DL Open Thread: Sunday, May 1, 2022
Tucker Carlson: American Nationalist. When the history of the death of American democracy (or what passes for it) is written (whether it’s permitted to be published or read depends upon the whims of whoever ends up as America’s Orban), the creation of a 24/7 TV propaganda news cycle will loom large in the story. As should the laws that Newt Gingrich pushed through permitting oligarchs to dominate both print and electronic media. Carlson, who could become America’s Orban, has turned himself into the top propagandist in the land, and with the largest audience:
In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.
Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.
This comprehensive three-part series by the Times is must-reading. Maybe if you know your enemy (centrist Democrats), you’ll be motivated to take up the fight. No? OK, just read it to learn something.
‘Explosions/Fires/Accidents’. What’s Going On In Russia? They’re not all linked to Ukraine. I think we’re talking Russian people surreptitiously fighting Putin.
‘Pegasus’: How Democracies Spy On Its Citizens. Yet another must-read, this one from one of the best journalists anywhere, Ronan Farrow:
Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial. In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda’s opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels. Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi’s associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, “Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.”) Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states. But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company’s efforts to fight spyware, told me, “The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff—not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments.”
NSO Group is perhaps the most successful, controversial, and influential firm in a generation of Israeli startups that have made the country the center of the spyware industry. I first interviewed Shalev Hulio, NSO Group’s C.E.O., in 2019, and since then I have had access to NSO Group’s staff, offices, and technology. The company is in a state of contradiction and crisis. Its programmers speak with pride about the use of their software in criminal investigations—NSO claims that Pegasus is sold only to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies—but also of the illicit thrill of compromising technology platforms. The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO. The company said in its statement that it had been “targeted by a number of politically motivated advocacy organizations, many with well-known anti-Israel biases,” and added that “we have repeatedly cooperated with governmental investigations, where credible allegations merit, and have learned from each of these findings and reports, and improved the safeguards in our technologies.” Hulio told me, “I never imagined in my life that this company would be so famous. . . . I never imagined that we would be so successful.” He paused. “And I never imagined that it would be so controversial.”
If you don’t subscribe to the New Yorker and can read only a limited number of free articles every month, make this article a priority. Hey, it’s May 1. The slate has been wiped clean.
What do you want to talk about?
*Sarcastic clapping* The NYT on the spot with some hard hitting journalism five years after the horses escaped from the barn, the barn was burned down and a Nazi parade ground exists where the barn once stood.
Ronan Farrow is the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. He has been a staunch advocate for his sister in her allegations of sexual abuse against Allen. Some of his best-known and most-impactful stories deal with noted abusers, most notably Harvey Weinstein, former NY AG Eric Schneiderman (who resigned over the story), CBS CEO Les Moonves, and, yes, Brett Kavanaugh.
He strikes me as quite the extraordinary person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Farrow
“What’s going on in Russia”
Good question, but it sure looks like there’s a Russian Resistance is in place. And from the videos it seems their everywhere and rather good at what they do. Dare say Putin has them executed then and there if their caught. Putin continues to play his failed game in Ukraine even as Russia seems to be falling apart. Cool.
I don’t think a true centrist democrat would consider Tucker Carlson anything but a dangerous asshole. The question is, what’s the best way to curb his power? If dragging him out of his studio and beating him senselessly turns out to be the best way, then we should get on with it.
It’s not what they would consider, it’s the fact that they seem oblivious to what I believe are serious threats to the survival of democracy, and don’t do a damn thing about it..
I agree, our merry little “centrists” live in a fantasy world, sort of like Coons going on about his “good friends in the Republican party”. It seems threats to democracy don’t intrude on their happy little world of corporate butt kissing.
The “serious threats” are real and should be clear. But what response will get the best result? For the time being, anyway, the main thing is winning elections. I think most of us are trying to save democracy.
My point is that, when centrists talk about ‘winning elections’, they’re talking about candidates who don’t stand for anything and, as a result, lose.
Especially in a mid-term, when those who are most motivated are those who turn out.
Not to mention, one way to motivate voters (I would think) is to stress how dangerous and nuts the Rethuglicans are. Rethugs scare voters all the time. It’s a proven effective strategy. Now that they’re really scary, D political types are talking about how to finesse issues like inflation.
The proper strategy is TO SCARE VOTERS who would most be hurt by what Rethugs are doing into getting them out to vote.
Ah… the view from Nathan’s sober moderate high horse must be magnificent.
Yeah Nathan the “main” thing is to “win” elections. And when you do, the “main” thing is to cower in the dark defecating on your principles and hope nobody notices you till after the next election. I hope your hero “winners” realize that constantly soiling themselves leaves an easily identifiable stench that eventually becomes unbearable to those people they’ve s##t on
Rev – You’re the one always certain about his righteousness. You seem to think anybody who disagrees with you is doing it from a “high horse.” I only like to bet on horses. And I wasