouldn’t have been supporting Ukraine in the first place.
“Why do I care? Why do I care what's going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” Carlson asked on his prime-time show. “Like, why do I care? And why shouldn't I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Carlson quickly claimed he had been joking — but the mask had slipped.
- ### 2021-2024: MAGA pundits swallow Kremlin line on Ukraine, Biden
On March 3, 2022, just days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a Russian government agency issued new instructions to state-sponsored propaganda outlets: Promote Tucker Carlson.
“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” the memo, which was leaked to Mother Jones, stated.
The Kremlin’s assessment of Carlson’s broadcast was accurate. The Fox star, in the days before and following the Russian incursion, had passionately defended Putin, criticized Zelensky as Biden’s “puppet” and his country as a “growing dictatorship,” denied that a war was imminent and then blamed the U.S. for its start, and mocked the bipartisan supporters of U.S. aid to Ukraine. And over the following months, a Carlson-Kremlin feedback loop developed in which Carlson picked up disinformation campaigns originating with Russian state media, then Russian outlets promoted his reports.
Carlson was the loudest and most influential MAGA media figure to adopt pro-Russian talking points about the country’s brutal bombing and occupation of portions of Ukraine — but he and his guests were far from alone.
Commentary that toed the Putin line became increasingly commonplace on the right among Carlson’s Fox colleagues as well as from online fever swamps like The Gateway Pundit and far-right influencers like Jack Posobiec. Within months, the right-wing propaganda machine was in full-scale revolt over the U.S. sending aid to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion.
The MAGA movement’s information ecosystem became increasingly honeycombed with pro-Putin propaganda over the course of the war.
Hannity, his House Republican allies, and his Fox colleagues spent 2023 attempting to manufacture an impeachment case against Biden which largely rehashed the disinformation debunked four years earlier about the fired Ukrainian prosecutor. The story did feature one new wrinkle — a report from an FBI informant that a Ukrainian oligarch had paid Biden a $5 million bribe to get the prosecutor removed.
Hannity promoted that account in dozens of segments, arguing that the FBI informant’s “bombshell” was “smoking-gun evidence” of “the very definition of a high crime,” and “might end up being the biggest story of the year.” But the tale disintegrated in February 2024 when federal prosecutors arrested the informant — who reportedly had deep ties to Russian intelligence — and charged him with fabricating his allegations (he later pleaded guilty). The GOP’s impeachment push dissolved soon after.
Meanwhile, Carlson was not just excusing Putin’s invasion, but doing an interview with the Russian dictator that was heavily touted by Kremlin propagandists and producing glowing videos that extolled the Russian system.
The situation became so bleak that in April 2024, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) — the former GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — told a reporter that because of right-wing media, Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
McCaul was not exaggerating — later that year, federal prosecutors alleged several prominent right-wing influencers had unwittingly received millions of dollars that originated from a Russian government operation aimed at promoting Donald Trump.
They didn’t push Russian talking points for the money — the Kremlin gave them the money because, like so many of their MAGA colleagues, they were already pushing Russian talking points.
===
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Right-wing media cheer Trump's anti-Christian bias task force after years of laying the groundwork
Right-wing commentators have spent years claiming that the Biden administration was “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity” and that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square”
Written by Payton Armstrong
Published 02/27/25 mma
A task force created by President Donald Trump to eradicate alleged “anti-Christian bias” is drawing praise from right-wing media figures — some of whom have spent years baselessly claiming that Christians are a persecuted group in the United States, even though experts say there’s no such widespread bias.
Right-wing commentators celebrated Trump’s task force as “a cultural resurgency” and declared that “this is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020.”
In one instance, Christian nationalist media figure Lance Wallnau joined Steve Bannon’s podcast to praise the task force as the first step in the “recapturing of institutions,” naming education, media, business, and government among the institutions he wants to infuse with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” This appears to be a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate popularized by Wallnau, which instructs Christians to impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in American life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.
Experts have argued “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society" and that Trump’s anti-Christian bias task force is actually “enshrining Christian privilege in our society.”
Trump issued an executive order on “eradicating anti-Christian bias,” but experts say “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society”
- Trump first announced the task force during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, saying it will “protect Christians” and bring “our country back together as one nation under God,” and he later issued an executive order listing examples of supposed bias under the Biden administration.The executive order — titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” — claimed that “the previous Administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.” The executive order claimed, “The Biden Department of Justice sought to squelch faith in the public square by bringing Federal criminal charges and obtaining in numerous cases multi-year prison sentences against nearly two dozen peaceful pro-life Christians for praying and demonstrating outside abortion facilities.” The Hill, [2/6/25; White House, 2/6/25]
The Associated Press reported that “critics said Trump is claiming to see persecution in distorted case descriptions, a calendar coincidence and other situations that, while raising concerns, don’t add up to a pattern.”As noted by the Associated Press, “Christianity is by far the largest faith in America, and Christian conservatives have a strong grip on the levers of government.” The Associated Press, [2/13/25]|}:
- On CNN, religious extremism expert Matthew Taylor argued “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society,” noting that claims of anti-Christian persecution can “become a pretext for them persecuting actual minority groups.”Taylor urged that “we need to recognize that there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society,” and said, “It's striking that given the widespread realities of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and as you said, mosques and synagogues tend to have more attacks than churches per capita, there's no task force on rooting out anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Instead, this is enshrining Christian privilege in our society.” CNN, *CNN Newsroom*, [2/9/25]
- Multiple Republican-led states have moved to require Bible instruction or a display of the Ten Commandments in all public schools.Last year, Louisiana became the first state to require all public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Soon after, Oklahoma’s state superintendent directed all public schools to teach the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, and conservative media figures promoted the policy as a way to “impose Christian values” and encouraged other states to follow suit. At the start of the 2025 legislative session, Alabama Republican lawmakers proposed mandates to display the Ten Commandments in public schools and give students the “opportunity to participate in daily prayer” or risk losing some state funding. PBS, [6/19/24; New York Times, 6/27/24; Media Matters, 7/8/24; AL.com, 2/15/25]
- Right-wing media and extreme anti-LGBTQ groups have a long history of conflating criticism of anti-LGBTQ positions with anti-Christian hostility.They’ve said that Democratic senators have anti-Christian bias for questioning federal judicial nominees’ anti-LGBTQ statements or ties to bigoted groups, and they’ve described basic legal protections for LGBTQ people as anti-Christian. Media Matters, [11/8/19, 5/20/14]
- ### During the Biden administration, right-wing media personalities baselessly claimed Christians were targeted by the government and “the left”
* When Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter in 2024, right-wing media figures — especially on Fox News and Newsmax — claimed that the Biden administration was attacking Christians.Right-wing media used the day to warn Christians that they were under attack after Biden’s statements recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility, with Fox’s Jesse Watters arguing that Biden is “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity.” Between Fox and Newsmax, the networks combined aired more than 4 hours of coverage and nearly 80 segments, slamming Biden for his “demonic” remarks which they said amounted to an “attack on Christian faith.” Media Matters, [4/2/24, 4/2/24]
- On his network, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson hosted anti-abortion protester Paul Vaughn — who was arrested for blocking access to a clinic — and falsely claimed that Vaughn was facing prison time for merely singing hymns and praying.Carlson said that Vaughn “had dared to pray and sing hymns in the hallway of an abortion clinic. In other words he did what the Biden administration really fears, he prayed. And for doing that, he faces 11 years in prison.” USA Today fact checked Carlson’s claim, noting that: “Vaughn was arrested for physically obstructing access to an abortion clinic, not for praying,” highlighting that “the law in question explicitly protects First Amendment speech and also includes language ensuring free access to houses of worship.” [Tucker Carlson Network, *Tucker Carlson [vid] Uncensored,
; USA Today, 4/1/24]
- On his network, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson hosted anti-abortion protester Paul Vaughn — who was arrested for blocking access to a clinic — and falsely claimed that Vaughn was facing prison time for merely singing hymns and praying.Carlson said that Vaughn “had dared to pray and sing hymns in the hallway of an abortion clinic. In other words he did what the Biden administration really fears, he prayed. And for doing that, he faces 11 years in prison.” USA Today fact checked Carlson’s claim, noting that: “Vaughn was arrested for physically obstructing access to an abortion clinic, not for praying,” highlighting that “the law in question explicitly protects First Amendment speech and also includes language ensuring free access to houses of worship.” [Tucker Carlson Network, *Tucker Carlson [vid] Uncensored,
Carlson again falsely claimed that Vaughn was facing felony charges “from the Biden administration for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns,” adding that “from the perspective of the people who run the country there’s really just one enemy, and that’s faithful Christians.”During a Tucker Carlson Uncensored clip posted on X, Carlson said: “If you’re interested in who they really hate, well, look at what's happening. So Christian churches across the country have been burning and no one in the government is doing anything about it. Look at how Christian churches were treated during Covid … we talked the other day to a guy who is facing 11 years in prison, federal felony charges from the Biden administration, for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns. So if you are a faithful Christian — not a fake Christian, David French Christian, but an actual Christian, of the kind this country has always had, of the kind this country was created to harbor actually — you are seen as an enemy by the people who run it.” Twitter/X, [4/18/24]|}:
Fox host Laura Ingraham repeatedly lamented the supposed anti-Christian bias of the Biden administration, including in an interview with Vaughn where she suggested that “singing hymns and peacefully expressing your traditional Christian beliefs can get you thrown behind bars.” During the interview, Ingraham’s show displayed a chyron that read: “Liberals fighting to wipe out Christian values.” FoxNews.com, [1/31/24]|}:
- Ingraham also complained that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland was not addressing a “growing anti-Christian bias in the United States and criminal activity geared towards Christians.” The chyron read “to the left, Christians are the emerging enemy” and Ingraham claimed that “pro-life centers across the country” and “churches have been attacked,” adding that to the left, “if you’re a Christian, a bible-believing Christian, you’re a terrorist.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [3/29/23]
Following a deadly shooting at a Christian private school in Nashville, Tennessee, Ingraham claimed the Biden White House and “the left” had been “ginning up anti-Christian sentiment” by allegedly teaching kids “to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.”Ingraham told her audience: “Isn’t it also the case that the left in America — and even this White House — is ginning up, without saying the words necessarily, but ginning up anti-Christian sentiment by referring to trans activists as heroes and their bravery for standing up against the intolerant class, the haters. So these kids are learning to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [4/11/23; Media Matters, 4/12/23]|}:
Sean Davis, CEO of The Federalist, argued that by charging anti-abortion protesters under the FACE ACT, “the Biden regime clearly desires to make being a pro-life Christian a crime.” As documented by Media Matters, anti-abortion figures baselessly accused the Biden Department of Justice of weaponizing the FACE Act against protestors convicted of harassment at abortion clinics. Twitter/X, [6/21/24; Media Matters, 6/11/24]|}:
- ### Right-wing media spent years launching hyperbolic accusations of Christian persecution, especially amid growing LGBTQ inclusion
- When the European parliament displayed an LGBTQ Jesus, Steve Bannon lamented that “the Judeo-Christian West” is “anti-Christian by its leadership,” suggesting there will be “Diocletian” level persecution.He warned: “If you're prepared to accept it, it's going to get first-century Rome anti— it's going to get Diocletian. You're going to get to Diocletian anti-Christian and you're going to get there pretty quickly.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [5/5/23; FoxNews.com, 5/7/23]
While hosting Jack Phillips — a Colorado baker who had been sued for refusing to make a trans-themed cake — Fox’s Laura Ingraham declared that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square.”Ingraham added: “You don't even have a right to have a small business if you're a Christian today. You certainly don't have any conscience right, you have no religious rights, you have no First Amendment rights, if you clash with what they believe to be, you know, the supremely protected among us.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [1/30/23; Associated Press, 10/8/24]|}:
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk has relentlessly claimed that Christian values in the U.S. are under attack, claiming that they could be thrown in prison.At a 2023 TPUSA pastor’s summit, Kirk warned pastors that “if we continue theological disputes and don't focus on liberty, then we're going to be having those theological disputes from prison.” Ahead of the 2024 election, Kirk claimed that pro-choice Democrats would “create a secret police that will audit, intimidate, raid every single” pregnancy center in the U.S., saying that when that happens, “we'll be like, wow, I really wish that we Christians would have bought ourselves a little more time so that our nonprofits, our leaders, wouldn't go to federal prison.” NPR, [10/24/24; Media Matters, 4/27/23; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/16/24]|}:
Tucker Carlson suggested that the “trans movement is targeting Christians,” citing the Covenant school shooting.Carlson claimed that “the trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy,” declaring that “Christianity and transgender orthodoxy” are on a “collision course” and claiming that “one side is likely to draw blood before the other side.” Rolling Stone, [3/28/23]|}:
On Fox News, Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters lamented that a Harris/Walz administration would “trans the kids“ and “push all faith out of the public square,” as now-White House faith director Paula White-Cain bragged that Trump was “promising in his second term to do even more for Christians as he shares the same values.”White-Cain called for national “revival” and “turning our hearts back to God” and Walters declared that a Harris/Walz administration would be the “most anti-Christian administration in American history.” FoxNews.com, [8/10/24; Religion News Service, 2/21/25]|}:
On Sebastian Gorka’s Salem Media podcast, Breitbart’s Thomas Williams said that the U.S. is a “post-Christian society, but in many ways an anti-Christian society.”Gorka — who is now the counterterrorism chief in Trump’s administration — replied, “right,” and Williams added, “We are a Judeo-Christian nation by its foundation, and in the value system that understands what the family is, what society is.” Salem Media, *America First with Sebastian Gorka*, [6/14/23; CBS News, 1/7/25]|}:
* Fox host Emily Compagno labeled the U.S. an “anti-Christian, anti-Judeo-Christian society.”Compagno cited backlash to a graduation speech from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker that reportedly attacked the LGBTQ community and told “women to forget about a career and serve their man instead.” Fox News, *Gutfeld!*, [6/11/24; OutSports, 5/13/24]
Former Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark told Bannon that a second Trump administration needed a “beefed up” religious liberty task force to fight anti-Christian sentiment in the U.S., citing a story he heard about a “school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia.” Responding to a campaign speech where Trump pledged to create an anti-Christian bias task force if elected, Clark said: “That's wonderful to announce, especially in an increasingly anti-Christian world. I mean, I'd seen a story about a school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia to entertain the students a little bit. I mean things have gone into bonkers land. And look, in the first Trump term, we did have a religious liberty task force. And I think we need an even more beefed up one.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [12/20/23; Fox News, 12/19/23]|}:
- ### Right-wing media heaped praise on Trump’s task force, celebrating Trump “proudly defending our heritage as inheriting the values of the Bible”
- Charlie Kirk applauded the task force’s creation, declaring that “this is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020.” He said, “We are proudly defending our heritage as inheriting the values of the Bible,” adding, “This is a cultural resurgency. No longer should you be afraid to share your faith. No longer should you be afraid to share your political values. This is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020, and it is ascendant.” Real America’s Voice, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [2/6/25]
- On her show, Ingraham celebrated that “we have a president who believes our nation has a divine destiny” and displayed a chyron declaring: “Trump restores faith in America.”Ingraham then hosted a teacher, Marisol Arroyo-Castro, who claimed she had been suspended for having a crucifix in her classroom. Ingraham told Arroyo-Castro that “they see you and your presence as a threat,” and said, “I don’t think it’s constitutional.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [2/6/25; CT Insider, 1/30/25]
- Praising the task force announcement, right-wing commentator Michael Knowles said, “I love that he [Trump] is saying anti-Christian hostility, anti-Christian bias in the government” rather than “squish Republicans” who say “we want to just generally and universally speaking protect all religions.”Knowles elaborated, saying, “There aren't really threats against all general religions kind of broadly, man. That's not the problem. America wasn't founded on the principles of just kind of all the religions generally, universally, man. The specific problem that we saw explode during the Biden administration was bias against Christians. … That's the problem that has to be addressed, and that's the specific problem Trump is addressing, and I love it.” Daily Wire, *The Michael Knowles Show*, [2/7/25]
Steve Bannon celebrated the announcement and hosted media figure Lance Wallnau — a “prophet” and self-described Christian nationalist — with the two discussing right-wing Christians’ “recapturing of institutions” including “education, of media, of business, of government.”Bannon and Wallnau discussed how the task force can be used “to seize the institutions of the federal government” with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” Wallnau said that “there are three arteries that make this happen: legislation, litigation, and the shaping of public opinion,” adding, “because people like you, as long as we can shape the public opinion, the secret sauce is you've got to work with the awakening that's happening and move with it in such a way that you litigate and you legislate, but never get too far ahead of public persuasion.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/7/25; Media Matters; 9/27/24; Rolling Stone, 9/29/22]|}:
Video
Citation
From the February 7, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
- After Trump’s speech announcing his intent to create a task force, Bannon suggested that the president needs to “make sure they're going throughout the government because the administrative state is absolutely anti-Christian,” claiming that “the deep state is demonic.” Real America's Voice's chief White House correspondent Brian Glenn added, “Certainly we have seen how demonic this previous administration has been in terms of allowing religious freedom.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/6/25]
Fox host Jeanine Pirro praised the task force’s creation and attacked the FBI and the Biden administration for supposedly targeting Catholics, a claim that was found to be baseless after an internal investigation.Pirro noted that Trump “went to two prayer breakfasts this morning and he talked about eradicating anti-Christian bias,” and complained about “when the FBI director Christopher Wray came out and really told us no one at the FBI was targeting Christians and Senator Hawley came out and they found that leaked memo that the FBI was investigating Catholics and priests were gone to so they could then inform on parishioners who were considered domestic terrorists.” The New York Times reported that “Republicans claimed the bureau’s memo was evidence of an anti-conservative strain among F.B.I. ranks, but an internal investigation failed to uncover any ‘malicious intent.’” Fox News, *The Five*, [2/6/25; New York Times, 4/18/24]|}:
//
05/30/24
10/18/24
07/08/24
thom 11 24
Trump calls for Cheney's execution - by firing squad
calls her war hawk coward no battle so point 9 rifles at her face firing, talking to tucker?
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MMA
On January 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted Congress’ counting of electoral votes, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade dashed off a desperate text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” he wrote of Trump, who had summoned the enraged crowd to Washington, D.C., and incited it with lies that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a plot to subvert that election.
Kilmeade expressed a drastically different view on Monday, as a new Congress prepared to count the electoral votes that would return Trump to the Oval Office.
In one of Fox & Friends’ few references to the January 6 insurrection that morning, he mocked Democrats who “want to point out how different” today’s events will be “from four years ago” when “democracy was in danger.”
Kilmeade added that the American people think that January 6, “as bad as that day was, it’s a small part of the Donald Trump story” and that it would be “put to bed even further after today happens.”
The Fox & Friends host is one of an array of right-wing media figures who said at the time that the January 6 insurrection was a calamity, that the rioters were criminals, and that Trump himself bore responsibility for their actions. But over the past four years, they have participated in the right’s Great Forgetting, making their peace with Trump’s attempted coup and supporting his return to the presidency.
- ### When the right said January 6 was “deplorable” and its participants “criminals”
“Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different,” The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote the next day. “The health of the republic depends both on what swift consequences come—for Trump and for others—and also on how people remember the participants’ actions later on.”
Graham’s warning proved prescient. As the attack unfolded and in its immediate aftermath, many media figures on the right joined those on center and left in condemning the attack — and Trump’s work to incite it — in the strongest possible terms. But they did not sustain their initial response.
“Shoot the protestors,” influential commentator Erick Erickson wrote that afternoon. He added that Trump should receive immediate consequences that would end his political career: “Waive the rules, impeach. Waive the rules, convict. Waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.”
Four years later, Erickson offered this take: “First, Happy January 6th to all who celebrate. Note to the media: The exit polling in November showed that most voters do not care. That you will try to make them care today is another reason trust in the media is beneath that of Congress itself.”
Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume likewise denounced Trump at the time for having “fueled the worst suspicions of his supporters with wild claims that the election was stolen. And now we see the result.” But on Election Day 2024, he declared this “a BS issue” because “the thing was over in a matter of hours.”
Erickson and Hume are among a long list of right-wing media notables who condemned January 6 — and even Trump for bringing it about — but came around to implicitly or explicitly support his return to the presidency, even as he showed no remorse for his own actions and valorized the rioters.
Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire is one of the most potent forces in Republican politics, wrote in an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Inauguration Day 2021 that Trump’s election lies had been “pretty much a crime” that made January 6 “inevitable.” He added: “Best we don't mention his name unless essential and certainly don't support him."
On Fox, numerous hosts condemned the criminal acts of the mob and said its members deserved punishment, with some even describing such denunciations as morally necessary.
“Those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those that commit acts of violence,” offered Fox host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity. “Every good and decent American, we know, will and must condemn what happened at the Capitol.”
“The actions at the United States Capitol three days ago were deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal,” Jeanine Pirro likewise declared. “Anyone watching this must condemn it.”
Fox contributor Mark Thiessen was among the few to single out Trump on the network’s airwaves, saying the then-president had been “responsible for what happened,” and he went much further in a Washington Post column.
“It was one of the darkest moments in the history of our democracy. And Trump is responsible for it,” he wrote. “Trump formed and incited the mob. He stoked their anger with self-serving lies. He betrayed his followers. He betrayed his office. And now he has blood on his hands.”
The organs of the upper-crust right were united in blaming Trump for the attack.
Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal wrote in a January 7, 2021, editorial that Trump should resign the presidency after committing “an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election.” The New York Post editorial board wrote that “while the roots of this madness were many, with some blame across the spectrum, it’s fundamentally on President Trump.” And the editors of National Review said Trump “found a new low” by having “whipped up and urged on a mob toward the U.S. Capitol, where it breached the building and forced his vice president and lawmakers to flee.”
The hosts of the All-In podcast, which became a key venue of the MAGA tech right, were even more scathing at the time, describing Trump as “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag” who had engaged in “insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”
- ### The Great Forgetting and what comes next
These comments reflected the widespread initial consensus that January 6 had been horrific — and that Trump had been responsible for it. In the first days following the attack, politicians of both parties, corporate leaders, and the public at large responded with revulsion and demands for consequences.
But that unity ultimately proved fragile. A coterie of Trumpists, led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson, worked diligently to unwind it, reframing the sacking of the U.S. Capitol as either unimportant — or a conspiracy driven by Democrats and the media in which the assailants were the real victims of a crackdown on “political dissidents,” as Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy put it last week.
As this fraudulent counternarrative became increasingly widespread, most other conservative media figures eventually chose to join the right’s Great Forgetting. They pretended that a president who they knew had tried to overturn the republic was fit to return to that office. And in so doing, they helped power Trump from his post-January 6 position of disgrace back to the GOP nomination and the presidency.
Trump’s return to office sets the stage for more authoritarian acts. He never repudiated his election lies or the attack they incited, instead valorizing the January 6 “hostages” and promising they will receive pardons as one of his first acts in office. And he is assembling a team to carry out the “retribution” he has promised to inflict on his political foes, including an FBI director who proposed legal action against the conspirators, “not just in government but in the media,” who he claimed “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Trump’s authoritarian impulses may ultimately come to nothing. But with their actions after January 6, the leading lights of the right have already signaled their willingness to accept whatever he does.
//
01/06/21
They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them
07/22/22
05/21/24 MMA
===
doku
Tucker Carlson then reposted this two hours later, with the message: "Coming soon..."
O'Keefe posted a video to his X account on the evening of September 24 of him and Carlson in Fort Worth and a trailer for his new film 'A Line in the Sand.'
The film premieres on October 10 on the Tucker Carlson Network.
insert
Undercover journalist James O'Keefe goes to the front lines of the migrant industrial complex using hidden cameras and raw testimonials. O'Keefe reveals the shocking reality of the U.S. border crisis like never before: Mexican freight trains, cartel tunnels, and U.S. funded child detention camps. Watch this gripping exposé of a corrupted system that demands change. "Line in the Sand" premieres October 10th, exclusively on the Tucker Carlson Network.
===
12/11/2024 RWW
by
- Diana Falzone @ Mediaite: ‘Will Result in Termination’: Newsmax Bans Criticism of Pete Hegseth After Trump Fumed Over Host’s Attack
Newsmax instructed staff to lay off Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host Donald Trump nominated to serve as his secretary of defense, after a segment bashing the pick sparked the ire of Trump himself.
- Alexander C. Kaufman @ HuffPost: Trump Names Price For Avoiding All Environment Regulations: $1 Billion Or More
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he planned to expedite federal regulatory approvals, including all environmental permits, for any company or individual proposing to invest $1 billion or more in a construction project.
- Sean Craig @ The Daily Beast: Mel Gibson Threatens ‘to Kill Someone’ While Fearmongering at Mar-a-Lago
A cavalcade of supporting characters in the MAGA universe, and President-elect Donald Trump, showed up at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to attend a soirée for the conspiratorial, QAnon-adjacent conservative nonprofit America’s Future.
- Nikki McCann Ramírez @ Rolling Stone: Advocacy Group Calls B.S. on Nancy Mace’s Claim That She Was Assaulted in Capitol
A man has been arrested, and Nancy Mace is wearing a wrist brace and shoulder sling after the South Carolina congresswoman said she was “physically accosted” in a Capitol office building on Tuesday afternoon.
- Peter Drier @ Talking Points Memo: Trump Does Not Have Mandate
Newspaper headlines have called Donald Trump’s victory “decisive,” “massive,” “resounding,” “historic,” and “sweeping.” Trump himself has described his win as a “landslide.” On election night, he claimed that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” None of those things are true.
===
TDB REF
A cavalcade of supporting characters in the MAGA universe, and President-elect Donald Trump, showed up at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to attend a soirée for the conspiratorial, QAnon-adjacent conservative nonprofit America’s Future.
Mel Gibson, the traditionalist Catholic actor and director, told the crowd, “I got nine kids. If one of them got stolen or trafficked, I’d have to kill someone.”
That chimes with the kind of themes promoted by the group’s chairman, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has remade America’s Future in his own image. Since his appointment in 2021, the formerly meat-and-potatoes conservative group has shifted to promoting QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories about a clandestine cabal of pedophiles controlling media and government.
Last year, Gibson executive produced Sound of Freedom, a Christian thriller starring QAnon conspiracist Jim Caviezel that stoked QAnon paranoia. He praised Flynn for exposing “wolves in sheep’s clothing that prey upon our young” during Tuesday night’s speech at Trump’s club.
In addition to Gibson—who arrived in a polo shirt, shorts, and Crocs before changing into a more appropriate suit and tie—other attendees included British comedian turned conspiracy theorist Russell Brand, car dealership fortune heir turned working-class poseur Kid Rock, Fox News outcast Tucker Carlson, and former Trump adviser Roger Stone.
Trump was listed as an “invited honored guest” and was seen alongside Flynn before he briefly addressed attendees outside, accompanied by Flynn, Carlson, and Kid Rock, who he called “great people.”
Carlson and Kid Rock, née Robert Ritchie, were given “Champion for Freedom” awards by Flynn.
Carlson once called QAnon supporters—who believe a cabal of clandestine, Satanic child molesters are working against Trump—“gentle people waving American flags.” America’s Future, under the professed mandate of combatting human trafficking, has promoted similar conspiracies.
“They have organ harvesting,” says Flynn’s sister, Mary O’Neill, who was appointed executive director after he became chairman, in a video on their site. “They have also found a way to take the blood, and use the blood, to make themselves youthful.”
One attendee, who posed with Stone, commented on Instagram that they saw one-time television actor turned COVID and election denier Kevin Sorbo, who has been known to frequent Mar-a-Lago.
But the biggest name on hand, after Trump, was the pope-denying Gibson.
He called the Biden administration “four years of thinly veiled Marxism” and the incoming Trump administration as “a four year grace period,” adding “we’ll see how much this administration can claw back from the Philistines.”
===
aha not pm
msnbc 12 24
carusone says tucker has taken place of limbaugh as setting major uber narrative [ // bannon?], so not nec literally picking cab but trump has to cast to fit the story?
an 12 24
Is Tucker Carlson the carrier pigeon between Trump and Putin?
mma
MAGA propaganda machine helped carry Trump back to the White House — and it’s not done poisoning America
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 11/07/24
Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday, four years after fomenting a coup which saw a mob of his supporters storm the U.S. Capitol and then leaving the White House in disgrace. He owes his return at least in part to a rankly dishonest right-wing information ecosystem that helped carry him through countless scandals that would have ended the careers of most politicians, driving his comeback to the pinnacle of power.
Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information, be they legacy news outlets or government officials or medical experts.
Once Trump captured the GOP and ascended to the presidency in 2017, that bubble served him and his interests. Within it, for example, his supporters were convinced by a sprawling conspiracy theory portraying the then-president as the victim of a shadowy “deep state” cabal that justified vast retribution.
The January 6 insurrection presented Trump’s propagandists with a crossroads. Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire includes right-wing bastions like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, privately sought for him to become a “non person.” But Tucker Carlson and his allies at Fox and elsewhere instead went to work creating a counternarrative in which Trump was blameless. People who knew better either played along or actively participated in the whitewashing of that day.
Trump’s various indictments for a host of crimes provided additional hinge points. Right-wing media figures who could have used evidence of his abject criminality as a rationale for cutting him loose instead rallied to him and sought to delegitimize those seeking to bring him to justice.
The right-wing media bubble’s eagerness to excuse Trump’s actions gave him a dominant position in the Republican primary. As he romped to the nomination, his opponents complained that they were unable to gain traction because the party’s propaganda wing had united behind him.
Trump again became the nominee of one of the two major parties. He selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Carlson favorite, as his running mate, and demonstrated the importance of the right-wing echo chamber by giving Carlson himself a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.
With the general election set between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, right-wing propagandists went to work holding the GOP base together with a combination of grievance-mongering and silence.
They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime” while ignoring evidence that violent crime was actually plummeting from its Trump-era high.
They instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as a scapegoat, falsely claiming that federal disaster aid desperately needed to respond to hurricanes had been siphoned off to benefit migrants and ginning up grotesque lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
They lashed out at the press, urging the Republican base to treat Trump’s poor showing in his debate against Harris as the result of media bias.
When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials and Trump’s own former administration aides came forward with dire warnings of what Trump did in his first term and could do in a second one, they hid the news from their audiences.
And they kept quiet on a host of unpopular aspects of Trump’s policy agenda, from Social Security to reproductive rights, while beating back burgeoning scandals over his alleged January 6 crimes, communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a political event at Arlington National Cemetery.
Journalists and political strategists will spend the next weeks and months grappling for explanations as to how Trump returned to the White House. But without the support of the right-wing propaganda machine, he would not have been in position to sweep his party’s nomination in the first place — and in an evenly divided country amid a global anti-incumbent wave, that provided a strong position to win the presidency.
Now, the same propagandists who helped him back to power are poised to help him carry out his extreme agenda of destruction and retribution.
===
11/04/2024
by
- Todd Starnes declares that "it’s very possible that people like Liz Cheney and the Democrats and the Media are under the control of a demonic spirit."
- Jon Miller complains that "people are so touchy about rape bc we live in a totally feminized society where women dictate our discourse."
- Joel Webbon proclaims that he "hate[s] Judaism, but I love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity."
- Wayne Allyn Root gushes that "there will never be another superhuman hero, and superhuman fighter, and political leader and legend like President Donald J. Trump."
- Chad Connelly believes that Trump has the "opportunity to be the greatest second term president in American history."
- Finally, perhaps Tucker Carlson should read a book so that he doesn't automatically assume that everything he doesn't understand is "demonic."
===
bit unhinged at MSG, spew but sorta filter? malaysian?
===
10 24 TPUSA BIZARRE DADDY SPANK BAD GIRL, BIG CHEERS
CALL COACH GAY
===
an 10 24 omg
Tucker Carlson used to host the #1 most-watched show on the #1 most-watched network in the United States. But this Halloween, the ex-Fox News host was seen sharing a story about fending off a "demon" while in bed with his wife and pets.
On the social media platform Bluesky, journalist Joshua Friedman posted a video of Carlson speaking to Christian activist John Heers in a scene for his documentary film "Christianities?" Heers asked the former Fox News anchor if he thought "the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good." This led to Carlson immediately launching into a story recalling a confrontation with an unseen force roughly 18 months ago.
"I had a direct experience with it," Carlson said. "In my bed, at night."
READ MORE:[GOP lawmakers slam Tucker Carlson's 'deeply disturbing' interview with 'repugnant Holocaust denier'
"I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs in the bed and mauled. Physically mauled," Carlson said.
"In a spiritual attack by a demon?" Heers asked.
"Yeah. By a demon," Carlson quickly responded. "Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides."
Carlson insisted the claw marks were "still there," though Heers didn't ask him to lift his shirt and show the camera. Heers asked if Carlson's wife was "terrified" at the attack, but the far-right social media personality deflected and said he woke up and "couldn't breathe," then walked around outside before going back into his home. He added that both his wife and his dogs were still fast asleep, which he found odd as they were all "very light sleepers."
READ MORE:['Quickly falling apart': Conservatives are turning against 'click-chaser' Tucker Carlson
"And then I had these terrible pains on my rib cage and on my shoulder," Carlson added. "And I was just in my boxer shorts."
According to the website for Heers' documentary, "Christianities?" is about exploring the different forms of Christianity around the world, and exploring "the historical, intellectual, and spiritual continuity of Christianity today (or lack thereof)."
"Where is God in all this? Why does Christianity look so different from one place to the next?" The website reads. "Why is there not a single Christianity, but "Christianities" — a divided faith, split by politics, cultural beliefs, and more? What exactly IS a Christian?"
Watch the clip of Carlson below, or by clicking this link.
READ MORE:['Goebbels would be proud' of Tucker Carlson's 'unabashed hatred of Jews': NewsNation host
===
alternet-lNO LNX
MAGA pastor who wants to end female voting rights compares women to 'pigs with gold nose rings'
Thom Hartmann October 26, 2024
The Hartmann Report, this little newsletter that Louise and I started in our living room and our old friend and business partner Nigel helps us administer, hits 100,000 daily readers this weekend. Over 90% of our growth has come about as the result of word-of-mouth; people sharing this newsletter with their friends, relatives, and coworkers. We are so honored to have your trust in our research and hard work, and really appreciate your sharing my articles with others. Thank you!
— The Massive Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans. Trump and Vance are promising to deport 15 million people from America, a massive undertaking that will require a major departure from our traditions and laws providing for due process. “You go to the red state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard.’ We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers,” notorious racist and Trump ally Stephen Miller said recently. Those soldiers — not police officers — would then “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.”
Melissa Gira Grant wrote a brilliant piece about this obscenity for The New Republic that’s well worth a read, and it’s vital to remember that Trump is setting up something that appears inspired by Hitler’s early pogroms of the Jews. What will you do and say when they knock on your door — particularly if you have a last name that sounds Hispanic — and demand to see your citizenship papers? This is the world these bizarre men want to plunge us into, and, tragically, half the country appears to be just fine with it. What the hell has happened to our nation? I lay most of the blame at the feet of the billionaires like Murdoch, etc., who’ve been funding rightwing hate media for decades.
— One of the reasons our media so rarely reports on the obscene things that Trump says at his rallies is that they are terrified of his followers. A woman reporter showed up at a Trump rally and was assaulted by the fascists in attendance, as reported by the International Women’s Media Foundation. The Trump-cult followers surrounding her screamed, “I hope you’re murdered,” “I hope you’re dismembered,” and “I hope someone rapes you before they murder you,” along with other hateful epithets. This is typical of fascist movements: violence is always just a thin-scratch layer under the surface.
Now it appears that billionaires including Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong have been intimidated by Trump (or are desperately sucking up to him) and so are preventing their newspapers from making an endorsement in this year’s presidential race. (I just canceled my Washington Post subscription.)
It took Adolf Hitler less than three months to cow and then largely shut down the media in Germany after he acquired power in January, 1933, although most newspapers had surrendered to him before then and voluntarily stopped reporting negative stories.
Reporters were interred in Dachau as early as March of that same year, along with progressive politicians and editorial writers who’d dared criticize him in the past.
Trump and his people trying to revisit this history is not the sign of a healthy republic; this is a bright red flashing warning about a country sliding into autocracy, as I described in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Now that the MAGA movement has become a full-blown fascist movement, the question is: What will the GOP do with it after the election? Particularly if Trump loses? You can leave your comments here.
— Rightwing billionaire Elon Musk and his colleagues apparently believe they now have the Supreme Court votes necessary to overturn the 1935 Wagner Act that legalized labor unions. When Musk “interviewed” Trump on Xitter, the two joked about how impressed Trump was with Musk’s unwillingness to allow unions in any of his companies. “I love it,” Trump told his fellow oligarch. “You’re the greatest ... I mean, I look at what you do. You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone ... Every one of you is gone.’” Musk chuckled at that one, so Trump followed up by discussing putting Musk in charge of a government “efficiency” body that could lead the charge to bust the last of America’s unions among government workers:
“You are the greatest! You would be very good [on the proposed commission]. Oh, you would love it.” Musk has filed a lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board (which enforces unions’ right to exist) claiming the entire agency is unconstitutional; a Trumpy federal judge has already agreed, temporarily blocking the agency’s ability to enforce the law, as the case now heads toward the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Republicans and the billionaires who own them have been on a jeremiad against the ability of unions to exist ever since American workers first earned the right to organize in 1935. Will Musk and his Republican buddies succeed in finally gutting the last income protection the middle class has against greedy billionaires? Stay tuned.
— Republican attorneys general go to court to demand more pregnant 15-year-olds. This story sounds too bizarre to be true, but Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador have filed a lawsuit in federal court — presumably aiming for an eventual hearing before the Supreme Court — claiming that their states are being harmed, population-wise, by the availability of abortion drugs that can be shipped into their states by mail.
They want shipping Mifepristone outlawed nationwide. The proof of the harm, they say, is that they are not seeing enough pregnant teenagers. The lawsuit is explicit (page 190): “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself. … When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’”
They then claim that this “proof” that availability of mailed abortion pills are causing the drop in pregnancies among girls 15-19 years old is an “injury” to their states because it lowers their potential population. This is getting wild, but wait until the Supreme Court authorizes Red states to begin monitoring the menstrual periods of fertile girls and women; Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt has already introduced federal legislation requiring companies selling devices that track ovulation to report their results to state agencies or a federal database, including police agencies nationwide, so pregnancies can be caught and tracked. Republicans won’t be happy until every girl in America grows up the way Amy Coney Barrett did in her People of Praise Catholic cult where she was referred to as a “Handmaiden.”
— And now, to the delight of Republican lawmakers and police the US government has bought a tool that can track you by your cellphone to abortion clinics anywhere in the country. Locate X is a product from Babel Street which our government has been using since the Trump administration; it’s capable of tracking every cellphone in the country with remarkable location accuracy. The folks at 404 Media did a trial run of it focused on tracking people to and from abortion clinics, and the process was startlingly easy. When Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP forced-birth crowd again gain control of the federal government, get ready. They’re chomping at the bit…
— Crazy Alert! Can anything get weirder than this? Tucker Carlson’s creepy “daddy speech” is stunning. Goddess only knows what happened to frozen-fish-stick heir Tucker Swanson Carlson in his childhood, but whatever it was, it’s showing. Earlier this week he introduced Trump at a rally with a sweet little speech about the former president’s future role overseeing our country and “spanking” all those uppity girls and women who’ve dared defy the Republican Party’s demand for more pregnancies and less talkback:
“There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right, dad comes home and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed! He’s not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you, not it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.’”
Honest, that’s what he said. And the crowd’s response wasn’t the shocked silence a rational person would expect; instead, when Trump appeared after this introduction, they started chanting, “Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!” Where do they find these people? And how can anybody vote to put them in charge of our country?
— Even Crazier Alert! Famous MAGA pastor says American women are “pigs with gold nose rings,” wants to overturn the 19th Amendment right of women to vote, and says women who accuse men of rape but can’t absolutely prove it should be put to death. Say what?! Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon is a rising star in the GOP, and recently had some interesting things to say about American women. First, he claimed they’re far too pampered: “Pigs with gold nose rings.” Then he claimed it’s time to overturn the 19th Amendment and revoke women’s right to vote because that’s “the Christian thing to do.” Finally, to top it all off, the GOP’s top Christian guru argued women who claim rape but can’t prove it should be publicly executed to put an end to the Me Too movement.
“If you perjure yourself by bearing false witness accusing somebody else,” the minister told his followers, “whatever the penalty would have been for that person had they been found guilty, then that penalty should fall on your head for falsely accusing them. … If that were to occur and the just penalties were to be enforced, you, the false accuser, is now put to death. And that’s a public death. It’s a public sentence, publicly carried out, then the citizens of these United States of America, you know what they would do? #MeToo would end real fast. False accusing, playing the victim when you’re actually not; you know how to end that real fast? All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied.” This guy isn’t an outlier; this is the direction the entire GOP has been going for years, and now, with Trump and Vance within a hair’s breadth of seizing the federal government, they feel empowered to be open and public about their positions. What would Jesus say? Nothing like Joel Webbon’s spouting off, I can guarantee you that…
---
===
wapo no lnx
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Conservative media is familiar with Buffalo suspect’s alleged ‘theory’
The scene Sunday morning after the deadly shooting Saturday in Buffalo. (Libby March for The Washington Post)
By Paul Farhi
Updated May 15, 2022 at 4:26 p.m. EDT|Published May 15, 2022
The suspect in Saturday’s killing of 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket allegedly wrote a document endorsing “great replacement theory,” a once-fringe racist idea that became a popular refrain among media figures such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News and conservative writer Ann Coulter.
Before the shooting rampage that also left three wounded, the suspect, Payton S. Gendron, 18, allegedly posted a lengthy document invoking the idea that White Americans were at risk of being “replaced” by people of color because of immigration and higher birthrates.
Gendron, who is White, allegedly indicated that he chose a neighborhood with a large number of Black residents for his alleged attack. In the document that Gendron is suspected to have written, he indicated that he was radicalized online. There’s no indication that he watched Carlson’s program.
The theory was once confined to far-right White extremists, who cast immigration as part of a plot by “elites” to take political and economic power away from White people. It has gained broader circulation in recent years as a talking point among prominent conservative media figures.
On Sept. 22, Fox News host Tucker Carlson misrepresented past immigration remarks by President Biden to suggest the existence of the “great replacement theory.” (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Carlson, whose weeknight program is typically the most popular on Fox News, has been an especially avid promoter of the thesis. He has mentioned variations on the idea in more than 400 episodes since 2016, according to a New York Times analysis of his program. In April of last year, he said on Fox News that people from the “Third World” are immigrating to the United States “to replace the current electorate” and “dilute the political power of the people who live there” — language that essentially distills the replacement thesis.
He was more explicit in a video posted on Fox News’s YouTube account in September. Carlson said President Biden was encouraging immigration “to change the racial mix of the country, … to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.”
White nationalists and racists have celebrated Carlson’s endorsement of an idea they have championed for years. At the same time, Carlson’s rhetoric prompted the Anti-Defamation League to call for his firing.
The organization noted that racists have spouted the theory in perpetrating violent attacks, such as the killing of 51 people in mosques in New Zealand in 2019, and the killing of 23 mostly Hispanic shoppers in a Walmart in El Paso the same year.
After he was called out for promoting the theory in April 2021, Carlson said on his show: “I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the white replacement theory? No, no, no. This is a voting right question.”
A Fox News spokesperson on Sunday afternoon pointed to examples of Carlson speaking against violence on his program but had no further comment.
Other Fox News hosts besides Carlson have picked up the theme, giving it a veneer of respectability, at least within the conservative media ecosystem.
Ingraham, another prime-time Fox News host, told viewers in 2018 that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.” During a monologue on her program last year, she called immigration an “insurrection [that] seeks to overthrow everything we love about America by defaming it, silencing it, and even prosecuting it. This is an organized mob funded by billionaires, it’s supported by celebrities.”
Fox host Jeanine Pirro has also echoed the tenets of the “replacement” idea during an appearance on a syndicated radio program in 2019. She said liberals and Democrats were pursuing immigration policies that are “a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats.”
The same themes have been echoed for years by such prominent conservative media figures as Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and the late Rush Limbaugh.
O’Reilly, who formerly occupied Carlson’s spot on Fox News, told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on his radio show in 2020 that undocumented immigration would cause “traditional America to vanish.” Limbaugh said in 2018 that immigration from Central America was intended to “dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture. … This is why people call this an invasion.”
Coulter wrote about the alleged threat to American culture posed by immigrants in a book in 2015 titled “Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.”
Charlie Kirk, a conservative pundit who heads Turning Point USA and sometimes appears as a guest on Carlson’s program, defended Carlson’s “replacement” advocacy last year. After playing a clip of Carlson’s comments on Fox News, Kirk commented: “Nothing he said there is controversial. It’s factual and it’s true.” He later added that he was “so proud” of Carlson for promoting the theory.
Last month, Kirk tweeted: “There is an undeniable War on White People in The West.”
Matt Walsh, a contributor to the Daily Wire, also tacitly endorsed the idea during a program he hosted last summer.
“So we’re bringing in a flood of immigrants across the southern border, non-White,” Walsh said in the video. “We’re putting policies in place with the express purpose of having fewer White people in universities and positions of power. And we’re celebrating the reduction in the White population. I mean, it sounds like [liberals] want to replace White people. So this is replacement, is it not? And you’re happy about it?”
===
Tucker Carlson promoted Heritage's Project 2025 — but never mentioned Project 2025 by name 10/08/24 mma
===
judd ymail 9 24
Murderer whose life sentence was commuted by Trump convicted of domestic violence
Judd Legum
·
Sep 3
Read full story
Major outlets change standards for hacked emails, protect Trump
·
Sep 9
Read full story
Trump teams up with pickup artist for new crypto scheme
·
Sep 10
megyn Kelly, formerly of NBC and Fox News, is enraged that Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president. The global superstar endorsed Harris in an Instagram post on September 10, immediately after the debate between Harris and Donald Trump. Kelly was particularly incensed at the section of the endorsement where Swift praises Harris' selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) as her running mate. Swift wrote:
I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.
I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.
Kelly responded to Swift's endorsement that evening on YouTube, highlighting Swift's praise for Walz's endorsement of LGBTQ rights:
So this woman is fine with [Walz's] plan to take custody of the children from parents who don't want them to chop off their body parts and put them in Minnesota Court's custody so the body parts can be chopped off and they can be sterilized outside the custody of their parents. That's what led Taylor Swift to endorse her… I'm allowed to criticize Taylor Swift and I don't give a shit who gets upset. This is disgusting. If she wants to vote Harris/Walz she can do it all she wants. But to say the reason she is doing it is because of Tim Walz's on LGBTQ? F you Taylor Swift!... This is unbelievable. The left is losing its mind.
Kelly reprised the rant during an appearance on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's live tour on September 13. "Screw you, Taylor Swift," Kelly said. "That is how I want to begin." Kelly then described the purported impact of Tim Walz's LGBTQ policy:
A little girl is going to find herself down a rabbit hole on Reddit. Reddit is going to tell her she is actually a boy and she's going to get sucked into this gender cult. And she's going to say, "Mom and Dad, I want puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones." Which will sterilize her. And they are going to say, "No, you’re a girl." And she's going to say, "I want top surgery." This benign thing. This double mastectomy where I'll have tubes coming out of me and I'll never breastfeed. "I want that too." And they're going to say, "no." And she's going to go to a judge in Minnesota. And because of Tim Walz, the court will take custody of her [and] use the Medicaid funds in Minnesota to provide her all of those things.
If this was accurate, it would be alarming. But while Swift has done her research, Kelly has not. Everything Kelly said about the LGBTQ legislation signed by Walz in 2023 is a lie.
Minnesota's law does not terminate parental rights — it protects parental rights
The lynchpin of Kelly's argument is that the Minnesota law signed by Walz allows for the termination of parental rights. The law, however, does the opposite.
The law protects the rights of parents in Minnesota if another state terminates custody rights for helping their child receive gender-affirming care. This is typically a situation where there is a dispute between two parents about how to care for a child. The law states that court orders “for the removal of a child issued in another state because the child’s parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in this state must not be enforced in this state.” The law was enacted around the same time that many nearby states, including North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa, adopted laws limiting access to gender-affirming care.
There is no provision of the law that allows Minnesota courts to terminate parental rights based on a parent's refusal to provide gender-affirming care.
Minnesota's law does not allow the state to take custody of children
There is also nothing in the law that allows the state to take custody of a child or provide gender-affirming care over the objection of a child's parents. Rather, the law allows for Minnesota courts to exercise “temporary emergency jurisdiction” over a custody dispute that crosses state lines. This means that courts have “the ability to resolve conflicts when parents disagree on whether their child should receive gender-affirming care,” but “it does not remove custody from parents who decline such care,” Kat Rohn, executive director of LGBTQ rights advocacy group OutFront, told the Washington Post.
The law allows the court to hear these cases, but this does not mean that courts will rule in favor of the parent seeking to help the child obtain gender-affirming care. Instead, the courts will decide based on "evidence about what is in children’s best interests."
There is no scenario under the law in which Minnesota can provide gender-affirming care to a minor over the objection of both parents.
The truth about gender-affirming care for trans children
Kelly is outraged about something that almost never happens: surgery for trans children. Gender-affirming surgeries for minors almost never occur, and “many health care providers do not offer them to minors.”
A study done by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that “gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed for transgender minors.” The study found no cases of surgeries for children 12 and younger in 2019. Among teens, 97% of gender-affirming breast reduction surgeries involved cisgender males.
Kelly's misinformation spreads to Trump and Vance
Kelly has been spreading lies about Walz’s transgender rights policies since the day Harris selected him to be her running mate. “Tim Walz signed a bill that lets the State take away ur kids if you d/n/agree to sterilize them & chop off their body parts in the name of ‘gender affirming care.’ So if your 14-yr-old is sad but thinks it’s gender confusion & u object to castrating him, the St takes custody,” Kelly posted on X on August 6.
Shortly after her original post, Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), began amplifying Kelly’s falsehoods. At a campaign event in Montana on August 9, Trump said that Walz signed a law that lets “the state kidnap children to change their gender so that they go home.”
On August 7, at a campaign event in Wisconsin, Vance said, “I think it’s pretty weird to try to take children away from their parents if the parents don’t want to consent to sex changes. That’s something that Tim Walz did.” Vance repeated the claims in an interview with ABC News on August 11, calling the policy “kidnapping.”
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Why the MAGA movement can’t cut loose toxic liabilities like Tucker Carlson and Laura Loomer
What it takes to get kicked out of the MAGA movement
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/12/24 MMA
MAGA stalwarts Tucker Carlson, Laura Loomer, and Benny Johnson spent the last week demonstrating that as long as you pledge fealty to Donald Trump, there’s virtually nothing you can do that will get you kicked out of his movement.
The trio of pro-Trump personalities drew significant shows of support from the top echelons of the GOP after dabbling in Holocaust denial and Nazi apologia (Carlson); describing Vice President Kamala Harris as “a brain-dead bimbo who sucked so much c**k in order to get to the political position that she's in today” and saying her “White House will smell like curry” (Loomer); and unwittingly receiving vast sums of laundered money that originated with the Kremlin (Johnson).
Right-wing media figures with bizarre fixations and extreme views became an increasingly potent power center within the Republican Party in recent years. The rising influence of these conspiracy-minded propagandists led GOP politicians to seek their favor by mimicking their affects and obsessions, which are toxic to normal people, thus weakening the GOP’s electoral prospects.
Trump’s Tuesday debate performance encapsulated this trend, as he ranted about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets and spread other lies familiar only to those steeped in the deep lore of Fox News prime-time hosts and right-wing online subcultures.
But Trump shows no signs of breaking out of that right-wing bubble. And his willingness to embrace anyone willing to give him their loyalty — no matter how extreme their views — has helped make it impossible for the GOP to separate itself from even the most depraved and corrupt MAGA figures.
By way of contrast, there is one thing that will get you purged from the modern right: forcefully arguing that Trump’s 2020 election subversion effort renders him unfit for the presidency.
- ### Tucker Carlson promoted Nazi apologia. JD Vance is standing by him.
Carlson may be the single right-wing media figure with the most influence within the GOP. He spoke at the Republican National Convention, has Trump’s ear, and helped secure Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s position as Trump’s running mate. Carlson is currently touring the country for events featuring numerous Republican power players, including Vance.
So when Carlson touted Daryl Cooper as “the most important historian in the United States” at the top of their two-hour interview published September 2, he was effectively giving the podcaster the imprimatur of the GOP.
He then proceeded to nod along as Cooper complained that purportedly legitimate German grievances are treated too unsympathetically by historians, argued British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War II, and blamed negligence for how “millions of people ended up dead” in Nazi concentration camps. In a follow-up thread on X, Cooper suggested Churchill should have taken Adolf Hitler up on an offer to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”
Carlson has a long history of promoting white supremacist talking points — I noted a prominent neo-Nazi describing the then-Fox as “our greatest ally” more than seven years ago. But his eager platforming of Holocaust denial and Nazi apologia last week drew condemnations from some elected Republicans and numerous right-wing figures, with some suggesting that Vance and Trump should cut ties with him and that the right as a whole should cast him out.
“It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure,” wrote Jonathan S. Tobin, the editor-in-chief of Jewish News Syndicate and former executive editor at the conservative magazine Commentary. “Call it cancel culture, if you like, but the notion that someone who thinks it is acceptable or legitimate to question the truth about the Holocaust ought not to have access to a potential president, as Carlson appears to have with Trump, is entirely reasonable.”
But the revolt dissipated without forcing a break between Carlson and the upper echelon of the GOP. Carlson “laughed off the backlash,” while Vance “pointedly refused to join in the outrage over Carlson’s chat with Cooper” and even sat for an interview with the host. Kevin Roberts, the president of the powerful Heritage Foundation think tank which oversees Project 2025, kept his September 6 date on Carlson’s tour. Vance’s appearance is still on Carlson’s schedule for later this month.
By Tuesday, Carlson’s Republican critics were reduced to anonymously and impotently telling reporters that if Vance and Trump stick with the host, it might alienate “swing voters in the suburbs.”
- ### Laura Loomer’s Harris commentary is unprintable in a family publication. She’s campaigning with Trump.
The GOP’s situation grew more toxic that evening when an unexpected person disembarked from Trump’s plane when it arrived in Philadelphia for the night’s presidential debate: the pro-Trump influencer Laura Looomer, a notorious bigot and conspiracy theorist.
Loomer is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who is “pro-white nationalism.” She has claimed there is a “genocide” of “native white populations,” which she says are “being replaced in this country by third-world invaders,” and accused “so many rich Jews” of having “a fixation on trying to destroy America.” She has accused the Biden administration of seeking to assassinate Trump; called for the execution of unnamed “Democrats who are guilty of treason”; said that “all of these communist secretaries of state who try to rig our elections” against Trump “belong in jail for election interference”; and shared a video which claimed “9/11 was an Inside Job!”
Loomer is “mentally unstable and a documented liar” who “can not be trusted” and is “toxic and poisonous,” according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) (herself no stranger to bigoted and unhinged conspiracy theories).
But Loomer’s ardent support for Trump has made her a favorite of the former president, who has repeatedly praised her on the campaign trail, repeated her baseless smears on Truth Social, and reportedly attempted to hire her in the spring of 2023 before being dissuaded by “a firestorm” among some of his “most vocal conservative supporters.”
Loomer has in recent weeks described Harris, whose parents immigrated from India and Jamaica, as “a brain-dead bimbo who sucked so much c**k in order to get to the political position that she's in today,” said she “is NOT black and never has been,” said her election would ensure that “Ebonics will replace English as the language of our land,” and said that if she’s elected “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.”
That last remark — which Loomer posted to X on Sunday, days before going on the campaign trail with Trump — led Greene to respond, “This is appalling and extremely racist. It does not represent who we are as Republicans or MAGA. This does not represent President Trump.”
Loomer’s direct contact clearly has some Republicans unnerved. Some are suggesting to reporters that her presence on Trump’s plane led to his unhinged debate rant about migrants eating pets. But she remained on the campaign trail with the former president on Wednesday — including at ceremonies marking the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — and the X account of the National Republican Senate Committee promoted one of her videos that same day.
- ### Benny Johnson took money from Russia, then hosted the RNC co-chair
One might have expected Trumpist influencer Benny Johnson to have had difficulty finding guests for his streaming coverage of Tuesday’s presidential debate.
He was one of several right-wing YouTubers revealed to have unwittingly received significant sums that originated with the Russian government after the Justice Department indicted two Russia propagandists last week for allegedly directing the scheme.
Johnson described himself and the other influencers as the “victims” of the effort. Its existence, however, suggests that Kremlin operatives believed paying Johnson and his colleagues would result in the kind of divisive and extreme content that redounds to Russia’s benefit.
But top Republicans aren’t treating Johnson as radioactive following that revelation.
His “STACKED” guest list on Tuesday featured Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, the former president’s election-denying daughter in law; Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who in his role as House Judiciary chair often pretends to be very concerned about the prospect of foreign money finding its way to Democrats; as well as Greene and Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL).
Lara Trumpconcluded her friendly interview by suggesting that Johnson had been the victim of a government conspiracy, saying, “You know we’re in election season, Benny, whenever they’re bringing Russia back up and trying to make some sort of a connection between Republicans and Russia.”
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mma 9 24
TUCKER CARLSON: I don't think a lot of DC think tanks, but Heritage is an exception in my mind. And the reason that it is is that they are totally sincere about what they're trying to do, which is to improve the country.
…
Heritage is the place that makes it its job to actually understand it, not in just broad terms, thematic terms, but in the precise terms necessary to make things better. And it looks like Trump's going to win, if I'm being totally honest.
…
Kevin Roberts is the guy who's actually thought this through, and I thought it'd be really interesting just to, like, sit down for 10 minutes and ask when and if Trump wins, how do you make the system non-corrupt? What do you actually do? I think this will be really interesting.
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KEVIN ROBERTS (PRESIDENT, HERITAGE FOUNDATION): I guess I should say I’m Kevin Roberts with Project 2025 and I’m here to help.
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I can report to you on behalf of these folks and the rest of common sense, normal Americans, that the first thing that these people would ask for is for the southern border to be closed 100%.
CARLSON: Amen.
KEVIN ROBERTS: And illegal aliens, which is what they are by our Constitution. Nothing against them as human persons, but they are illegal aliens. They must be cut off from government benefits immediately.
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The third thing that we would encourage any policy maker to do is, and I think that we can say this will be a policy priority of a Trump-Vance administration, is that when they get to Washington, DC, they correct the abuses and overreach of the American administrative state.
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It happened because it's more important for them to play DC than it is to actually govern on behalf of the American people. And the real, the real gist of the work we do at Heritage, of Project 2025, which includes, I should say, 111 organizations, is that. That we're trying to break the power of the elites in DC.
As Media Matters' Matt Gertz previously documented “pushing Nazi apologia and Holocaust denial”:
Tucker Carlson no longer shapes national media narratives the way that he did at Fox News, but he may be more powerful than ever within the Republican Party. Behind the scenes, Carlson reportedly lobbied former President Donald Trump to pick Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate and midwifed Robert F. Kennedy’s endorsement of the GOP presidential nominee. He addressed the Republican National Convention in July and has a series of public events lined up featuring guests including Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Carlson’s increased GOP prominence has coincided with his descent to new levels of unhinged crackpottery: The latest edition of his eponymous program dabbles in Holocaust denial and presents “Zionist” financiers as a motive force behind World War II.
On Monday, Carlson published a two-hour interview with Darryl Cooper, the right-wing host of the history podcast Martyr Made. Previewing their discussion on X, Carlson wrote: “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”
Carlson praised his guest at the top of their discussion, comparing him favorably to popular historians like Jon Meacham and Anne Applebaum, whom he described as “the dumbest people in the country” who are also “dishonest political actors.”
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mma
The right-wing media pipeline behind Trump’s election fraud lies
Trump promotes a "Socialism Research Center" director hosted by Tucker Carlson
Written by Matt Gertz
:{:{Published 09/09/24 }:
In a Sunday rant on his Truth Social platform, Donald Trump lifted up a bogus claim of widespread election fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he sourced to a guest of Tucker Carlson, the right-wing media star and sometime Trump adviser.
“An interview by Tucker Carlson of an election expert indicates that 20% of the Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent,” Trump wrote. “Here we go again! Where is the U.S. Attorney General and FBI to INVESTIGATE? Where is the Pennsylvania Republican Party? We will WIN Pennsylvania by a lot, unless the Dems are allowed to CHEAT. THE RNC MUST ACTIVATE, NOW!!!”
Throughout his campaign, Trump has lied about election fraud costing him the 2020 race and baselessly warned that any defeat in 2024 could only be attributed to cheating by Democrats. On Saturday, he pledged that “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
Trump Truth Social Post, 9/7/24
The former president’s social media screeds illustrate the state of the right-wing media bullshit pipeline Trump used to try to steal the 2020 presidential election, which he will use again to delegitimize the 2024 election if he loses it.
Trump’s claim originates with a bogus poll from a right-wing think tank’s “Socialism Research Center”}:
Trump appeared to be referencing an April interview Carlson conducted with Justin Haskins, a think-tanker at the right-wing Heartland Institute, as Mediaite noted.
Carlson introduced Haskins by falsely claimingthat Trump faced federal criminal prosecution simply because he suggested “the 2020 presidential campaign was not on the level,” asserting that “it’s worth denying the legitimacy of that election,” and alleging that a poll Heartland conducted demonstrated that widespread voter fraud did take place.
Haskins went on to detail the poll, in which respondents who said they voted absentee or with mail-in ballots in the 2020 election were asked if they engaged in various illegal actions, like voting in a state in which they were not a legal resident or forging the signature of someone else on their ballot.
“All told, it’s at least — and I say at least — 1 in 5 mail-in ballots involved some kind of fraudulent activity,” he concluded.
But Heartland’s poll “instantly fails the smell test,” Washington Post reporter Philip Bump wrote in December, when Trump previously cited the results. Bump pointed out that the poll would indicate both a massive quantity of fraud happening undetected — and that Republicans were conducting that fraud at the same rate as Democrats. From the post:
A fifth of voters said they voted in a state where they no longer live? About 6 in 10 Americans have never moved out of the states in which they were born. Half of the rest, we are meant to believe, committed an obvious form of election fraud three years ago.
Without, I’ll add, being detected by any authority or by any of the thousands of people who, eager to prove Trump right, have been looking for examples of fraudulent voting. Those professional and amateur sleuths have also somehow not found evidence showing that 1 in 12 absentee voters — millions of people! — were offered cash for their votes. This would seem like it might leave a trail.
Rasmussen did provide a breakdown of the responses by demographic group, which does not exactly help Trump’s argument that the election was being stolen from him. After all, a quarter of the Republicans they interviewed said they also voted by absentee ballot, and their admissions of these federal crimes matched the rates of admission by Democrats.
While Trump in his Truth Social post described Haskins as an “election expert,” Haskins’ Heartland bio gives no indication of any actual expertise in that field. It identifies him as the director of its “Socialism Research Center,” and “the editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com, one of the world’s largest and most influential publications devoted to challenging socialism,” and highlights his publication by various right-wing news outlets and his work co-authoring surveys.
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again}:
Trump is immersed in a right-wing media bubble that confirms his biases and stokes his worst inclinations. He often took action or spoke out during his presidency in response to what he was seeing from favorite outlets like Fox News, a pattern which very much applied to his seditious plot to delegitimize and subvert the 2020 election.
That plan depended on deluging the Republican base with a constant stream of nonsensical claims of election fraud in order to put pressure on its elected officials to act on Trump’s behalf — and right-wing media were more than willing to play their part to achieve those ends.
Trump began regularly promoting Fox reports about the election fraud in the months leading up to the vote.
After he falsely declared victory on the night of Election Day — even as his top campaign and administration aides reportedly told him he had lost — he relied instead on the deranged lies his favored Fox hosts were telling him. (Fox’s coverage ultimately resulted in a record $787.5 million defamation settlement with the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems).
Over the following weeks, Trump also began promoting even more baroque fever dreams from Fox’s fringe-right competitors Newsmax and One America News Network.
Ultimately, Trump sent at least 76 tweets in response to right-wing TV programming about purported fraud in the 2020 election in the weeks between Election Day and the eventual result of his incitement: the January 6, 2021, riot in which his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s Sunday social media post demonstrates that the pipeline that brought election fraud lies to the former president in 2020 is still online as the 2024 election approaches. But the right-wing ecosystem is more fractured and competitive than it was, as former Foxers like Carlson have left the network and attracted their own audiences. Given this ecosystem, we are likely to see the varied outlets and personalities — competing for Trump’s attention and favor — push each other to endorse ever-less-credible claims to support the GOP nominee’s contention that he can lose only if the election is stolen.
With the 2024 election shaping up to be a close one, the Republican Party and its propagandists turning election denial into a core value, and the right-wing ecosystem primed to rerun the demagoguery that helped bring about an insurrection, the next few months are looking grim.
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an 9 24
Tucker Carlson has a history of doing very friendly interviews with controversial figures on the far right, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to Russian President Vladimir Putin (who he interviewed during a visit to Moscow).
Now, according to Jewish Insider's Matthew Kassel, the former Fox News host is drawing criticism for a "friendly interview" with Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper.
Kassel explains, "Carlson, who helms an independent streaming service, has continued to invite a range of controversial figures onto his show, including some guests who have promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories as well as anti-Israel sentiments that he has abstained from challenging. But his decision to host a self-proclaimed podcast historian, Darryl Cooper — who has praised Adolf Hitler and believes Winston Churchill was the 'chief villain' of World War II — has drawn unusually fierce criticism from top [Republican Party] members."
READ MORE:**'Gender chasm': GOP panics over huge Harris lead among women as Trump chases 'bro vote'**
Kassel adds, "In the interview, Cooper diminished the Holocaust by claiming that 'millions of prisoners of war' had 'ended up dead' in concentration camps, suggesting the Nazis did not have genocidal aims against Jews but were simply 'unprepared' for the war, among other false assertions."
Some of the criticism has come from Dani Dayan, who heads Yad Vashem and slammed the interview as "repugnant Holocaust denial."
Because Carlson is such a prominent figure in right-wing media, Kassel notes, many Republicans serving in Congress "have been reluctant to publicly criticize" him.
But Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) told Jewish Insider, "Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing — during my time in the State Assembly, I worked with Democrats and Republicans to help pass legislation aimed at ensuring all students in New York received proper education on the Holocaust — something Mr. Cooper clearly never had."
READ MORE:[Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools
GOP fundraiser Eric Levine described Carlson as a "very troubling person" whose views are not helpful to 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Levine told Jewish Insider, "I continue to believe that Donald Trump is best served by appealing to the center of the party. We can hit the Ronald Reagan wing of the party to appeal to Reagan Republicans, moderates, independents, women. I just think that's a more fertile area for votes, and I would encourage him to focus there and distinguish himself from Kamala Harris on policy."
READ MORE: [Walz’s pro-Trump brother drops public criticism — thanks to family invention]
*Read Jewish Insider's full report at this link.
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nyt no lnx pix
american nationalist: Part 2
How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News — and Became Trump’s Heir
By Nicholas Confessore
Published April 30, 2022
Updated May 16, 2022
Tucker Carlson had a problem.
After years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.
But as Mr. Trump thrashed through his first months in office, Mr. Carlson found himself with an unexpected programming challenge: Fox was too pro-Trump. The new president watched his favorite network religiously, and often tweeted about what he saw there, while Fox broadcasts reliably parroted White House messaging. No one was more on message than Sean Hannity, then Fox’s highest-rated star, who frequently devoted his show to Mr. Trump’s daily battles with Washington Democrats and the media.
Newly planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.
The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
He began seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to “Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” (It was not true: Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who had pulled down his pants outside because he couldn’t make it back home in time.) He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as growing discrimination against white Americans. Stories about the threat of immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed up the intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative that would come to define “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: falling birthrates among the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly alter American society — all engineered or encouraged by a “ruling class” desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.
Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’
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A Times analysis of 1,150 episodes reveals how Tucker Carlson pushes extremist ideas and conspiracy theories into millions of households, five nights a week.
Mr. Carlson’s darkening arc foreshadowed a transformation beginning to sweep through Fox itself. As Mr. Trump fought to build a border wall and keep Muslims out of the United States, Fox’s journalists and right-wing commentators would clash repeatedly over what many longtime staff members saw as a creeping invasion of the news divisions by allies and functionaries of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-time hosts. Mr. Carlson would be both instigator and beneficiary of Fox’s civil war. He forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family’s heir apparent, who would become his most public supporter at Fox. And while Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, the reality is less high-minded. From the beginning, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have been part of a painstaking, data-driven campaign to build and hold Fox’s audience, according to former Fox executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.
The network’s leadership takes a broader view of Fox’s financial and ratings success. A spokeswoman for the network provided the following statement: “Fox News Media has grown through strategic innovation, redirecting investments in journalism to encompass more than 50 percent of the budget while expanding our footprint beyond one legacy linear network to eight thriving platforms. As a result, we’ve doubled our audience, achieved unrivaled results, and have become the destination that more Democrats and independents choose for their news coverage, while our competitors have lost dramatic levels of viewership. We couldn’t be prouder of our entire team, whose commitment to excellence in journalism and opinion has led Fox News Media to all-time ratings records and delivered the best in class to our viewers.”
Mr. Carlson declined to be interviewed for this article. At Fox, his popularity with viewers has allowed him to fend off external critics and shut down those within, from news anchors to junior employees who objected to his rhetoric. His importance to the Murdochs has grown along with his ratings, giving him unusual power at the network. During the waning months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Carlson would harness the tidal wave of white resentment animated by Mr. Trump to draw the largest audience of any show on television.
Today, Mr. Carlson’s influence reaches far beyond the channel he works for, or the audience that tunes in to his show. Mr. Trump is out of office and banned or suspended from the leading social media platforms. But Mr. Carlson remains, both high priest and champion of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers. Each night, Mr. Carlson channels the passions and grievances that have replaced the Reagan-era conservatism he grew up on, from the tyranny of mask mandates to the grave danger posed by critical race theory in schools. He has aggressively defended the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — an attack that Mr. Carlson, borrowing the former president’s “deep state” canards, has portrayed as a false-flag operation masterminded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ambitious Republican lawmakers now echo his embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once relegated to the far-right fringe, that Western elites are importing immigrants to disempower the native-born.
In some respects, Mr. Carlson has taken Trumpism away from Mr. Trump. While the former president has urged his followers to get vaccinated and sought to claim more credit for his administration’s efforts to fight Covid-19, Mr. Carlson has continued to promote doubt about the vaccines’ efficacy, even likening mandates to Nazi medical experiments. On the Jan. 6 anniversary, Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, set out to walk back his comments accurately calling the Trump-inspired riot a “violent terrorist attack.” He didn’t apologize to Mr. Trump. He apologized to Mr. Carlson, in a cringing appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Trumpism Without Trump
“Tucker Carlson Tonight” was at first only a slight update on the classic cable shoutfest. The show arrived on Fox a few months after Roger Ailes, the network’s powerful co-founder, was forced out amid a widening sexual harassment scandal. Mr. Ailes had been lukewarm on Mr. Carlson, then paying his dues on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends.” (According to a Fox colleague at the time, Mr. Ailes had once described Mr. Carlson’s hiring at Fox as “his last chance” in cable news.) But the Murdochs liked him, and Rupert Murdoch, who temporarily took the reins after ousting Mr. Ailes, installed Mr. Carlson in Fox’s 7 p.m. slot.
In segments dubbed “Tucker Takes On,” Mr. Carlson would invite on a liberal foil for combat, an approach Fox executives sometimes referred to as “Twitter for television.” There were lighter segments, like “The Friend Zone,” in which the host would bring on a Fox colleague or friend for a bit of self-promotion, or “King for a Day,” in which viewers would be invited to propose one thing they would do to fix the country.
Less than two months in, Mr. Murdoch promoted Mr. Carlson again, to the higher-profile 9 p.m. slot abruptly vacated by Megyn Kelly. To help write scripts, Mr. Carlson hired one of his old Daily Caller reporters: Blake Neff, a young South Dakotan who would later be let go after CNN outed him for posting racist and sexist jokes online. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began to dial up coverage of college liberals, both a Fox staple and Mr. Neff’s specialty at The Caller. Sometimes titled “Campus Craziness,” the segments featured conservative professors shunned for criticizing Islam and left-wing professors expressing hatred for white people. One episode mocked students in Mississippi who mistook a stray banana peel for a hate crime. Mr. Carlson’s ratings shot up, and just a few months later, in April 2017, Mr. Murdoch promoted him to succeed Mr. O’Reilly, long Fox’s most prominent and popular host. Mr. Carlson’s agents immediately began shopping a book, with a price tag said to be as high as $15 million.
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Mr. Carlson and other hosts repeatedly called a migrant caravan approaching the southern border in 2018 an “invasion.” They continued even after a man who applauded such language on social media fatally shot 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.Credit...Associated Press
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“Another migrant caravan of people from another country who have not been invited to this country are coming nevertheless and telling us that we’re not allowed to do anything about it. Will that caravan make it to the U.S. border? And what exactly happens if and when it does? That is next.”
To help redesign “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for the 8 p.m. hour, Fox assigned Ron Mitchell, a former O’Reilly producer recently promoted to Fox’s executive ranks, where he would supervise “story development” across prime time. Fox had always excelled not just at attracting more viewers than its rivals but at getting them to stick around longer, giving an added bump to its Nielsen ratings. To maintain its dominance in the post-Ailes era, the teams working on Fox’s evening lineup began to make wider use of expensive ratings data known as “minute-by-minutes.” Unlike the “quarter-hour” ratings more commonly used in cable newsrooms, which show how each 15-minute “block” performed, the minute-by-minutes allow producers to scrutinize an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. Mr. Carlson, determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC, was among the network’s most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes, according to three former Fox employees.
His new direction — Trumpism without Trump — took shape that summer. The lighter segments faded from view. Notably, Mr. Trump was mentioned less often than on “Hannity,” and Mr. Carlson sometimes even criticized the president, particularly when he deviated from campaign promises like building the border wall and avoiding what he had once called “stupid” wars. In private, Mr. Carlson mocked the president’s habit of calling to head off his on-air attacks. (When Mr. Trump called to pre-empt criticism of one foreign-policy move, Mr. Carlson declined the call, according to a former Fox employee who witnessed it.)
Most strikingly, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began devoting more and more airtime to immigration and to what its host depicted as the looming catastrophe of demographic change. “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” said another former Fox employee, who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.
He covered protesters’ attempts to pull down Confederate monuments with hyperbolic intensity; one such episode, he told his viewers, marked the beginning of “the destruction of America’s delicate social fabric.” His producers scavenged local news for under-covered items about refugees and migrants, which Mr. Carlson blew up into national news. He also began to venture farther afield than other hosts. He mocked Austria as the soon-to-be “caliphate of West Arabia.” The immigration backlash and migrant crimes in countries like Sweden and Germany became forewarnings of America’s future. “The country’s in decline,” he told viewers in the fall of 2017. He added: “Everyone knows that. It’s not racist to note that.”
A Ratings Game
But as America declined on screen, Mr. Carlson ascended behind it.
Fox News was undergoing the most significant changes in its history, a shift that would position Mr. Carlson to seize outsize power within the network. The Murdochs were negotiating to sell most of their television and studio assets to the Walt Disney Company, a transaction that would also resolve the family’s succession battle, leaving Lachlan Murdoch as sole heir to the throne. He was widely viewed as having more conservative politics than his father. In Australia, he had been instrumental in installing a number of hard-right executives and editors at the family’s media properties, while overseeing efforts to transform the little-watched cable channel Sky News into a mini-Fox, with a fiery evening lineup. At Fox, he became friendly with Mr. Carlson, who cultivated a perception within the network that the two men were close.
Mr. Murdoch ran the new Fox enterprises — now a stripped-down company with Fox News at its core — from across the country, in Los Angeles. (Last year, he moved back to Australia.) In mid-2018, he announced the appointment of Suzanne Scott, an Ailes-era network veteran, as the new Fox News chief executive. Though credited with helping revamp the network’s post-O’Reilly lineup, Ms. Scott, who would preside over Fox expansions into weather, books and other new divisions, seemed disinclined to exert Mr. Ailes’s tight rein over Fox’s talent, according to former employees. And where Mr. Ailes had been regarded within Fox — if not always outside it — as protective of the news divisions’ credibility, Ms. Scott, mindful of the cable industry’s long-term headwinds, was focused on preserving the network’s audience. “Suzanne began talking about, ‘We have to do more of what we do best,’” said one former senior employee.
Under Ms. Scott, Fox’s news shows began to more closely mimic its highly rated prime-time opinion shows in both tone and topic. Guests brought on to analyze the day’s stories would instead find themselves asked to respond to clips of provocative comments made by Mr. Carlson and other hosts or guests the night before — a backdoor way for Fox to inject prime-time material into the lower-rated dayside shows. In 2018, after a former Hannity producer took over the network’s widely read website, FoxNews.com, he assembled a team of reporters called Fox News Flash, who were deployed to write news stories built solely around video clips from prime time. Mr. Carlson’s drove the most traffic, according to a former FoxNews.com employee.
One major force behind the news-side changes was a former Megyn Kelly producer named Tom Lowell, a Fox vice president who assumed growing authority over the network’s correspondents and news coverage. He was considered a favorite of the elder Mr. Murdoch, who appreciated his tabloidy approach to news curation. He was less popular among his subordinates, who nicknamed him “the burglar,” on account of his reputation for stealing credit for ideas, and because of a long-ago incident that became Fox lore as he rose: In his 20s, Mr. Lowell and two friends were arrested after breaking into a liquor store in Florida. (Mr. Lowell received three years’ probation, according to public records.) One week, while an executive who typically ran the high-level daily news meeting was on vacation, Mr. Lowell took over the role and never gave it back.
He encouraged shows to focus on the kind of grabby, inflammatory stories that dominated prime time and drove ratings. As the midterm elections approached and Mr. Trump’s unpopularity threatened to sink down-ballot Republicans, Fox began nonstop coverage of a migrant caravan wending its way through Central America to the U.S. border. Mr. Carlson and other prime-time hosts and guests called the caravan — mostly women and children — an “invasion” dozens of times in the weeks before the election, according to tallies by Media Matters and CNN. They continued to do so even after a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue in late October and murdered 11 people, leaving behind a trail of social media posts railing against immigrants and Jews and applauding how people were now calling illegal immigrants “invaders.”
Shortly after the attack, the longtime anchor Shepard Smith, a beloved figure in the Fox newsroom, threw a brushback pitch at his own network. “There is no invasion,” he told viewers of his afternoon news show. “No one’s coming to get you.” Whether or not the caravan threatened America, however, it was a boon to Fox: That October, ratings were even higher than they had been right before the 2016 presidential election. Network executives soon began retooling the dayside shows, applying the approach that had worked for Mr. Carlson and his prime-time colleagues. Mr. Mitchell, now promoted to a high-level position running “analytics” across Fox, began sitting in on story meetings to vet topics and guests, a role that discomfited some reporters and producers. He handed out color-coded bar charts detailing the minute-by-minute performance of each show. “They’re all obsessed with the minute-by-minutes,” said a former Fox employee. “Every second that goes on that network now gets scrutinized.”
Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell pitched the initiative as “Moneyball” for television: a data-driven, audience-first approach to deciding what to cover and how to cover it. But journalists on the daytime lineup discerned a pattern to what the audience didn’t like. Segments featuring Fox’s own reporters consistently drew lower ratings, especially if they were covering stories the audience deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump. So did guests who leaned left, or simply staked out independent viewpoints. Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell, for example, urged shows not to book Chris Stirewalt, a respected, down-the-middle political editor and analyst. But immigration was a hit. Coverage of migrant caravans became a Fox mainstay, with one correspondent even embedded with refugee groups.
Fox executives wanted to focus on “the grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up,” said one current Fox employee. “They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you.”
Dangers Abroad
In the spring of 2018, Mr. Carlson aired a segment that jolted even his more jaded Fox colleagues. South Africa’s white farmers were “being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he told viewers. The Black-led government “just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”
Until Mr. Carlson waded in, few Americans were paying attention to “farm murders” in South Africa. In a country of 60 million people, where violent crime is common but the vast majority of its victims are Black, the police record dozens of murders of whites on farms and other small holdings each year. But the notion that white farmers were being singled out for attack was largely confined to the far-right web, where writers and commenters warned of a burgeoning “white genocide” — itself a neo-Nazi trope dating back to the end of apartheid.
Then the Murdoch empire stepped in. In the winter of 2018, reporters for a Murdoch-owned Australian tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, contacted AfriForum, a self-styled civil rights group for South Africa’s Afrikaner white minority. For months, with little success, the group had been circulating widely contested studies claiming to show that white farmers faced a disproportionate risk of murder and brutalization. After touring white-owned farms in South Africa, the Telegraph team returned with a package of columns and news articles asserting that being a South African farmer was “now the world’s most dangerous job” and demanding that they be granted emergency refugee visas. From there, the story would be picked up by the Fox-inspired nighttime hosts on Sky News. Within days, Australia’s home affairs minister floated the idea of fast-track visas for South African farmers.
The idea went nowhere, but the story soon jumped around the world. In a 2018 meeting of Fox News executives, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, Mr. Lowell proposed covering farm murders for American audiences, echoing the fevered framing of his Australian colleagues: a country descending into chaos, an impoverished Black majority scheming to kill white farmers and steal their land. Mr. Carlson, it turned out, was also pursuing the story. He had briefly mentioned farm murders in a segment that March, and two months later, when AfriForum officials made a lobbying trip to Washington, an ally put them in touch with him.
“My understanding was, he was interested in the topic already, and someone we had gotten to know over time recommended he speak with us,” said Ernest Roets, AfriForum’s deputy chief executive, who declined to identify the intermediary.
AfriForum formally rejects the far-right idea of a “white genocide.” But when he interviewed Mr. Roets on his show that May, Mr. Carlson bulldozed through the group’s careful caveats, describing “in some sense an intentional campaign,” supported by the government, “to crush a racial minority within your country.”
In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Roets acknowledged that Mr. Carlson had exaggerated.
“It’s not my job, as a spokesperson, to tell a journalist how he or she should frame a question,” he said. “I would be a bad spokesperson to use what little time I have to say, ‘Well, let’s frame that question a little differently.’”
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In 2018, Mr. Carlson began airing segments on “farm murders” in South Africa, linking the killing of white farmers there to government proposals to seize land without compensation — something that had never come to pass. The coverage echoed far-right narratives about a looming “white genocide.”Credit...The New York Times
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“South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he said, adding that “the government just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”
:{:{Mr. Carlson’s coverage sparked a rare high-level dispute inside the network. During a subsequent meeting of Fox’s senior executives, Brian Jones, president of Fox Business Network and the highest-ranking Black man in Fox leadership, explained that almost everything Mr. Carlson was saying on the air was wrong.}:
Legislators in South Africa, where whites still own the majority of private farmland, had begun debating a constitutional amendment to allow uncompensated land seizures, but no such measure had been passed. Though intended to reverse apartheid-era land dispossession, the proposed amendment did not target farmers on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Nor had the government backed a campaign of ethnic violence and murder. Mr. Jones told his fellow executives that Mr. Carlson’s coverage had been ripped from far-right sites, including the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. (Mr. Jones, who left the network in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.)}:
Mr. Lowell defended the segments, and Mr. Jones was ultimately overruled. A Fox spokeswoman disputed that account, saying that Mr. Lowell had only pushed for the story to be investigated to see if it was accurate. But word of the high-level editorial dispute soon filtered down through the network. Even among the generally right-of-center rank-and-file, discontent was growing over Fox’s nativist tilt and racial scaremongering. Now staff members who had watched the farm-murder story swirl around far-right websites wondered how it had arrived at their network, and why Mr. Lowell and Mr. Carlson had pushed it, especially when Fox was so busy covering Trump-related breaking news and more conventional controversies.
But Mr. Carlson dug in. He covered South African farm murders and land disputes throughout the spring and summer, again claiming that officials there were seizing land that they hadn’t under a constitutional amendment that didn’t exist. That August, after an episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” President Trump tweeted that his administration would “closely study” the seizure of white-owned land and the “large-scale killing of farmers.” Alt-right and neo-Nazi figures in the United States cheered the propaganda coup. Patrick Casey, leader of the group Identity Evropa, exulted that Mr. Trump’s proclamation could help bring white nationalist ideas to a mainstream audience.
“Conservatives becoming aware of the plight of White South Africans has the potential to take them beyond the current limitations of ‘acceptable’ conservative immigration debate toward identitarianism,” Mr. Casey tweeted.
Strange Bedfellows
Fox journalists soon had another reason for concern. Around the same time Mr. Carlson was promoting the notion of a South African ethnic cleansing, Fox was lurching through a post-Ailes rebuilding of its human resources organization. Lines of authority and power had always been mysterious at Fox, and so when a formal organizational chart appeared on the company’s employee portal, some curious employees logged on to see who reported directly to Rupert Murdoch.
Most of Murdoch’s subordinates were unsurprising, according to several people who viewed the chart. But one came as a shock: Peter Brimelow, founder of the website VDare.
The British-born Mr. Brimelow had known Mr. Murdoch for decades and once worked as a columnist for MarketWatch, the Murdoch-owned financial news site. But over the years, he had adopted more pronounced nativist views; VDare, started in 1999, had evolved into a hub of the new, more online-oriented white nationalist movement. Mr. Brimelow once described the Obama administration as a “Minority Occupation Government” and California as “totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants.” Shortly after Mr. Trump was elected, he spoke at a conference held by the National Policy Institute, a latter-day white nationalist group. (Mr. Brimelow sued The Times in 2020 for articles in which either he or VDare was described as white nationalist; a judge dismissed the case later that year. A separate lawsuit brought by VDare is still pending.)
Mr. Brimelow’s apparent role at Fox set off a new wave of consternation and gossip. Employees who asked about the relationship were given a variety of explanations. Mr. Brimelow was said to be helping with Mr. Murdoch’s memoirs — a project that, as far as most people understood, their boss had abandoned in the 1990s — or writing speeches, or attached to some other Murdoch initiative. In short order, several former Fox employees recalled, the organizational chart was taken down entirely.
A Fox spokeswoman said Mr. Brimelow did not currently have any relationship with the company. Mr. Brimelow declined to comment, writing in an email that The Times could not be trusted, so “you cannot expect any sane person to talk to you.”
In August 2018, Mr. Brimelow was spotted at a birthday party for the Trump adviser Larry Kudlow, drawing an article in The Washington Post and prompting the White House and Mr. Kudlow to distance themselves from Mr. Brimelow. But at Fox, some took the Brimelow discovery as an indirect explanation for the latitude Fox had extended Mr. Carlson on South Africa. If Mr. Murdoch had someone like Mr. Brimelow working for him, reasoned the former employee, he would have little objection to Mr. Carlson peddling far-right themes. (By coincidence, the same week Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers had begun their emergency-visa campaign in Australia, VDare published a story imploring Mr. Trump to welcome South African farmers to the United States.)
South Africa was not an aberration. In an echo of how Mr. Murdoch’s media empire had spent decades nurturing right-wing populism throughout the English-speaking world, Mr. Carlson had begun to fashion his show as a broader platform for nationalist ideas. From early on, he had promoted right-wing figures from abroad, people who could provide testimony on his themes of immigration and social decay. Now he was forging links with an increasingly globalized movement of populist activists and politicians — some of them eager for influence in Trump-era Washington.
Among those politicians was Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, a rising darling of the international far right. In late 2018, the Hungarian embassy hired a lobbyist, William Nixon, with business ties to Mr. Carlson’s father; within weeks, the lobbyist was in touch with Mr. Carlson about arranging an interview with the Hungarian foreign minister, who was planning a trip to Washington. During these talks, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, Mr. Carlson mentioned that his head writer, Mr. Neff, was headed to Hungary the following year to report on how Mr. Orban was “improving the country.” (At the time, allies of Mr. Orban, a promoter of what he called “illiberal democracy,” had completed a sweeping takeover of the country’s news media, and the government would soon begin efforts to shut down a Budapest university founded by the liberal philanthropist George Soros.) In an email to The Times, Mr. Neff characterized his trip as a vacation.
Mr. Nixon connected Mr. Neff to the embassy to arrange interviews during the trip, according to the person with knowledge of the conversations. He also brought the Hungarian ambassador to Mr. Carlson’s Washington office, where the three men bonded over fly fishing, a popular pastime in Hungary. Mr. Carlson said he had long been interested in Mr. Orban and would welcome the chance to interview him.
That February, Mr. Carlson hosted the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, who touted Mr. Orban’s hard line against immigration and his efforts to encourage families to have more children. And last summer, Mr. Carlson traveled to Budapest to produce what was in effect an extended infomercial for the Orban government. In a series of segments and a gentle interview with the prime minister himself, Mr. Carlson employed a sanitized version of Mr. Orban’s Hungary to frame his own arguments about an American civilization under attack by alien forces.
Where South Africa was a warning of the hell that America could become, Hungary was a vision of the paradise that could be had by taking America back. “You don’t have to watch your country collapse,” Mr. Carlson told viewers. “You don’t have to have leaders who hate the population or divide their own people against each other.”
Going Farther Afield
The day after the 2018 midterms, as darkness fell over Washington’s leafy Kent neighborhood, members of a local antifa group appeared outside Mr. Carlson’s home to protest his coverage of the migrant caravan. Standing in his driveway, yelling through bullhorns, they chanted, “We know where you sleep at night.” Mr. Carlson was not at home, but his wife, Susie Andrews, was. According to the Carlsons, someone banged on the door. Panicked, she locked herself in the pantry and dialed 911.
Mr. Carlson had lived in Washington for most of his adult life, and loved it. Two longtime friends said he was deeply shaken by the protests outside his home. “All of a sudden, it just became impossible to live there,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview last fall with Dave Rubin, a conservative YouTube personality and occasional guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” He added, “I felt like we were really part of the city and then, next thing you know, people are showing up at the house.” He worried that “you’re going to wind up shooting somebody.” Within a year, he would flee Washington entirely, seeking asylum far beyond the Acela corridor.
In March 2019, Mr. Carlson set out to buy a dilapidated town garage in Bryant Pond, Maine, where his family had owned a vacation getaway for decades. In a letter to town officials, he pledged that Fox would install a state-of-the-art studio there. Mr. Carlson had never been guarded about his home in Bryant Pond, and often told interviewers about his love of Maine living. But when a local newspaper, The Sun Journal, published news of the proposed purchase, he lashed out like a man under siege. “All it does is hurt me,” he told the paper’s reporter, Steve Collins, explaining that Fox would never agree to leave $1 million worth of equipment in an isolated rural location if everyone knew about it. (Mr. Carlson would raise the stakes when The Times later assigned a freelancer to write about his life in Bryant Pond, accusing the paper of seeking to endanger his wife and children. A Maine-based freelance photographer, whom Mr. Carlson named on air, found his own door banged on by strangers after dark.)
In the end, Mr. Carlson proceeded with his plans, and by the following spring, The Sun Journal reported that his new studio was complete. He put his Washington house up for sale and began living in Maine much of the year, taping “Tucker Carlson Tonight” from Bryant Pond. (When not in Maine, Mr. Carlson usually broadcasts from Florida, where he has a second home in the resort town of Boca Grande.)
A different kind of threat was emerging inside Fox itself. In March 2019, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters surfaced old recordings of Mr. Carlson defending statutory rape and calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” comments that had yet more advertisers fleeing and Fox colleagues fuming, especially some younger employees. That same month, the Fox opinion host Jeanine Pirro questioned on air whether Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and Somali-born former refugee, might be more loyal to her Muslim faith than to the Constitution. The slur prompted a young Muslim employee named Hufsa Kamal, who worked on Fox’s flagship news show, “Special Report With Bret Baier,” to chastise Ms. Pirro on Twitter — an extraordinary breach of the network’s hermetic culture. Not long after, as Ms. Kamal endured a stream of online abuse and threats from Fox fans, a producer in Fox’s Los Angeles bureau named Dan Gallo wrote to the company’s top human resources executives.
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Mr. Carlson ran a segment in 2017 on a small group of Romani asylum seekers in Pennsylvania town. Local reports of a Romani child going to the bathroom outside became, on Mr. Carlson’s show, a plague of streets covered “with human feces.”
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“I’m merely saying this has been a distinct group for a thousand years. It actually hasn’t assimilated, for the most part, into the cultures in which it has been hosted. And so I wonder why we think they’re going to assimilate in Pennsylvania.”
“When Fox personalities make these sorts of statements, it damages my credibility as a Fox journalist & my ability to effectively cover stories,” wrote Mr. Gallo, who provided copies of his emails to The Times. He argued that Mr. Carlson and Ms. Pirro were creating an unsafe workplace for employees like Ms. Kamal, and asked that Fox take action. “If an employee said those things in the workplace, especially with Muslim colleagues present, I think they would be disciplined,” Mr. Gallo wrote. (While Fox had issued a statement condemning Ms. Pirro’s remarks, she had not apologized.) Before sending his complaint, Mr. Gallo showed a copy to Ms. Kamal to make sure she was comfortable with it.
In a subsequent phone call, the executives, Kevin Lord and Nicolle Campa, seemed receptive, Mr. Gallo said in a statement to The Times. They thanked him for his letter and promised to relay it to Ms. Scott and Jay Wallace, Fox News’s president, so that they could understand the impact the hosts were having on the network’s journalists. Mr. Gallo assumed the complaint would otherwise remain confidential, as with other human resources matters.
A month later, Mr. Carlson landed in Los Angeles for a weeklong West Coast stint. Minutes after arriving in the bureau, he tracked down Mr. Gallo, who was sitting in an office talking to two colleagues. “Are you Dan Gallo?” he interrupted. When Mr. Gallo tried to introduce himself, an indignant Mr. Carlson simply handed him a blue notecard with his cellphone number. The next time Mr. Gallo had a problem with his show, Mr. Carlson said, he should “do the honorable thing” and call. Mr. Gallo offered to talk then and there, he said, but Mr. Carlson wasn’t interested. “I’m busy,” the host said, and walked off.
That night, Mr. Gallo wrote again to the human resources executives, asking who had told Mr. Carlson about his complaint. They promised to talk to Mr. Carlson. But pressed on the leak in a subsequent phone call, Mr. Lord refused to look into the matter. He blamed workplace gossip, and insinuated that Mr. Gallo himself was responsible for the leak. “That was insulting,” Mr. Gallo said. “I stuck to the proper channels and had moved on.” He left Fox that summer, and now works for MSNBC. (The writer of this article is an MSNBC contributor.)
Far from being chastened, Mr. Carlson seemed to be testing his boundaries. In August 2019, days after a 21-year-old white man killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart to protest what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Mr. Carlson declared on the air that white supremacy was largely a “hoax.” Even more advertisers fled; Mr. Carlson embarked on what Fox described as a preplanned vacation. While he was gone, a Fox producer named Cristina Corbin tweeted an indirect rejoinder to the prime-time star. “White supremacy is real, as evidenced by fact,” Ms. Corbin wrote. “Claims that it is a ‘hoax’ do not represent my views.”
She had not mentioned Fox’s star by name, but Mr. Carlson appeared to catch wind of her tweet almost immediately. A few hours later, while still on vacation, he called Ms. Corbin at work from a blocked number, then berated her for airing her disagreement publicly. “Shut your mouth,” he yelled, according to a former Fox executive briefed on the episode. Ms. Corbin did not respond to an email seeking comment for this article; Fox declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements pertaining to human resources matters.
When Ms. Corbin reported the incident to Fox management, Mr. Carlson denied making such a call, according to the former executive. He was soon back to explaining to his viewers how liberals and Big Tech wanted them to “just shut up.”
The Backlash Pays
It was a frequent refrain on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”— and a calculated one. According to former Fox employees, Mr. Carlson and his team had learned to work the calls for boycotts and cancellation into their programming playbook. Mr. Carlson would grab third rails on race or immigration, then harvest the inevitable backlash, returning the next evening to roast his critics for trying to suppress an obvious truth. The feedback loop didn’t just drive up ratings. It boosted the audience’s loyalty to Fox, while encouraging audiences to identify with Mr. Carlson himself, now playing victim to the same forces he was warning them about. (Liberal-leaning outlets and Twitter influencers also capitalized on Mr. Carlson’s provocations, using clips from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to attract and provoke his haters rather than his fans.)
In early June 2020, Mr. Carlson told his audience that the Black Lives Matter protests were “definitely not about Black lives” and to “remember that when they come for you.” The next evening, as Fox’s public relations team insisted Mr. Carlson’s comment was being mischaracterized, Mr. Carlson leaned in. “The mob came for us — irony of ironies,” he told Fox viewers. “They spent the last 24 hours trying to force the show off the air for good. They won’t succeed in that, thankfully. We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they’re not intimidated.”
Off-camera, Mr. Carlson could be less defiant. In a conversation that spring with Eric Owens, one of his former employees at The Daily Caller, he worried that the controversy over his show had made it difficult for his children to get jobs and internships; he worried that his younger children wouldn’t get into college. “It’s not right for this to affect my family, and literally affect my children’s future,” Mr. Carlson said, according to Mr. Owens.
But it’s less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Fox’s bottom line: To compensate for the lost advertising, Fox turned “Tucker Carlson Tonight” into a promotional engine for the network itself. It replaced the fleeing sponsors with a torrent of in-house promos, leveraging Mr. Carlson’s popularity to drive viewers to other, more advertiser-friendly offerings. By early 2019, roughly a fifth of all advertising “impressions” on the show were from in-house ads, according to data from the analytics company iSpot.tv. That summer, as Fox fended off criticism of Mr. Carlson’s “hoax” comments, the proportion climbed to more than a third. (A Fox spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to provide specific figures.) “Fox is basically an enormous loyalty brand,” said Jason Damata, the chief executive officer of Fabric Media, a media consultancy. “He’s the hook.”
Other advertising slots were taken by direct-to-consumer brands that either didn’t care about Mr. Carlson’s bad publicity or saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose chief executive, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie, began airing more than $1 million worth of ads on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” each month. Fox appeared to be using MyPillow to cushion Mr. Carlson: As other advertising dried up, the company’s ads spiked. (All told, through December 2021, Mr. Lindell had bought advertising that would have cost $91 million at publicized rates; discounts probably made that sum lower.)
Blue-chip advertisers would never return to the show in force. But thanks in part to the large audiences he could provide for those advertisers who remained, and the premium prices Fox could charge them, Mr. Carlson’s ad revenue began to recover. Every year since 2018, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has brought more annual ad revenue to Fox than any other show, according to estimates by iSpot. Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement” theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018 but brought in almost twice as much money.
As “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became more toxic to advertisers, it also began featuring fewer guests who disagreed with the host, and more guests who simply echoed or amplified Mr. Carlson’s own message. It wasn’t just that liberals didn’t want to debate him, though some now refused to appear on the show, as Mr. Carlson complained during a Fox appearance last summer; Fox was learning that its audience didn’t necessarily like hearing from the other side.
“From my discussions with Fox News bookers, my takeaway is that they’ve made the judgment that they just don’t do debate segments anymore,” said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who appeared regularly on Mr. Carlson’s show until the summer of 2020. Across much of the Fox lineup, former employees said, producers were relying more and more on panels of pro-Trump conservatives competing to see who could denounce Democrats more fervently — a ratings gambit one former Fox employee called “rage inflation.” (One exception, perhaps, is “The Five,” a panel show featuring four conservative co-hosts and one rotating co-host from the left, which has beaten Mr. Carlson in total viewers in some recent months.)}:
And as advertisers fled, Mr. Carlson’s opening monologue grew. Where once he spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral just-asking-questions mode, he now often opened the show with a lengthy stemwinder, addressing his audience as “you” and the objects of his fury as a shadowy “they.” Ratings data showed that the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to one former and one current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke directly to the camera for more than quarter of the hourlong show. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.
:{:{His critics at Fox found themselves further marginalized: After an on-air feud with Mr. Carlson over the legality of Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials, Shepard Smith was reportedly warned against criticizing his fellow host — something the network denies — and he departed Fox in October 2019. Mr. Carlson’s ratings grew, buoyed by the increasingly heated and apocalyptic presidential campaign.}:
One night in June 2020, after yet another commercial-to-commercial attack on Black Lives Matter protesters, Mr. Carlson addressed the matter directly. Ratings were more than just ammunition in the cable-news wars, Mr. Carlson explained. They were proof that his viewers were not alone, proof that they were right. “Last night, we did something we don’t do very often: We spent the entire first block of the show on a single topic,” he said. More people had watched the previous night’s show, he observed, than any other hour of prime-time television that evening — more than the old evening news broadcasts, more than any sitcoms or sports events. “Millions and millions of Americans agree with you,” he said. “You are not crazy. Your views are not evil.”}:
That month, another Fox employee complained to human resources that Mr. Carlson’s on-air statements contradicted Mr. Murdoch’s public pledge to “support our Black colleagues” in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. In response, an executive cited the company’s need to allow “diverse voices and perspectives,” according to a person familiar with the exchange. At the end of the month, when the Nielsen figures trickled in, Fox sent out a triumphant news release: Mr. Carlson had posted the highest quarterly ratings of any cable news show in history — breaking Mr. Hannity’s old record and helping make Fox the most-watched channel on all of basic cable.
An Upside-Down Nation
In the end, it was Fox’s own political unit, a bastion of traditional news-gathering, that brought the network’s increasingly wobbly balancing act to an end. Just before midnight on Election Day, hours ahead of other networks and news consortiums, Fox announced that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the swing state of Arizona. Mr. Trump instantly declared the result a “fraud,” but the following Saturday, as late votes trickled in, Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania, ending the presidential race.
:{:{Mr. Trump’s defeat was the ultimate glitch in Fox’s Trump narrative, one that couldn’t be so easily spun or papered over by its prime-time hosts. Despondent Trump supporters began to look elsewhere for news, encouraged by anti-Fox tweets from Mr. Trump himself.}:
In early December, the upstart conservative network Newsmax, which had positioned itself as even more devotedly pro-Trump, scored its first ratings win over Fox. It was a minor crack in Fox’s cable dominance — fewer than 30,000 viewers in one audience segment on a single December night in the 7 p.m. hour — but it sent shudders through the Fox executive suites. The network might shrug off the complaints of a few advertisers; losing audience to a right-leaning rival was another thing. That month, according to one former Fox executive, Rupert Murdoch delivered a message to the network’s chief executive, Ms. Scott: Clean house. (A Fox spokeswoman disputed this description.)}:
:{:{The purge would not come until early January, as CNN and MSNBC overtook Fox, the cable-news ratings leader for two decades, and as Washington reeled from the violent, Trump-inspired effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory}:. In the intervening weeks, Mr. Carlson and other Fox prime-time hosts would pump out a steady stream of attacks on the election results, often drawing on claims of voter fraud from Mr. Trump and his new legal team, led by Rudolph W. Giuliani.
:{:{Fox’s prime-time guns also aimed inward: When a Fox White House correspondent and occasional Carlson guest, Kristin Fisher, told viewers that much of one rambling Giuliani presentation “was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court,” Mr. Carlson went on the air to attack “credentialed reporters, some of whom we know and like,” who were refusing “even to acknowledge” the already discredited claims.}:
He had not mentioned Ms. Fisher by name, but she was warned by superiors to keep her head down, according to two former employees. She did not reappear on air for several days, and her appearances declined significantly in subsequent weeks. (Ms. Fisher later left for CNN.) Around the network, supervisors repeated an Orwellian mantra: “Respect the audience.”}:}:
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Mr. Carlson has fanned doubts about the 2020 election and often cast those who stormed the Capitol as victims: innocent citizens entrapped by scheming Democrats.Credit...The New York Times
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"When a group of sad, disenfranchised people who have been left out of the modern economy show up at your office, you don't have to listen to their complaints. Not for a second. Why would you?"
:{:{Much as Mr. Carlson’s vast cable audience had grown to encompass the white nationalist fringe, it now drew in some of the hundreds who would go on to attack the Capitol.}:
At least eight people now facing criminal charges stemming from the insurrection commented on Mr. Carlson’s official Facebook page in the preceding months, according to an analysis of since-deleted Facebook accounts conducted for The Times by CounterAction, a security firm. They included Graydon Young and Connie Meggs, members of the Oath Keepers militia organization who would be indicted on federal conspiracy charges. Another Carlson fan was Tammy Bronsburg, who on Election Day posted “WE ARE TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK.”
Two months later, she donned a Trump flag as a cape and joined the crowd breaking into the Capitol. (Mr. Young pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government against the Oath Keepers; Ms. Meggs and Ms. Bronsburg are fighting the charges against them. Their lawyers did not comment on the Facebook posts.) Later that day, as the Capitol lay stained with blood and broken glass, the Proud Boys posted a defiant message of justification on the Parler social media platform, borrowing a meme from Mr. Carlson’s segments on Black Lives Matter. The lesson of the civil rights protests, Mr. Carlson had claimed, was that “violence works.”}:
:{:{Soon after the Capitol riot, Fox replaced its 7 p.m. host — Martha MacCallum, a news anchor and part of the political reporting team — with another hour of right-wing opinion programming.}:
Mr. Stirewalt, the political editor, who had vanished from the air after defending the Arizona call, was fired; his boss, Fox’s Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, retired. More than a dozen reporters for Fox’s digital arm were also laid off, a culling that followed pre-election layoffs in the Brain Room, the in-house research and fact-checking division. Publicly, Fox portrayed these changes as a restructuring, but as with the Moneyball initiative, their impact was felt chiefly in the news ranks, now an expensive and increasingly distracting legacy of the Ailes era.}:
:{:{Trumpism without Trump had begun as a programming strategy. Now, with Mr. Trump gone from the White House and cut off from Twitter and Facebook, it has become a reality. Mr. Carlson, more successfully than any other figure on the right, has filled the vacuum, picking up the banner of Mr. Trump’s movement and the followers who insist he was cheated of victory.}:
Last year, according to The Times’s analysis, nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — included segments playing down the Capitol riot, lurching into ever more fantastical terrain. Much as he once recast the country’s racial hierarchy to make white Americans an oppressed class, Mr. Carlson has inverted the story of Jan. 6 into a modern-day Lost Cause. On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the rioters were not aggressors; they were victims. Last June, he floated a conspiracy theory that the riot was an inside job, claiming that an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a government court filing was “almost certainly working for the F.B.I.” In fact, it was Sharon Caldwell, the wife of an insurrectionist with ties to the Oath Keepers; a few months later, Mr. Carlson brought Ms. Caldwell onto the show, now casting her and her husband as the victims of overzealous prosecutors.}:
:{:{This past fall, Mr. Carlson and his team distilled the show’s Jan. 6 fantasia into “Patriot Purge,” a three-part “documentary” for the Fox Nation streaming channel. After a trailer aired in late October, two longtime Fox contributors quit in protest. Mainstream media outlets and fact-checking sites inevitably eviscerated Mr. Carlson’s work for its factual errors and dubious assertions, but that was beside the point.}:
:{:{ After starting the year with the lowest ratings in cable news, Fox ended 2021 back on top. And Mr. Carlson’s inverted, invented narrative of the Jan. 6 insurrection has become a new Republican orthodoxy: This February, members of the Republican National Committee approved a resolution calling investigations into the attack a “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” censuring two Republicans who sit on a congressional panel scrutinizing the riot.}:
“Propaganda tends to bewilder people, to confuse them when they first hear it,” Mr. Carlson observed last fall, in a monologue accusing liberals and mainstream outlets of themselves misleading the public about Covid-19, Jan. 6 and the 2020 elections. “It is so completely and obviously untrue,” he continued. “‘What is this?’ you think. And yet for that very reason, because it’s so ridiculous, so absurd, propaganda tends to be effective.”}:}:
Reporting was contributed by Larry Buchanan, Weiyi Cai, Ben Decker, Alan Feuer, Barbara Harvey, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Karen Yourish. Jack Begg and Julie Tate contributed research.
Nicholas Confessore is New York-based political and investigative reporter for The Times and a staff writer at the Times Magazine, covering power and influence in Washington, tech, media and beyond. He can be reached at nicholas.confessore@nytimes.com. More about Nicholas Confessore
A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: American Nationalist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Republican Party, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics
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tucker fired
intercept
it’s been a lifetime since Fox News offloaded Tucker Carlson, and when I say a lifetime, I mean six days.
It feels like forever thanks to the exhausting velocity of theories that seek to explain the downfall of cable television’s most famous host and racist. Carlson was fired because of the Dominion Voting Systemslawsuit. Carlson was fired becausehe used the C-word. Carlson was fired becausehe prayed too much. Carlson was fired because even his colleagues at Foxdespised him.
That’s just a partial list of the best guesses circulating in the media ether. While Carlson was probably felled by more than a single factor, these guesses are akin to the trees that obscure the proverbial forest. Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News, did what he often does at a moment of crisis, swiveling 180 degrees to secure his business empire. The move is famous enough to have an unusual name in Britain, where Murdoch first came to global prominence: the reverse ferret.
In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”
One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenowethwrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.” For instance, the right-wing Murdoch unexpectedly threw The Sun’s support to the Labor Party and Tony Blair in 1997, reportedly because then-Prime Minister John Major refused toback policies that Murdoch had pressed him on.
That kind of out-of-the-blue abandonment is basically what happened with Carlson, Fox’s biggest star and the pride and joy of not just Rupert Murdoch but also his sonLachlan, who runs the network on a daily basis. Both Murdochs had unusually close relationships with their favorite host — Carlson evendined with Rupert at the 92-year-old’s estate in Bel Air just a few weeks ago — until, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Carlson learned justa few minutes before the rest of us that his services were no longer required at Fox News.
This occurred a few days after another big reversal: Fox’s decision to pay $787.5 million in damages to Dominion for wrongfully reporting that its machines took votes away from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The stop-the-steal ferret placed in America’s pants by Carlson and other Fox hosts, such as Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, was suddenly extracted, and while it was major news across the country, Fox hardly mentioned it, just as the network said almost nothing about Carlson’s exit. The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.
Protesters outside Fox News HQ in the wake of the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and the firing of Fox’s anchor Tucker Carlson on April 25, 2023.
Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images.
The philosophy behind this maneuver helps answer another question: What’s next for Fox? The consensus, expressed by journalist Brian Stelter, is that the Murdochs have learned to never again let a host become as extreme and beyond their control as Carlson. The Murdochs have a line of allowed mendacity, Stelterexplained this week, and Carlson crossed it all the time; whoever replaces him will understand that you do not cross the line. Stelter, who is now working on hissecond book about Fox News, added, “I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.”
That would defy the imperative of the reverse ferret. Glenn Beck got too wild and was reverse ferreted more than a decade ago. As NPRreported in 2011, “At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News channel?” Bill O’Reilly took Beck’s place as the network’s headliner, and when he eventually went too far (by sexually harassing women), he too was gone. Now, it’s Tucker Carlson’s turn. Throughout it all, Fox has made piles of money, billions and billions of dollars, far more than its rivals.
The lucrative dialectic of the ferret/reverse ferret is the spring mechanism for Murdoch’s business success. That’s because the kind of right-wing propaganda that makes the greatest amount of money is not reality-based; it’s how we got birtherism, the war on Christmas, Seth Rich, ivermectin, the “great replacement theory,” and election denialism. Walking up to the edge of what might destroy them, and doing an about-face that might involve paying off an aggrieved party, is not a mistake but a business strategy.
It is magical thinking to believe that Rupert and Lachlan have any interest in abandoning a strategy that constitutes their DNA. The Murdochs will not save us from the Murdochs.
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rww July 31, 2024
- Michael Flynn’s America’s Future organization will be holding a “Champions for America Celebration Gala” at Mar-a-Lago in December at which Tucker Carlson and Kid Rock will be honored.
- Joshua Feuerstein issues a warning: “Dear Libtards, If you take out Trump, it’s over! We’re gonna start it popping.”
- Jackson Lahmeyer held an event for Tulsa mayoral candidate Brent VanNorman at his church last night during which Lahmeyer openly told his congregation to donate to VanNorman’s campaign because they need to have “someone in office who is on our team.”
- As long as Christian nationalists like Tim Barton are going to keep claiming that the Bible was “the top cited source” by the Founding Fathers, we are going to keep correcting the record.
- Ali Alexander offers some advice to the Trump campaign: “YOU HAVE TO GET NATIVIST, RACIST, NATIONALIST, AND CATHOLIC! TO WIN!”
- Finally, Glenn Beck, of all people, is insisting that it is the Democrats who are weird. What? The guy who once aired an hour-long special broadcast from the year 2054 thinks the Democrats are the weird ones?
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7 24 rww
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson closed out the all-day Heritage Foundation policy fest on the first day of the Republican National Convention. He warned the crowd that they are in a “spiritual battle” against “anti-human” forces that want to “eliminate” Christians.
In a strange choice for talking to political activists, Carlson began by describing politics as a “repulsive” process and politicians in general as ruthless and power-hungry and miserable people. But he said he is “thrilled” by Trump picking Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, because “every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against J.D. Vance.” Carlson said that was because “they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people…that he would be an impediment to their exercising power.”
Carlson veered into spiritual warfare rhetoric, saying that since he spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary celebration 15 months ago, he has experienced “a total change in the way that I see the world,” explaining, “this is not ultimately political. This is much deeper…There is a spiritual battle underway.”
From Carlson’s remarks:
And I think what happened on Saturday, the assassination attempt against President Trump, reminded a lot of people this, or awakened a lot of people to this. There is a spiritual battle underway. There is no logical way to understand what we’re seeing now in temporal terms. You just can’t.
These are not political divides. There are forces, and they’re very obvious now. They’ve decided, for whatever reason, to take off the mask, whose only goal is chaos, violence, destruction. And there are the rest of us who, once again, are not always certain we’re right, but we know that that’s bad and we’re against that, sort of standing, watching, thinking, ‘Is someone going to explain to me why this is politics?’
This is not politics at all. This is much deeper and older and more recognizable than that. This has been going on since the beginning of time. And I do think, by the way, that the more literal among us, and I would count myself in that category, fail to see this because we’re so desperate to ascribe some kind of recognizable human motive to what we’re seeing.
So we call it leftism or neoliberalism or communism or anarchism. We come up with some phrase to describe it, but those phrases are inadequate. They do not describe what’s actually happening. So what you’re seeing now is really not at all different in substance from what you saw in 1789 in France, from what you saw in 1936 in Spain, from what you saw in 1917 in Russia, from what you saw in 1975 in Phnom Penh. It’s all the same. These are forces of chaos and destruction which are fundamentally anti-human, which are against people.
Carlson railed against a number of movements he described as “anti-people,” including what he called “the climate cult.” He told the activists to pay close attention to what makes “them” angriest.
What group do they dislike most? What group are they absolutely terrified of and hoping to eliminate? Well, it’s Christians. That’s who it is. It’s Christians. … The group that makes them angriest, triggers them most, I guess we would say now, is Christians. Christian nationalism. People pray outside abortion clinics. People celebrate Easter, not trans visibility day. These are their real enemies.
Carlson talked about religious persecution during the Cultural Revolution in China and the French Revolution. He said at the start of the Spanish Civil War, the “anti-Christian” side opened fire on a statue of Jesus. “If you find yourself firing bullets at a statue, what you’re really doing is revealing your deepest priority, and that’s to kill Christians,” he said.
“I don’t know if any Christians here or people who are interested in continuing to live in the country you grew up in, but these are the terms and these are the stakes,” Carlson said. “They are not the ones that we’ve been told they are–left versus right, Republican versus Democrat.”
Carlson also talked about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, saying that Trump’s show of strength—fist raised in defiance—had won him the election, because people want and need strong leaders.
After delivering his remarks, Carlson engaged in some Q&A with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In response to a question about what kind of conversations people could have to bring their friends and neighbors into the MAGA movement, Carlson said they should pray for people who are willing to accept the status quo. He then veered into a diatribe against “weak men,” saying that fathers should be willing to beat up school counselors who “indoctrinate kids and try and turn them into freaks, circus freaks.” Roberts agreed, saying that “what we’re all yearning for is just a return to normal. And it is normal for a strong man, for a man period, to respond the way you describe to the school counselor.”
Asked about what kind of message the Trump team should be delivering, Carlson said the campaign was trying out a “unity message,” to which he responded:
And a lot of people hear “unity” and they think, well, unity implies some sort of compromise conversation. You can’t have a conversation with people who are unwilling to compromise. The left, which is a religious movement, is unwilling to compromise on any level at all. They won’t even admit men can’t become women. So you how can you have unity with people like that? And of course, you can’t.
Carlson recommended that Trump’s team ignore his critics and simply show through his actions that he is calm and in command. He urged activists to take Trump’s bravery as a model for their own political engagement.
Tags: Kevin RobertsTucker CarlsonChristian PersecutionElection 2024Republican National ConventionSpiritual WarfareHeritage FoundationRepublican Party
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an 7 24
Hours before announcing he had chosen U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) as his vice presidential running mate, Donald Trump met in Milwaukee on Monday with conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is an independent candidate for President of the United States.
Tucker Carlson, the far-right wing former Fox News host, “helped broker the meeting,” The New York Times reports. Politico adds the meeting took place “to discuss the possibility of the independent candidate endorsing the Republican nominee, according to multiple people familiar with the huddle.” The Kennedy camp denied he has any intention of dropping out of the race, despite his inability to gain any substantial traction that would make him a serious contender for the White House. RFK Jr. is polling in the high single digits to about 10 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, which is enough for him to be a spoiler, likely helping Trump more than President Joe Biden.
The Kennedy family back in April endorsed President Joe Biden for re-election.
READ MORE: ‘Indoctrination’: Top Republicans Kick Off National Convention With Anti-LGBTQ Attacks
But in a stunning move, the Kennedy camp reportedly “leaked” video of RFK Jr. speaking on the telephone with Trump, according to the MeidasTouch Network. That video was was quickly removed, but not before NBC News’ senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny was able to obtain a copy and post it on social media (video below.)
In that video, Donald Trump can be heard telling Kennedy, “I would love you to do stuff and I think it’d be so good for your and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy.”
It was not clear in what context Trump meant “do stuff,” although he could have possibly meant endorse Trump, or hand Kennedy a post in his administration. There had been some speculation, including in the betting markets, Trump would make RFK Jr. his running mate.
Deadline reported Trump “sounded like he was wooing [Kennedy] for his support.”
“Leaked video of a phone call between the two exposes just how aligned they are,” The New Republic reported.
In his remarks about vaccines, about which RFK Jr. has “spent years stoking fear and mistrust,” and left a “trail of false and misleading claims,” Trump shared some of his own false theories.
“When you when you feed a baby a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse not a, you know 10-pound or 20-pound baby,” Trump said. “It looks like you’re giving you should be giving a horse this and did you ever see the size of it right? You know, it’s this massive – And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago. And anyway, I would be, I would love you to do stuff and I think it’d be so good for your and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy.”
READ MORE: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’: RNC’s ‘Chilling’ MAGA Chant Echoes Trump – and ‘1930’s Germany’
Trump in the video also positively spoke about President Joe Biden calling him after Saturday’s assassination attempt.
RFK Jr. on Tuesday posted an apology to Donald Trump on social media, writing: “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”
“Whoops,” Zadrony reported. “Seems like RFK Jr.’s son posted and has since deleted video of a call between RFK Jr. and Trump after the shooting. In the video Trump repeats his old (false) claims about childhood vaccines, suggesting the vaccine schedule causes injuries in babies.”
She included a screenshot of Bobby Kennedy III’s statement, which reads, “I am a firm believer that these sorts of conversations should be had in public. Here’s Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids — this was the day after the assassination attempt.”
Watch video below or at this link.
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Mitch McConnell: Tucker Carlson 'ended up where he should have been all along' - Alternet.org
bb 6 24
No one cares enough about Tucker Carlson for a publisher to bother with a book telling the story of his Fox-tastic rise and fall.
A few years ago, Tucker Carlson rode high on a wave of lies, abuse, and deceit. Having cost Fox a lot of money and had a number of his texts exposed publicly, Carlson was let go from his position as the largest talking head on the far-right propaganda network. Since his dismissal, Carlson has been humiliated by Putin and pretty much slunk into a corner. Now it seems a planned book by an independent author has been dropped by its publisher due to lack of interest.
According to the Schaffer, the book which once seemed important due to the Fox News pundit's outsized popularity during and right after Donald Trump's presidency, now no longer seems relevant as Carlson's fame has waned after being fired for pushing unfounded conspiracy theories as well as his personal conduct, including texts the had the media giant's management reeling.
As Schaffer put it, the book cancellation is both good news for Carlson, because it's critical of the former Fox pundit, and bad news because it shows he is yesterday's news since being relegated to streaming his views to a smaller and diminishing audience.
As Schaffer wrote, "It's a far cry from the situation in 2021, when Carlson was zooming past Sean Hannity to become cable's top talker, with a legion of fans on the right and an army of detractors in the center and on the left — and even speculation about a possible presidential bid. That's when Little, Brown and Co. tapped Zengerle, a New York Times Magazine contributor and one of the leading magazine writers on contemporary politics, to do a book on the political-media titan," adding that times have changed and there is little appetite for a Carlson book now.
an 4 24
Carlson was once the most-watched primetime host on the most conservative cable news network. But after a recent interview he conducted on his new X/Twitter show, more conservatives are abandoning him.
The Daily Beast reported that following Carlson's interview with the Rev. Munther Isaac, pro-Israel conservatives have lost patience with the far-right pundit. Like his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Carlson gave a soft, lengthy interview to Isaac — an Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, which is in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — and lent him a platform to repeatedly attack the Netanyahu regime in Israel while Carlson agreed with him.
"It would be pretty easy for Republicans in the US Congress to say we support the government of Israel. But if you touch a single Christian, harm a single church, prevent any Christian from practicing his religion, you’re done. Not a single dollar will come from the US Congress for you," Carlson said. "If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government, blowing up churches and killing Christians. I think you’ve lost the thread."
READ MORE:**'Goebbels would be proud' of Tucker Carlson's 'unabashed hatred of Jews': NewsNation host**
Carlson's remarks angered prominent conservative Christians who back Israel, including Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who declared: "This is who Tucker is: a click-chaser."
"Tucker’s MO is simple: defend America’s enemies and attack America’s allies. There isn’t an objective bone left in that washed up news host’s body," he tweeted. "Tucker will eventually fade into nothingness, because his veneer of faux intellectualism is quickly falling apart and revealing who he truly is: a cowardly, know-nothing elitist who is full of s—."
X influencer AG Hamilton — a pseudonym for an attorney who writes for the conservative National Review — had similar thoughts in a lengthy post to the platform. He suggested that Carlson's concern about Christians under attack was hollow given that he didn't "have a word to say" about the oppression of Christians in other countries. He added that Tucker's "whole shtick" was feeding his audience a pre-conceived narrative and presenting it as an objective interview.
"He presents a question then suggests an implied answer using dishonest or partial facts, then insists he’s selling his audience a truth instead of feeding them obvious BS," Hamilton tweeted.
READ MORE:**Putin pulled a 'classic power move' to 'humiliate' Tucker Carlson: FT Moscow bureau chief**
Carlson's decision to interview Munther Isaac also attracted criticism from one of his former Fox News colleagues. After Hamas' October 7 terror attack that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and resulted in hundreds of hostages being taken, Isaac suggested that the Natanyahu regime owned responsibility for the attack, attributing it to the*Nakba* (the Arabic word for the establishment of the Israeli state and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians). NewsNation host Leland Vittert — a former Fox host — slammed Carlson's interview as irresponsible journalism.
"Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, would be proud," Vittert said after showing Carlson's remarks. "Again, Tucker's a smart guy, yet he's taking the side of terrorists. There's no other explanation than his unabashed hatred of Jews."
Read the Beast's report in full by clicking here (subscription required).
newsNation host Leland Vittert recently raked far-right pundit Tucker Carlson over the coals for a statement he made during an interview with a controversial Christian pastor in Bethlehem, which is in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
During a segment on Thursday morning tweeted by Republicans Against Trump, Vittert criticized Carlson for his remarks about Israel's military offensive in retaliation for Hamas' October 7 terror attack that killed 1,200 Israelis. In his interview with Rev. Munther Isaac, Carlson specifically accused the Netanyahu regime of indiscriminately killing Arab Christians in Palestinian territory.
"If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you've lost the thread," Carlson said.
READ MORE: Putin pulled a 'classic power move' to 'humiliate' Tucker Carlson: FT Moscow bureau chief
"Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, would be proud," Vittert said after showing Carlson's remarks. "Again, Tucker's a smart guy, yet he's taking the side of terrorists. There's no other explanation than his unabashed hatred of Jews."
"It's hard to have peace with people who think that's OK," Vittert added.
According to Jewish Insider, Isaac has previously justified the October 7 attack, saying it was the result of "the injustice that has befallen us as Palestinians from the Nakba until now," using the Arab word for the establishment of the state of Israel that displaced 750,000 Palestinians. Isaac is also a member of the organization Kairos Palestine, whose founding document calls the Torah – the primary religious text of Judaism — a "dead letter ... used as a weapon in our present history in order to deprive us of our rights in our own land."
"Those of us who track these things know that Munther Isaac has long been the high priest of antisemitic Christianity; sadly, he spreads his hate from the city of Jesus’ birth," said the Rev. Johnnie Moore, who is the president of the Congress of Christian Leaders. "Since October 7, Isaac seems to have graduated from being an anti-Zionist Lutheran preacher to a terror sympathizer. There’s really just no other way to describe him.”
Vittert's critique of Carlson is particularly noteworthy, given that both men are former Fox News hosts. While Vittert joined the NewsNation team in 2021, he had previously been an anchor and correspondent at Fox News since 2010. While covering the protests of George Floyd's murder in 2020, Vittert and his crew were reportedly attacked by protesters once they learned the crew was with Fox News.
Carlson, whose Fox News program was once the most-watched show on the network, was abruptly let go in 2023. CNN journalist Brian Stelter reported that network executives were wary about Carlson getting "too big for his boots" and alienating "large swaths" of his coworkers.
After being fired from Fox News, Carlson launched his own program on Elon Musk's X platform (formerly Twitter). He garnered significant criticism over his hours-long interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was seen by many observers — including Putin himself — as being too soft and deferential.
Watch the video of Vittert's critique below, or by clicking this link.
mma 2 24
EMAD ELDIN ADEEB: Comparing the culture, the competence between Vladamir Putin and Biden, how do you see the two men now running the world?
TUCKER CARLSON: If this were boxing the fight would be called by the medic. So, and I say that as an American, and I don’t have another passport, I don’t plan to ever leave my country, my family’s been there hundreds of years and I love it and I am a patriotic American and I grieve when I see that the president is non compos mentis.
…
The most radicalizing thing I would just say for me in the eight days I spent in Moscow was not simply the leader of the country who of course is impressive, it’s the largest landmass in the world and it’s wildly diverse, linguistically, culturally, religiously, it’s hard to run a country like that for 24 years, whether you like it or not. So an incapable person couldn’t do that, he is very capable and many of you know him and you know that.
What was radicalizing, very shocking and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been, the biggest city in Europe, 13 million people. And it is so much nicer than any city in my country, I had no idea.
…
ADEEB: You should challenge in the roles of an interview, and you’re a master in your business. It’s not for me to give you a lecture about that, but you should challenge some ideas. For instance, you didn’t talk about freedom of speech in Russia, you did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.
CARLSON: I didn’t talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about.
ADEEB: Why, yes? This is my question.
CARLSON: Because those are covered and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following. That every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be a leader. That press restriction is universal in the United States, I know because I’ve lived it. Ask my former – I’ve had a lot of jobs. And I’ve done this for 34 years and I know how it works and there’s more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States but there is a great deal in the United States. And so at a certain point, it’s like people can decide whether they think, what countries they think are better, what systems they think are better. I just want to know what he thinks, that was the whole point.
///
02/09/24 10:50 AM EST
02/08/24 11:21 AM EST
- ### Newsmax guest John Bolton says Tucker Carlson is “being used by the Kremlin for their own purposes”
02/08/24 9:16 AM EST
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navalny murdered
ukraine 7:1 on brkthru, low/no ammo
putin // hitler on poland invasion
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an 2 24
former Fox News host Tucker Carlson conducted a much-hyped interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week that mostly consisted of Putin lecturing Carlson about Russian history while barely letting him get a word in.
However, Financial Times Moscow Bureau Chief Max Seddon singled out one particular part of the interview that had to be particularly embarrassing for Carlson, which came when the Russian president mocked him for getting rejected to work at the CIA decades ago.
"We should thank God that they didn't let you in!" Putin said to Carlson. "Although it is a serious organization, I understand."
Seddon noted that Putin embarrassed Carlson despite the fact that Carlson had gone out of his way to lob softball questions at him while also in the past praising his nation for supposedly upholding traditional Christian values.
"The way Putin casually humiliates one of his most prominent and sympathetic interlocutors in the west here, after state media and the Kremlin spent ages praising him, is just brutal," Seddon posted on Twitter. "Classic cheap power move."
Carlson has frequently parroted Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine over the years, and at one point even went so far as to say he was rooting for Russian to win the conflict.
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WALSH KIRK BLAZE?
In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire Texas laid along the border with Mexico, right-wing pundits are claiming the Biden administration has sparked a second American Civil War. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, two members of the court’s conservative block, sided with the three liberal justices in ruling for the federal government.
The issue stems from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to stretch razor wire over dozens of miles along the state’s southern border, a cruel policy that has failed in its stated objective of deterring unauthorized border crossings. The Biden administration opposes the measures, and has ordered the Border Patrol to remove the barriers. The stand-off between Border Patrol and the Texas National Guard escalated earlier this month, with federal officials blaming Abbott for the deaths of a mother and her two children who drowned in the Rio Grande. (Texas authorities dispute this version of events.)
For his part, Gov. Abbott pledged that Texas will “continue to deploy this razor wire to repel illegal immigration.” Although it may appear that Abbott is in direct defiance of the Supreme Court, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained that the ruling overturned an “order saying Border Patrol COULDN’T remove Texas razor wire to process migrants. It didn’t affirmatively rule that the Border Patrol COULD remove Texas razor wire.” Or, as the New Republic's Matt Ford put it, the Supreme Court “lifted an injunction” on the Department of Homeland Security, so there's “nothing in this case for Texas to obey or defy at the moment.”
This simmering confrontation is the new backdrop for an old story. During election years, conservative media outlets generally ramp up their attacks on immigrants. Separately, over the last year, conservatives have become increasingly comfortable calling for, threatening, or warning about a coming civil war in the country. Responses to the recent court ruling have married these two trends.
As the news broke on January 22, conservative YouTube streamer Tim Pool said it “looks like a Fort Sumter-esque type scenario,” referencing the first battle of the Civil War, adding that “it does feel like it could be escalating to this federal versus state conflict.”
That evening, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted on X (formerly Twitter), asking: “Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?”
The same night, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) wrote that “the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.”
Then on January 23, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon appeared to favorably reference that post, saying “as Clay Higgins said” there is “kind of a civil war between the federal government and the state of Texas.”
Hours later, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fantasized about Gov. Abbott openly defying the court’s ruling at the barrel of a gun.
Video CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble
“So someone says right here, ‘Charlie, what would happen if Texas ignores the ruling? Will the government go to war with Texas?’” he asked.
“The federal government would come in, and some people would say, ‘Well, that's the seeds of a civil war.’ Is that what you want? Where does this end?” Kirk added moments later. “By the way, I'm all on board.”
“If we had an actual governor of Texas that was willing — 100% defy this,” Kirk continued, before advising Abbott on the logistics.
“If you're going to defy, here's how it works: press conference flanked by your most loyal Texas Rangers. ‘I am ignoring the Supreme Court's decision,’” Kirk said, adopting Abbott’s point of view. “‘I will enforce the border of Texas. If you're going to arrest me, you have to go through the Texas Rangers.’”
“If we had more governors on the border, it would be even more powerful,” he added, implicitly invoking the Confederacy. “Get every red state on board. Fly in every Republican governor.”
On Wednesday afternoon Abbott issued a statement invoking “Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” which he claimed is “the supreme law of the land.” Throughout the day, at least nine governors backed Abbott on X, even if they fell short of Kirk’s demand that they travel to the border. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp all posted their support for Texas, as did Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
In the same episode, Kirk told his audience that they had “better buy weapons,” and “have a lot of guns at your disposal.”
That afternoon, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh echoed Kirk. “Red state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border,” Walsh said. He later added, “The last civil war was unimaginable until it wasn't.”
In the early evening, Bannon returned to the topic with guest Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). “That Supreme Court decision that was made has now put the federal government at war with the state of Texas,” Greene said.
“If they fund a war in Ukraine when Zelensky is raising the white flag, asking for peace talks in Switzerland, and they weaken our border policy while the federal government is at war with Texas, that is truly, possibly the start of a civil war in this country,” she added.
Blaze TV’s Steve Deace also invoked the memory of the Civil War. “Basically, the Supreme Court has told Texas your choices are: be invaded or secede,” Deace said.
Video
CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of BlazeTV's The Steve Deace Show
On January 25, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade adopted the same framing on Fox & Friends.
Video
CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
“It feels like almost like a soft civil war,” Kilmeade said. “You’ve got all the Republicans saying, ‘Can we secure our borders?’ the Democrats saying, ‘I want this to go away’ and blaming Republicans, the President against the governor of Texas — the most independent state in the union. I mean, this is getting a little crazy.”
Fox News sounded little different than the fringe. “This is a constitutional crisis,” said conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in a video titled: “Supreme Court Decision Provokes Civil War in Texas.”
The story was the same in the right-wing blogosphere, too, with conservative news site PJ Media asking, “Is Joe Biden Mounting a Civil War at the Border?”
Conservative influencer Jordan Peterson posted: “So is it the case that@TheDemocrats are truly ready to go to war with Texas?”
While right-wing media figures fantasize about a new civil war, their rhetoric has real implications for immigration policy. They are stoking xenophobia and nativism, and endorsing cruel policies that are already injuring and killing some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
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rww 1 24
Former Fox host Tucker Carlson is platforming disgraced climate denier Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer known for accepting over $1 million from fossil fuel companies for writing publications he referred to as “deliverables.”
Carlson invited Soon, a former researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, on his exclusive program on X (formerly Twitter) for an interview on January 9. The two amplified long-debunked hypotheses about what is causing climate change, and clips from the interview have already been viewed over 1 million times on TikTok, likely by a young audience that might not be familiar with Soon’s controversies, which came to light back in 2015.
The spread of these videos highlights TikTok’s ongoing climate misinformation problem, even as it has begun implementing a new policy banning content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”
Though experts dismissed Soon’s false claims, clips of his interview with Carlson have gained traction on TikTok, a social media platform popular with young users
- Clips of Carlson’s interview with Soon have been viewed over 1 million times on TikTok. Media Matters identified six videos that have collectively accrued more than 1.1 million views. According to a January 2023 report from Morning Consult, over 60% of Gen Z adults use TikTok at least once daily. TikTok, [1/10/24, 1/10/24, 1/10/24;1/10/24; 1/10/24, 1/10/24;Morning Consult, 1/2023]
- Climate scientists continue to highlight and debunk Soon’s disinformation.“Soon's science is based on faulty assumptions & his conclusions are invalid & that's likely why FF [fossil fuel] companies pay him," wrote Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Twitter/X, [9/10/23, 1/10/24,1/10/24]
The interview is part of a larger trend of major right-wing media outlets relying more on long-debunked climate deniers
- :{:{Discredited climate deniers like Judith Curry, Patrick Moore, Anthony Watts, and Gregory Wrightstone, who have been vocal for decades, received renewed attention in 2023 from right-wing media figures. After years of relative obscurity, these figures found a reliable home on shows like Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, and also appeared on Fox News programs such as Jesse Watters Primetime and The Ingraham Angle. On social media, they’ve increased engagement on X. Media Matters,:(style="background-color:#e0e000ff"):}: [11/28/12, 2/17/14, 12/22/23; DeSmog, 5/15/22; StateImpact Pennsylvania, 3/27/19]}:
Willie Soon has been exposed for unethically promoting flawed science
- In 2015, a joint investigation by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center found that Soon had accepted over $1.2 million in funding from fossil fuel companies for his research. Soon’s work was funded “almost entirely” by the fossil fuels industry, including Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Charles G. Koch Foundation. The Guardian, [2/21/15]
- Soon described his papers as “deliverables” to his corporate funders. Emails revealed that one of the country’s largest utility holding companies, Southern Company, paid Soon to publish research examining the sun’s role in driving climate change. At the time, Southern relied heavily on coal. Scientists have long recognized that solar activity cannot be responsible for the rapid warming that the planet has experienced in recent decades. The New York Times, [2/21/15; Inside Climate News, 2/21/15; NASA, accessed 1/11/24]
- The investigation also found that Soon failed to disclose his relationship with Southern Company in some of his research papers, violating ethical guidelines upheld by scientific journals. Despite accepting more than $400,000 from the company, Soon insisted he had no conflicts of interest, raising the alarm for academics and scientists. His papers, which have been published in top scientific journals, push a “range of climate-denial perspectives.” Inside Climate News, [2/21/15]
Soon has for years been a go-to source for media and lawmakers keen on protecting fossil fuel interests
- Soon and his work have been used by the GOP in their efforts to block climate action.Climate denier and former Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe has cited Soon in press releases and on the Senate floor. In 2013, Soon testified in support of an effort to repeal Kansas’ renewable energy standard in front of state legislators, claiming that climate change isn’t a problem. DeSmog, accessed [1/11/24; Energy and Policy Institute, 8/28/15; U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, 5/14/08, 7/29/03]
- Soon has worked with right-wing think tanks that influence climate policy. Soon has spoken at conferences hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the Texas Public Policy Institute, and the Heartland Institute. In 2014, he was awarded the “Courage in Defense of Science Award” by the climate denier organization now called CO2 Coalition. DeSmog, accessed [1/11/24, 1/12/24; Heartland Institute, accessed 1/12/24]
- Since Soon’s interview with Carlson, several well-known conspiracy theorists praised his ideas.Jimmy Corsetti, a YouTuber who has pushed the idea that a polar shift is responsible for climate change impact, and The Vigilant Fox, a figure known for spreading anti-vaccine misinformation, and many more, praised him on social media. Twitter/X, [1/9/24, 1/9/24; Media Matters, 5/24/23; Forbes, 11/26/22]
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yikes reminder
MMA 1 24 MG
Three years after the January 6 insurrection, the initial broad agreement about that day’s depravity lies in ruins. That consensus didn’t unravel on its own — right-wing commentators deliberately dismantled it for power and profit.
Republicans have made their peace with the violent mob of Donald Trump’s supporters that stormed the U.S. Capitol as the culmination of his plot to remain in office, according to a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll the paper reported on Tuesday.
“Republicans are showing increased loyalty to the former president as he campaigns for reelection and fights criminal charges over his attempt to stay in power after losing in 2020,” the Post reported. “They are now less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were ‘mostly violent,’ less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack and are slightly less likely to view Joe Biden’s election as legitimate than they were in a December 2021 Post-UMD survey.”
Right-wing propagandists engineered that shift in GOP views of the January 6 insurrection by creating a revisionist counternarrative out of lies they repeated over and over again. Their work created a permission structure for Republicans to stop caring about the assault of hundreds of law enforcement officers amid an effort to overturn a presidential election by force. That helped ensure that the mob’s leader would remain the GOP’s presumptive nominee in 2024, positioned to carry out the party’s top priorities of cutting taxes for rich people, banning abortions, building huge migrant deportation camps to expel undocumented immigrants Trump claims are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and deploying state power against left-wing “vermin.”
Trump’s 2020 election subversion effort received strong support among his media allies, many of whom backed his claims of a stolen election even as they privately acknowledged those claims were false. When Trump urged the violent mob he had summoned to Washington, D.C., to “fight like hell” to stop the steal — and they responded by attempting to do just that and attacked the Capitol — the right’s propagandists could have washed their hands of the then-president and his violent supporters.
They made a different choice. As I detailed last month:
The right-wing effort to minimize January 6 and Trump’s role in fomenting it began that very day. Fox hosts who knew better told their viewers that Trump’s supporters had been responding to reasonable fears that the election had been stolen, while any violence may have been caused by antifa interlopers.
In the intervening years, Trumpist media stars — led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson — cosseted their viewers with a slew of lies about January 6. There was no “insurrection,” just a “political protest [that] got out of hand” in which “the overwhelming majority” of participants were “orderly and meek.” The rioter shot and killed by law enforcement while trying to breach the speaker’s gallery was a martyr, while the officers who were nearly beaten to death during the attack deserve mockery. The violence was orchestrated by undercover federal agents as part of a sinister plot to imprison patriotic Americans for their conservative views. The events were comparable to staffers for a late-night talk show shooting an unauthorized video in the Capitol complex, or a Democratic congressman foolishly pulling a fire alarm, or progressive protests at state capitols.
Trump’s 2020 subversion effort ultimately failed — but he still claims that he won the election, and gives every indication that he could try again should he lose in 2024. Voters expect as much: Roughly 7 in 10 respondents say Trump won’t accept the results of the election if he is defeated, according to the Post/UMD poll.
After a yearslong right-wing drumbeat of stolen-election lies and insurrection revisionism, and the corresponding purges of dissident Republican leaders and terror campaigns against election workers, the battleground is more favorable to a second attempt to overturn an election through lies and violence.
Colorado, the 14th Amendment, and the right’s January 6 revisionism}:
:{:{12/20/23 }:
:{:{05/14/21 }:
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1 24 mma
In the years since the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which was spurred by then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to retain power, right-wing media figures have repeatedly whitewashed the violent attack, pushed misinformation and conspiracy theories about it, and defended its participants.
As a result, the initial consensus of the horrors of the day has disappeared, with Republicans reportedly “now less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were ‘mostly violent,’ less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack, and … slightly less likely to view Joe Biden’s election as legitimate.”
The following right-wing media personalities have been critical in the push to downplay January 6, and they have continued their apologia for the violent crowd that sought to overturn an election.
no lnx
no grf
Darren Beattie
Beattie was a speechwriter and policy aide for then-President Trump who was fired in 2018 for attending a white nationalist conference two years before. In 2020, he founded right-wing site Revolver News, with Trump himself praising the outlet’s commentary. Beattie has repeatedly pushed the baseless conspiracy theory that the FBI, in connection with an undercover agent named Ray Epps, helped to incite the January 6 riot.
2021: Beattie spread a conspiracy theory that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick’s death was not a result of injuries sustained in the attack, calling his claims “the most important story Revolver has ever run.” Fox’s Tucker Carlson also highlighted the story, calling it an “exhaustive and fascinating new analysis.” [Media Matters, 2/12/21]
2022: Beattie and his news outlet, Revolver News, were crucial in pushing the false claim that Capitol rioter Ray Epps was an undercover FBI agent who duped the crowd into entering the Capitol building. Epps has sued Fox News, and his suit describes Beattie as “the principal person driving the false story that Epps was a federal agent planted as a provocateur to trigger the Capitol violence on January 6th.” [Media Matters, 1/19/22; The New York Times, 7/12/23]
2023-present: Beattie has continued to falsely allege that Epps was a federal agent, claiming he was treated leniently for that reason. In posts on X from September, Beattie claimed that “charging Ray Epps now for ‘disorderly conduct’ is not going to make the Feds' credibility problem go away.” Beattie additionally called the government’s case against Epps “a phony charge” that “will only make things worse for the Fed narrative.” He also suggested that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag and said that the Justice Department and FBI should “at least do us the courtesy of a high effort cover up like you did with OKC” for January 6. [Media Matters, 9/21/23; Twitter/X, 9/19/23, 9/19/23, 9/19/23, 9/19/23]
DB Tweet Collage
Julie Kelly
Kelly is a prolific conspiracy theorist who has written for a number of conservative outlets, mainly American Greatness, National Review, and The Federalist. Then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave Kelly and former Trump adviser John Solomon special access to security camera footage from the Capitol attack, as she claimed that conservatives were being unjustly persecuted.
2021: Kelly called January 6 Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone a “crisis actor.” [Media Matters, 7/27/21]
2022: On One America News, Kelly pushed a conspiracy theory that the FBI fabricated pipe bombs that were discovered at the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. the night before the January 6 riot. Kelly also published a book where she claimed that the Biden administration is weaponizing January 6 to persecute conservatives and criminalize political protest. [One America News, Tipping Point with Kara McKinney, 2/16/22; Google Books, accessed 1/5/23, Post Hill Press, accessed 1/5/24]
2023-present: Kelly repeatedly spread the Epps conspiracy theory, and when Epps was charged, she questioned why he wasn’t charged with more crimes, posting, “No obstruction felony? No civil disorder charge? Not even a trespassing on restricted grounds misdemeanor?” Kelly also claimed that the Biden’s Justice Department has “successfully criminalized political speech and activity.” In May, then-Speaker McCarthy reportedly gave Kelly special access to security camera footage from the Capitol attack. [Media Matters, 9/21/23, 5/31/23; The Washington Post, 6/6/23; Premiere Networks, The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, 3/23/23]
Julie Kelly claims that January 6 prosecutions are a silencing free speech and destroying lives
MARCH 23, 2023
Julie Kelly claims that January 6 prosecutions are a silencing free speech and destroying lives
:{:{Audio }:
CitationFrom the March 23, 2023, edition of Premiere Networks' The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Tucker Carlson
As a Fox prime-time host, Carlson relentlessly downplayed the January 6 insurrection and promoted the conspiracy theory that Ray Epps, whom he posited was a federal agent or FBI informant, incited the riot. Carlson also repeatedly hosted Beattie and Kelly to push misinformation about the attack.
2021: Carlson put out a revisionist January 6-focused series that suggested the attack was a “false flag.” In an interview with Kelly, Carlson said the left used officer Brian Sicknick’s death “as a political weapon” and that his state funeral was “fake.” “Completely fabricated,” agreed Kelly. Carlson also hosted Beattie and cited an article in which he suggested the January 6 attack may have been orchestrated by FBI operatives. [Media Matters, 11/2/21, 11/4/21, 6/16/21, 6/17/21; Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 11/1/21]
2022: Carlson defended the rioters as “passionately patriotic Americans” “who genuinely love America” and on the one-year anniversary of January 6 he downplayed the violence as “just barely” a riot. As a guest on Carlson’s show, Beattie also called January 6 “a clear hoax” planned and carried out by “the feds.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 6/8/22, 1/6/22, 6/9/22]
Early 2023: Carlson continued to downplay the severity of the January 6 riot, calling the rioters “nonviolent … protesters” and “patriotic Americans.” He also said January 6 was “probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 3/21/23, 3/14/23]
April 2023-present: After Carlson was fired in April from Fox, he appeared on a Spaces live chat on X (formerly Twitter) and continued to downplay the insurrection. [Twitter/X, 12/12/23]
:{:{Video}:
CitationFrom a December 12, 2023, X Space
Steve Bannon
Since he left the Trump administration in 2017, Steve Bannon has hosted War Room — a podcast for Real America’s Voice — where he has frequently defended those involved in the insurrection. Bannon has also hosted both Beattie and Kelly to also push conspiracy theories about January 6.
2021: Leading up to the January 6 insurrection, Bannon bragged on his podcast about his role in working to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. [Media Matters, 10/29/21]
2022: Bannon defended the Proud Boys ahead of one of Congress’ January 6 hearings, referring to the organization, whose leaders have since been convicted for their role in the January 6 attack, as a “rag tag beer drinking group.” Bannon also repeatedly made false claims that U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms Michael Stenger’s death was an intentional homicide, comparing it to older right-wing conspiracy theories around the suicide of Clinton administration official Vince Foster. [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 6/9/22; CNN, 9/1/23; Media Matters, 6/29/22]
2023-present: Bannon is still hosting his podcast, War Room, where he has continued to downplay the insurrection, including dismissing Trump's role by stating that Trump was “doing his duty” to “make sure that the 2020 election had been fairly decided” and continuing to insist that the 2020 election was stolen. [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 8/2/23]
:{:{Video }:
CitationFrom the August 2, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk, who co-founded the right-wing organization Turning Point USA, has repeatedly downplayed the insurrection and accused Ray Epps of being a federal agent.
2021: In the immediate aftermath of January 6, Kirk downplayed the attack, saying that “just because you do something that is regrettable does not mean that you are planning an armed insurrection against the United States government." [Newsweek, 1/12/21]
2022: Kirk pushed the Epps conspiracy theory, posting to X that Epps “texted his nephew ‘I orchestrated it’” and claiming that he is the “only man caught on camera actively calling for people to enter the Capitol and riot.” In another post, Kirk said, “If the FBI knows who Ray Epps is, why haven't they arrested him yet?” [Twitter/X, 1/11/22, 12/30/22]
2023-present: Kirk continues to run Turning Point USA and has repeatedly promoted far-right talking points, including false claims about January 6. On his eponymous show, Kirk has primed his audience to prepare for “another January 6” over Trump’s various indictments and called on a future administration to “get some pardons done” for the January 6 insurrectionists. [Media Matters, 9/22/23, 11/21/23; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 1/3/24, 12/7/23, 7/28/23, 1/6/23; Twitter/X, 9/19/23]
CHarlie Kirk Epps tweet 1
The Gateway Pundit
The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website that frequently pushes conspiracy theories and hoaxes, and Editor-in-Chief Jim Hoft have repeatedly claimed that the January 6 insurrection was a false flag operation organized by federal law enforcement.
2021: The Gateway Pundit was reportedly a favorite source for Donald Trump in the lead-up to January 6. According to The Washington Post, “In the weeks before he left office in 2021, Trump brandished printouts of Gateway Pundit articles questioning the results of the election.” In May 2021, a few months after the insurrection, Hoft published an article claiming that someone inside the Capitol unlocked the doors for the rioters, citing an anonymous member of the Oath Keepers — a group with several members who have since been convicted for their roles on January 6. [The Washington Post, 1/3/24; The Gateway Pundit, 5/24/21; Politico, 1/23/23]
2022: Hoft doubled down on the claim that “someone inside the security booth at the US Capitol opened the doors” in a Gateway Pundit article titled “WE WERE RIGHT. ” In another article, Hoft claimed that instead of investigating the Oath Keepers’ involvement in January 6, “the FBI would have better luck if they looked at their trained operatives instead who were leading the charge on the Capitol building.” [Twitter/X, 6/13/22; The Gateway Pundit, 1/29/22, 8/24/22]
2023-present: Hoft and The Gateway Pundit remain a source of conspiracy theories about January 6. Hoft has penned several stories alleging that Ray Epps’ criminal charges and sentencing are proof that he was a federal agent and said President Joe Biden “will use the J6 anniversary to accuse Trump supporters of being white supremacists.” [The Gateway Pundit, 1/2/24, 9/19/23, 1/3/24]
Laura Ingraham
Fox News host Laura Ingraham has used her prime-time platform to repeatedly claim that January 6 was a “false flag operation” orchestrated by “antifa” or federal agents.
2021: Ingraham suggested “antifa sympathizers” were behind the January 6 attack, citing a Washington Times article that was later debunked. [The New York Times, 3/1/21]
2022: Ingraham cited Darren Beattie’s Revolver News on her show on Fox to argue that “Epps may have led the breach team that first entered the Capitol on January 6.” [Media Matters, 1/19/22]
2023-present: Ingraham has used her prime-time slot on Fox News to continuously defend Trump and attack those who are involved in the legal cases against him over his alleged role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. She has also whitewashed the Capitol insurrectionists as “old ladies walking through the halls of Congress taking selfies.” [Media Matters, 11/01/23; Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 10/10/23, 8/7/23, 3/29/23]
:{:{Video}:
CitationFrom the March 29, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
Infowars
Prolific conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars co-host Owen Shroyer were part of the crowd on January 6. Shroyer has since celebrated the insurrection while Jones has claimed that any violence that occurred was caused by antifa or federal agents.
2021: Jones responded to the FBI’s investigation into his involvement in the insurrection by claiming that “we know who did it: antifa with some paramilitary groups all together, which are going to turn out to be feds with idiots they provocateured to be part of it, the Q people,” calling it “the modern Reichstag 2.0.” Shroyer stated that “we should have been proud of what happened on January 6.” [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 1/14/21, 5/17/21]
2022: Jones claimed that when investigated by the January 6 committee, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment “almost 100 times.” [Texas Tribune, 4/28/22]
2023-present: Jones celebrated Tucker Carlson’s revisionist history of the insurrection, claiming the footage Carlson aired showed that “January 6 was an inside job.” In the days before Shroyer was sentenced to two months in prison for leading a portion of the crowd on January 6, Jones claimed that the government was “asking for prison time for a man that did nothing and was there with me trying to stop people going to the Capitol because he still says he thinks the election was stolen.” [Media Matters, 2/28/23; Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 9/6/23; PBS, PBS NewsHour, 9/12/23]
:{:{Video }:
CitationFrom the February 20, 2023, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show
Newsmax’s Greg Kelly
In the wake of January 6, Newsmax prime-time host Greg Kelly has repeatedly whitewashed the violence at the Capitol on his show, claiming that Trump supporters were allowed into the building or set up by federal law enforcement and unfairly prosecuted.
2021: Kelly claimed that the insurrection was “a trap to make Trump supporters, the MAGA movement, look bad,” and alleged that police were “not doing anything” and had ushered insurrectionists into the Capitol. Kelly later claimed the insurrection was a “false flag operation” staged by federal law enforcement. [Newsmax, Greg Kelly Reports, 9/16/21, 11/3/21]
2022: Kelly continued to claim that Capitol Police and other federal agents “stood by” and that insurrectionists were “let in” to the Capitol. He also claimed that the rioters who called for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged were “speaking metaphorically” and downplayed the makeshift gallow that were erected nearby. [Newsmax, Greg Kelly Reports, 6/16/22]
2023-present: Kelly doubled down with the claim that January 6 insurrectionists were invited into the Capitol by police, claiming that it is “actually not true” that rioters violently breached the Capitol. He has also repeatedly defended Trump’s increasingly hostile campaign rhetoric, dismissing comparisons of the former president to Adolf Hitler and saying he is “a madman, and that is a good thing.” [Newsmax, Greg Kelly Reports, 11/17/23, 11/13/23, 10/19/23]
:{:{Video }:
CitationFrom the November 17, 2023, edition of Newsmax's Greg Kelly Reports
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Tucker Carlson is helping Alex Jones evade his TikTok ban | Media Matters for America
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tiktok infl
mma 12 23
- ## White evangelical Protestants, particularly those who watch right-wing media, have a higher rate of climate denial than the overall American public
- Concern over climate change has declined among evangelicals, despite the scientific consensus that climate change is real and worsening natural disasters.According to a recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute, “while the proportion of all Americans who consider climate change a crisis has risen 16% since 2014, among white evangelicals it has dropped 38%.” PRRI, [10/4/23; Religion News Services, 10/4/23]
- In public polling, right-wing Christians who express little concern about climate change and reject government action to curtail it cite a host of reasons, including the notion that God controls the climate and the belief that natural disasters are a sign of the End Times.Notably, the 2023 PRRI poll found that “agreement with the severity of natural disasters as evidence of the end of times is greater among Americans who most trust Fox News (52%) or far-right news outlets (43%).” Pew Research Center, [11/17/22; PRRI, 10/4/23]
- Republican politicians, prominent figures on the religious right, and key right-wing media funders have for years invoked religion to deny climate change and reject action to curtail it.Farris Wilks, an evangelical fracking billionaire and early funder of PragerU and The Daily Wire — both of which also have histories of pushing climate denial — has attributed climate change to God’s will, saying in 2013, “If [God] wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there.” In a 2019 appearance on a right-wing Christian radio program, former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) dismissed the need to mitigate climate change by citing “God’s word” that the world would not flood. The Guardian, [9/5/23, 9/6/23; Right Wing Watch, 10/15/19; Baptist News, 9/27/19; Vox, 2/23/18; Time magazine, 5/31/17]
- ## Right-wing Christian media figures and TikTok influencers have dismissed climate change and instead cited biblical prophecy, the End Times, or “demonic attack” as explanations for extreme weather events
- FlashPoint, a Christian nationalist program that has interviewed high-profile Republicans including former President Donald Trump, tied record heat waves in the summer to biblical prophecy.Regular contributor and self-proclaimed prophet Hank Kunneman claimed that “when God tells you ahead of time what it’s going to specifically be and he lists out that it’s going to be in the hundreds and it is in the hundreds, and those specific numbers that he listed coincide with certain redemptive promises in the book of Psalms. … God’s anger is rising and it's coming with justice. Now, it isn't just weather and here's why. There is a connection between the prophetic and weather.” Victory Channel, *FlashPoint*, [7/25/23; Media Matters, 7/18/23]
- Kunneman also connected the wildfires in Maui to biblical prophecy, suggesting the fires were the result of “demonic entities” and that God will show “it’s not climate.”Kunneman claimed that the week before the fires, “the spirit of the Lord … began to prophesy about Hawaii, and he began to prophesy about North America and the fire. … And he said that ‘the demonic entities have stretched their hands.’” Victory Channel, *FlashPoint*, [8/22/23]
- TikTok influencers have also seized on wildfires as a sign of the End Times and return of Jesus Christ.An account with over 350,000 followers posted a video that suggested fires in Hawaii, Texas, Oregon, and Washington “have to do with the End of Times.” Another account with nearly 30,000 followers posted a video of wildfires in Canada with text that the fires were a “sign of His coming.” TikTok, [8/22/23, 8/23/23]
- Other TikTok users have claimed that rain, floods, or drought are also signs of the End of Times.A video of extreme weather in Mexico with nearly 5 million views asserted, “Terrifying roars from the sky convince people the apocalypse is coming,” with the caption claiming, “He’s at the doors!!! #Jesus.” An account with more than 28,000 followers posted a video of flooding in Israel with the hashtags “#bibleprophecy #prophecy #endtimes #endtimesprophecy #lastdays.” An account with over 100,000 followers cited biblical prophecy that the Euphrates River would dry up, stating, “The rapture may be closer than you think,” with the hashtags “#bible #prophecy #rapture #israel.” Another account with 31,000 followers posted a video of flooding in France with the hashtags “#bibleprophecyishappening #christiantiktok #jesusiscoming #GOD.” TikTok, [8/15/23, 4/13/23, 10/17/23, 11/3/23]
- Charisma News, a right-wing Christian outlet that is the top corporate sponsor of the Christian nationalist “ReAwaken America” tour, has repeatedly pointed to End Times biblical prophecy in coverage of recent extreme weather events.A Charisma News article titled “Growing ‘El Niño’ Expected to Cause End Times-Level Disasters,” asserted that “weather pattern changes” are “linked with the decline of morality in the end times of the Earth.” Another article suggested that “current bizarre weather events point to Biblical Prophecy,” citing “biblical” floods in Pakistan and the Euphrates River drying up. Charisma News, [5/25/23, 9/1/22; Rolling Stone, 2/28/23]
- In an opinion piece for the Christian Post titled “Who’s behind the weather,” the Rev. Mark Creech suggested that a warming climate is a sign of the “last days,” not climate change.Creech quoted a book, God’s Answer for America, that claimed natural disasters “are not ‘global warming’ (or ‘climate change’), but they are part of God’s ‘global warnings’ as signs for these last days.” Creech agreed, writing that the book presented “a more likely cause” of extreme weather. The Christian Post, [1/24/23]
- On the program Elijah Streams, which has interviewed members of the Trump family, self-proclaimed prophet Charlie Shamp attributed the Maui wildfires to “demonic attack” by a fire-breathing dragon upset over the legality of abortion.Twitter/X, [9/7/23]
- Televangelist Jim Bakker declared that discussions of climate change dismiss that God is unleashing “judgment” that will “come in the last days.” Bakker claimed, “Global warming is the world’s excuse that God wasn’t in the storm. I’m going to prove to you God’s in the storm, God’s in the rain, God’s in the wind, it’s God’s storm, it’s God’s wind, it’s God’s lightning.” Right Wing Watch, [9/16/19]
- ## Prominent right-wing media and Christian media figures have downplayed links between climate change and extreme weather events by arguing God controls the weather
- Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson claimed that Hurricane Ian was caused by “acts of God, not an act of global warming or climate change, as much as the perverse, seething scum wish to make it that.” *The Benny Show,* [9/30/22]
- While covering Hurricane Ian, former Fox prime-time host Tucker Carlson told his audience that the left “think they are God, they think they’re in charge of the weather.” Carlson stated that all natural disasters are “products of nature — God’s in charge, we’re not God.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [9/29/22]
- Right-wing Christian pundit Eric Metaxas hosted conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi to discuss “the hoax of global warming and climate change,” where Metaxas declared that “God has his hand on all of this, that to me is the key. And this is the hysteria of the, you know, the anti-fossil fuel left is simply a political narrative.” Salem Media Group, *The Eric Metaxas Radio Show*, [8/14/22]
- Family Research Council, an extreme right-wing evangelical activist group, published an article titled “A Biblical Perspective on Climate Change,” which asserted that “Christians should not forget that God is the one who calms the storms and is Lord over the elements.”The article also suggested that, “God is in control of everything that happens in the world, and nothing occurs without His knowledge and permission.” Family Research Council Action, [9/9/21]
- On Fox News, host Pete Hegseth suggested that climate activists are “wanting to play God” by attempting to mitigate climate change.Hegseth said: “This goes back to people wanting to play God. Climate has happened for thousands and thousands of years.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [1/27/23]
- ## Right-wing media and far-right Christian media have cited their faith to reject action on climate
- On Fox, Rachel Campos-Duffy asserted that it is not necessary to curtail climate change because of religion.Discussing climate activists, Campos-Duffy said: “For them, where we live right now, this place, Earth is it. So everything’s on the line here for them. They think, as you said, they can perfect this Earth. Those of us who have faith don’t believe that, and we believe how we act here determines where we go after. And so we got to behave.” She added that “if you don’t have a faith, whether it’s Hindu, Islam, Christianity, you’re going to create one. And it could be climate, or it could be yourself.” The Daily Beast, [1/4/23]
- Right-wing pastor Perry Stone, who has more than 750,000 subscribers on YouTube, said that the reason Christians don’t worry about climate change is because they know that all those problems will be taken care of “when Christ comes back to Earth.”Stone declared: “The travail of the earth will cease when the messiah returns, so those that criticize believers now for not being environmentally concerned or whatever, we know how the book ends, we know where this is going.” Twitter/X, [8/11/21]
- On Family Research Council’s Washington Watch podcast, FRC President Tony Perkins claimed that the warming climate is caused by sin and to combat it, people should “turn to the Lord Jesus Christ.”Twitter/X, [9/15/21]
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mma 12 23
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star, is launching his own eponymous streaming service. The network “went live on Monday” and “will be home to multiple shows, including interviews, short-form videos and monologues,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Carlson is the newest member of what I call the “Fox News diaspora” of network stars-turned-competitors. His streaming service is another entrant in an increasingly crowded field of right-wing outlets helmed by former Fox figures, all seeking the approval, money, and time of the same audience traditionally dominated by the right-wing outlet.
Fox has long minted right-wing luminaries, its large audience and credibility on the right converting network hosts and contributors into celebrities and even Republican Party power players. But when those figures leave the network (usually on bad terms), many end up either signing up with Fox’s existing right-wing competitors or launching their own. At this point, there is more talent in the Fox diaspora than at the network proper — and at a cheaper price to boot. The result is an increasingly fractured right-wing ecosystem that leaves Fox’s hegemony in doubt.
Glenn Beck, perhaps the network’s biggest star during Barack Obama’s first term before he was drummed out in 2011, launched TheBlaze. That outlet has waxed and waned in size and influence, but it still provides him and a cohort of ideologically aligned figures a venue through the streaming service BlazeTV.
Ben Shapiro was once a Fox fixture and hosted an ill-fated limited series about elections for the network. His podcast now appears via the outlet he founded, The Daily Wire. His Daily Wire colleagues Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan also boosted their personal brands through frequent Fox appearances.
Greta van Susteren left Fox after a contract dispute, while Eric Bolling was fired after reportedly sending unsolicited photos of genitalia to co-workers. Both now host shows at longtime Fox competitor Newsmax, alongside former Foxers Mike Huckabee and Sebastian Gorka.
Then there are the independents. Megyn Kelly left Fox for a disastrous turn at NBC, Bill O’Reilly was fired following the public revelation of numerous sexual harassment settlements, and Lou Dobbs was apparently dropped for being too Dobbs-y. Each now reaches fans through a personal podcast show.
So does Dan Bongino, a Fox weekend host who left the network earlier this year, and Steven Crowder, a former Fox contributor who has achieved notoriety on YouTube and Rumble. Lara Logan, who was banned from Fox for comparing Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and from Newsmax after going on a QAnon rant, is now in a similar position, publishing a docuseries pushing January 6 conspiracy theories on X.
Right-wingers who wanted a rage fix once had nowhere to turn but Fox. But now they can subscribe to cable and watch Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld on the network, or they can cut the cord, sign up for some services, and watch familiar faces like Beck ($10 per month for BlazeTV+), Carlson ($9/month for Tucker Carlson Network), O’Reilly ($6.95/month for The No Spin Zone), and Kelly (free on YouTube) instead. And some members of the diaspora even share a loose alliance — Carlson used to regularly host Beck on his Fox show, and he is promoting his new venture on Kelly’s program.
Fox still has the advantage of audience inertia — many fans have been watching for years and are simply used to keeping their television tuned to the network all day or turning it on for the prime-time shows.
But the business model of the Fox diaspora benefits from lower overhead, since its outlets don’t require the pretense of an expensive newsgathering apparatus. Instead, the former Fox stars can just rant angrily about whatever is reported elsewhere. And one of the things they rant about is Fox: They have a vested interest in tearing down the network, decrying it as insufficiently anti-woke or pro-Trump in an effort to steal away its viewers, which in turn can lead the network to course-correct in their direction.
We saw a version of this play out following the 2020 election, when Fox’s executives and stars, including Carlson, promoted Trumpian conspiracy theories about voter fraud out of fears of losing market share to relatively weak rivals like Newsmax. Since then, competition for Fox’s viewers has only grown.
The new Tucker Carlson Network will doubtlessly allow Carlson and the flunkies who join him to channel the same lies and hate that fueled his Fox show, along with passion projects his old bosses may have opposed airing. If the X show Carlson has hosted in recent months is any indication, that means nodding along with lunatic conspiracy theorists who claim that they had gay sex with Barack Obama and that Joe Biden wanders the White House naked, and producing even more hagiography for international autocrats.
But it will also give Carlson, who has hobnobbed with Donald Trump and drawn attention as a possible running mate for the man he once privately claimed to despise, another platform to weigh in on the 2024 presidential election.
If Trump once again tries to subvert American democracy, and Carlson and other members of the Fox diaspora come to his aid, how will Fox respond? The question answers itself.
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AHA SOVERIENTY IS GOD TERM // THE CONST BUT USEFUL IN TERMS OF YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, CONST RT TO DO ANYTHING I WANT
Right-wing media figures exploit anti-immigrant riots in Ireland to demonize migrants and Muslims, and attack legal immigration
Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and others pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and falsely portrayed immigrants as threats to public safety
WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES, SOPHIE LAWTON & JACK WHEATLEY
PUBLISHED 11/30/23
Right-wing media figures reacted to anti-immigrant riots in Ireland by demonizing Muslims, falsely accusing migrants of being a risk to public safety and attacking the very idea of legal immigration. Their response is an escalation of the xenophobic rhetoric that right-wing media frequently direct at unauthorized migration, and is a clear attempt to push for policies that would drastically reduce legal immigration levels.
The riots in Dublin were sparked after early reports on November 23 that an Irish citizen who allegedly stabbed five people, including three children, was believed to have been born abroad — thus highlighting the suspect’s perceived foreignness. Subsequent reporting found that although the alleged attacker was apparently born in Algeria, he has lived in Ireland for at least 20 years, according to Irish authorities. Numerous studies have found that increased levels of immigration do not cause a rise in crime rates either in the United States or European countries.
This manufactured panic and demonization of a marginalized group echoes a similar episode from last week, when Fox News invented a terrorism scare over a car crash at the U.S.-Canada border and used the nonexistent plot to paint Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and their supporters as the culprits, only to retract its reporting hours later. Anti-Muslim hate incidents have also skyrocketed during Israel’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ attack on October 7.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon exploited the Dublin attack to spread his anti-immigrant message across multiple platforms, including his own War Room podcast as well as Tucker Carlson’s show on X (formerly Twitter) and Donald Trump Jr.’s streaming show on Rumble, a far-right competitor to YouTube. In several of these segments, Bannon and his interlocutors endorsed versions of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that liberal elites are attempting to change the demographics of white-majority countries through mass migration from the Global South to maintain political and economic dominance.
Prior to Fox News’ firing of Carlson, he was the network’s — and perhaps the entire country’s — most visible proponent of the great replacement theory. During Bannon’s appearance on Carlson’s show on November 27, both figures pushed openly nativist bigotry alongside the racist conspiracy theory.
Bannon referred to migrants to the United States and Ireland as “alien invaders,” adding that Irish politicians have “sold out the sovereignty of the Irish” and that the riots were “natural blowback.”
“The Irish government is trying to replace the population of Ireland with people from the Third World, obviously,” Carlson responded. “But why? What's the justification for that?”
“You talk about the great replacement theory and people are — oh, you know, people get very upset when you talk about it, but just look at the math,” Bannon answered.
“It’s not a theory,” Carlson interjected.
“This has happened across Europe,” Bannon continued. “It's happened in Germany.”
“In 100 years, there'll be a minority of Irish people in Ireland,” Carlson said. “That's a big change, and it's on purpose.”
Later in their conversation, Bannon endorsed mass deportations, saying: “I think illegal alien invaders are coming because they've gamed the asylum system. My belief is those people have to go home. They have to be returned, they have to leave our country or we're not going to have a country.”
Later that day, Bannon appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered to celebrate Hungary’s far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán and Irish mixed martial arts fighter Connor McGregor, who had come under police investigation following anti-migrant social media posts.
Video
CitationFrom the November 27, 2023, edition of Triggered, streamed on Rumble
Former President Donald Trump fought “for the sovereignty, not just of nation-states, but the sovereignty of the individual citizens in those nation-states,” Bannon said. “I think it's inspired Orban in Hungary. I think McGregor in Ireland standing up the other day was inspired by Donald Trump.”
The discussion then turned to the knife attack in Dublin, with the host claiming Arab and Muslim cultures celebrate anti-social violence.
“In their culture, they can stab people in the streets. It's fine. We must allow them to do that to our children,” Trump Jr. facetiously said, adding, “I mean, the government is taking an actively hostile position against their citizens in favor of, like, seemingly savages in many cases.”
Bannon returned to the subject the next day on his War Room podcast, calling for the “deportation of the 9 million — at least 9 million to 10 million — illegal alien invaders coming in the Biden regime.”
“What happened in Ireland — it's all coming here, folks,” Bannon warned ominously. “It’s all coming here.”
His guest the following hour was conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been increasingly embraced by right-wing media in recent years. Jones falsely claimed that “illegal aliens or migrants” are responsible for “the majority of muggings, rape, and murder in every European country."
That evening, Bannon discussed the violence in Ireland in another episode of War Room, where his guest, author Michael Walsh, again pushed the great replacement conspiracy theory.
“This was the spark that set off what’s become a powder keg across the country, which is the notion — widely held among the Irish people — that they’re being replaced by foreigners,” Walsh said. He added that the Irish government “is committed to this program of quiet replacement and has demonized what we would have called Irish patriots,” referring to the far-right mobs.
Several other right-wing media figures also used the riots to spread anti-migrant bigotry.
- BlazeTV’s Steve Deace defended the mob, arguing that “the Irish Proud Boy wannabes” are “not the villain here,” suggesting they “have had enough” and feel like “I’ve already lost my culture to Islam. Now our daughters are getting raped and assaulted” by the “rape-fugees we brought in.”
- “Concerned citizens in Dublin, Ireland look on helplessly as busloads of undocumented migrants are brought into their community,” anti-LGBTQ social media account Libs of Tik Tok posted on X (formerly Twitter).
- Salem Media’s Charlie Kirk questioned “how Ireland allowed so many foreigners and Third-Worlders into the beautiful country of Ireland?"
- Self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer blamed the attack on a “Muslim migrant."
"Across the West, the status quo has become intolerable,” Loomer added. “The endless waves of immigrants, the devastation of our culture, and the crackdown against anyone who dares to stand against it has all become too much to bear.”
“There can be no doubt that the average person is, at last, awake to the gravity of the situation, and their anger is brewing,” Loomer continued. “White people, in particular, have taken all of this on the chin for the last few decades, but that appears to be coming to an end.”
- Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis argued that regardless of the suspect’s citizenship status, he “was an immigrant nonetheless,” claiming the incident was further evidence that “Europe is at the precipice of falling."
Following the riots, some observers of the far right argued that anti-immigrant sentiment had become a major issue in Ireland in recent years, and that politicians needed to do more to address the rising xenophobia. Right-wing media figures are determined to stand in the way.
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an 12 23
In a new column, MSNBC host Jen Psaki is warning that a conspiracy theory popular with the most far-right fringes of society has now become standard conservative orthodoxy.
On Saturday, Psaki remarked on a comment uttered by businessman Vivek Ramaswamy that went relatively unnoticed during the fourth Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, in which he baselessly suggested that the so-called "Great Replacement Theory" is "a basic statement of the Democratic Party's platform (it isn't)." That theory posits that Democrats seek to have immigrants and refugees "replace" the white population, with the overall goal of having them become registered voters to sway elections.
"The great replacement theory is definitely not a part of the Democratic Party platform. It is a conspiracy theory — one touted by neo-Nazis and avowed white supremacists," Psaki wrote. "The scary part is that it has become mainstream in Republican politics. There’s Donald Trump’s comments that immigration from the southern border was 'poisoning the blood of our country.' In the same vein, House Speaker Mike Johnson said in May that Democrats are 'intentionally' encouraging undocumented immigration to 'turn all these illegals into voters for their side.'
"It's all a part of a movement on the right wing to foment outrage and seize power by playing up the fear of the 'other,'" she added. "And it's not a strategy that is going away."
The "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory has also been popularized by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who frequently alluded to it on his primetime Fox News program to millions of nightly viewers. By the Guardian's count, Carlson mentioned it in approximately 400 episodes. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) have also been criticized for promoting the "replacement" conspiracy theory.
The growing prevalence of that conspiracy theory has led to violent and tragic outcomes. In 2022, the perpetrator of the mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York grocery store mentioned it in the manifesto he wrote prior to massacring 10 people and injuring three others at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood. While he didn't specifically name Fox News, he did admit to being radicalized on the forum 4Chan.
Neo-nazi Andrew Anglin, founder of the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, called Tucker Carlson "literally our greatest ally" and lauded him for "dropping the ultimate truth bomb on his audience" in reference to the "great replacement" theory.
READ MORE:'Safety is disappearing': Racist 'Great Replacement' theory targets Fargo's Liberian immigrants
//
- fact check highlights House speaker hopeful Jim Jordan’s 'vocal' support of Trump’s 2020 election lies ›
- Jen Psaki swats down Peter Doocy: 'We do something new here and allow DOJ to act independently’ ›
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an11 23
2023's most talked-about bombshell in cable news came in April when Fox News fired its top-rated host Tucker Carlson. Since then, the former Fox News star has hosted a show on X, formerly Twitter.
Carlson, post-Fox News, hasn't been shy about promoting former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign — not only in the United States, but in other countries as well. In a report published by Politico on November 29, journalist Sarah Wheaton stresses that Carlson is acting like "Trump's top international diplomat."
"Since his ouster from cable TV," Wheaton reports, "Carlson has been taking his new X show on a world tour — and his interviews with Argentina's Javier Milei and Hungary's Viktor Orbán have racked up hundreds of millions of views. Yet Carlson is also engaging in a sort of shadow diplomacy."
Wheaton continues, "In early November, he popped up in London to visit Julian Assange at Belmarsh prison. Eleven days later, Carlson was spotted on the streets of Madrid, alongside Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's far-right Vox Party, amid protesters against amnesty for Catalan separatists."
On X, Carlson has not only been promoting Trump's campaign — he has also been pointing out the parallels between the MAGA movement and far-right authoritarians like Orbán.
"According to a new book by the former CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, Fox executives hadn't authorized Carlson's weeklong mission there, and the flirtation with authoritarianism might have been a contributing factor in his dismissal," Wheaton explains. "There was also Carlson's role in the defamation lawsuit that cost Fox $787 million for on-air lies that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen."
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Alternet 10 23
Tucker Carlson’s 'homoerotic' ‘The End of Men’ is no laughing matter
Tucker Carlson // Fox News
John Stoehr
April 18, 2022
I did not, and I hope you did not, watch Tucker Carlson’s infomercial on Fox called “The End of Men.” We don’t need to see it to know it.
Social media was ablaze last night after a “fitness professional” told the TV show host that when applied to a man’s netherlands, “red light therapy” can boost his levels of testosterone. As of this writing, “testicle tanning” is trending on Twitter. Welcome to Monday.
Another point of focus was the video introduction of the TV special. In it, young, muscular and naked-to-the-waist white men, in this order:
do push-ups,
shoot a semi-automatic rifle,
milk a cow,
grill some meat and
wrestle.
Then comes a panoramic shot of a white man, fully naked, standing in front of what looks to be a bike-share dock. A red light illuminates his groin so brightly it’s like his parts are missing. His arms are reverently outstretched. The scene is set to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.
That’s followed by more unshirted white man lifting a tractor tire (?), chopping a tree (I think) with a double-headed ax (??), bathing (???) and drinking a globulous liquid (let’s hope to God it’s raw eggs). It all ends with a naked white guy standing before a rectangle of red lights.
In conclusion, a male voiceover, slightly British-sounding, says: “Once a society collapses, then you’re in hard times. Well, ‘hard iron sharpens iron,’ as they say. And those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, who are resourceful, who are strong enough to survive. Then they go on to re-establish order, and so the cycle begins again.”
Reactions from the liberal quarters of social media have been mixed. Some call it grift, which seems true. For God’s sake, listen to the guy:
It’s testicle tanning, but it's also full body. Red light therapy has massive amounts of benefits and there's so much data out there that isn't being picked up on or covered. … I was recently exposed to a term called 'bromeopathy' and I think there's a lot of people out there right now that are don't trust the mainstream information.
Others call it homoerotic. I presume some truth in that. But it can be hard to tell where homoerotism ends and where familiar ordinary narcissism begins. I’m partial to the latter explanation. Making a fetish of men’s bodies isn’t necessarily about sex or sexual identity.
(Saying as much is cruelty in disguise. If real men are really closeted gays, then closeted gays can’t really be real men? Let’s avoid that.)
The Nazis made a fetish of men’s bodies. Some were closeted, but all? As Annika Brockschmidt, author of America's Holy Warriors, said:
Fascist aesthetic is highly militarized, focusing on sculpted male bodies that represent the strength of the volk.
This form of hyper-militant masculinity can carry homoerotic implications. This is very on brand, not off brand for fascism.}:
Other aspects are ruralism, anti-urbanism, idealised version of hyper-virility, anti-feminism, pro-natalism.}:
This is a case study in modern American fascist aesthetics, anti-modernist, inspired by idealized ‘Roman’ bodies.}:
Others still called it ridiculous.
After all, “red light therapy” (not UV light) is more fiction than medicine. It won’t boost levels of testosterone any more than herbal cures will. (If you want more testosterone, it’s better to exercise).
In any case, how are young, muscular and bare-chested white men supposed to restore order by consuming products manufactured in a society that’s ordered enough to manufacture products with which young, muscular and bare-chested white men re-establish order?
Sure, ridiculous, but over top that is evil.
The first tell, above all the above, is that a highly profitable cable news network took it seriously enough to broadcast it. Fox knows that much of its viewership fear “testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it,” as Carlson told his “fitness professional” guest.
“That's crazy,” Carlson said. “So why is it crazy to seek solutions?”
Those solutions might include “testicle tanning” but that’s a stand-in for something else – the subliminal fear that white men are becoming less manly, more womanly, and the result, as the voiceover guy said, is that “society collapses.” It will take restoring white male strength, which is code for their rightful place in society, to “reestablish order.”
That doesn’t involve genitals, though.
It involves pushing women, racial minorities and sexual minorities (perhaps religious minorities) back to where they are “supposed to be,” where they are removed from the machinery of democratic power as well the rights and privileges white men have historically enjoyed.
Carlson’s “The End of Men” is worthy of ridicule.
But let’s remember it’s a reflection of a larger social paranoia about a form of government, democracy, and a set of values, liberalism, that have challenged, though not beaten, an ordinary familiar narcissism that’s now hoping to “restore” white men to the center of everything.
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an 7 23
for decades, Republicans have been angrily railing against what they consider a "liberal bias" in the mainstream media, arguing that right-wing outlets like Fox News, Newsmax and Townhall are necessary because the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer will never be fair to conservatives. But ironically, right-wing media figures are the ones who can cause Republican politicians the most worry, stress and anxiety.
In an article published on July 14, the Daily Beast's Jake Lahut notes thatTucker Carlson has been "the most feared man in Republican politics — aside from former President Donald Trump." That was once true of the late radio host Rush Limbaugh, who had so much influence on the right during the 1990s and 2000s that Republicans were terrified of offending him.
When Michael Steele was chairing the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 2009, he apologized for offering even mild criticism of Limbaugh — an incident that countless liberal pundits described as downright pathetic. Subsequently, Carlson had that type of power when he was with Fox News.
READ MORE: Tucker Carlson’s Twitter viewership falling as battle with Fox News stalls: report
It's a power that prominent liberal pundits simply don't have among Democrats. Although Democratic politicians will pay close attention to what MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell or the New York Times' Paul Krugman have to say, they aren't terrified of them the way that Republicans were terrified of Carlson during his years at Fox News or, before that, Limbaugh.
But according to Lahut, the "hard-earned honor" of being the pundit Republicans fear the most "might be slipping away from Carlson" now that he is no longer with Fox News.
"While Carlson still boasts plenty of fans despite his firing from Fox," Lahut explains, "he has seen a steep decline in his viewership on a new Twitter-based version of his show since it launched last month. These days, GOP campaign sources and Republicans closely watching the 2024 primary see Carlson as a necessary hassle to deal with — but hardly the towering figure of doom he once was."
Lahut stresses that Carlson will use the 2024 election to promote his post-Fox News brand, but how successful he will be remains to be seen.
READ MORE: Tucker Carlson claims 'neocon war agenda' is behind Trump documents prosecution
A GOP strategist, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told The Beast, "This is high stakes for Tucker…. to show that he has the mojo. Does he still have the influence and the ability to rake people over the coals? He obviously wants to build a media empire, and he doesn't have the sway he used to at Fox News. But this will prove whether he can still drive the conversation on the right and break through the noise."
READ MORE: Tucker Carlson's lawyers respond to Fox News' allegation of contract violation: report
Read the Daily Beast's full report at this link (subscription required).
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7 23 fox not doing x event? but bartiromo will interview trump
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an 7 23
man who participated in the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol and subsequently became the face of a Fox News conspiracy theory is suing the network for defamation, correspondents Alan Feuer and Jeremy W. Peters reported in The New York Times on Wednesday.
Ray Epps is "seeking an unspecified amount in damages" for the character assassination that he allegedly endured from fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson's "'fantastical story' that Mr. Epps was an undercover government agent who instigated the violence at the Capitol as a way to disparage then-President Trump and his supporters," Feuer and Peters wrote.
"Just as Fox had focused on voting machine companies when falsely claiming a rigged election, Fox knew it needed a scapegoat for January 6th," Epps' complaint states, according to Delaware Superior Court documents reviewed by the Times. Fox "settled on Ray Epps and began promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol."
"After the unfounded accusations about Mr. Epps were aired on Mr. Carlson's show," Feuer and Peters explained, "they quickly spread to online communities of Trump supporters and to the political world as Republican members of Congress tried to link Mr. Epps to a fictitious conspiracy theory that he was involved in planning the Jan. 6 attack. They includedSenator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, both of whom made Mr. Epps — a two-time Trump voter — a focus of concern at public hearings."
Fox's false narrative "had damaging consequences for Mr. Epps and his wife, Robyn,who received numerous death threats and were forced to sell their five-acre ranch and wedding business in Arizona and move into a 350-square-foot mobile home parked at a remote trailer park in the mountains of Utah," per the**Times. "Online retailers began selling T-shirts that said 'Arrest Ray Epps.' Some people even recorded songs about him and posted them on YouTube, the complaint states, adding how he had been reduced 'into a character in a cartoonish conspiracy theory.'"
Epps' attorney, Michael Teter, noted that although his client "demanded in March that Fox and Mr. Carlson retract its stories about him and his purported role in the Capitol riot and issue an on-air apology, neither the network nor Mr. Carlson, whose prime-time show has since been canceled, responded."
Despite never being criminally charged for his role in the Capitol attack, the Times added, "Mr. Carlson and Fox settled on Mr. Epps as a 'villain' who could serve as a distraction from the network's own 'culpability for stoking the fire that led to the events of January 6th.' Mr. Carlson, it said, became 'fixated on Epps' and began the promoting the idea that Mr. Epps and the federal government were responsible for the Capitol riots.
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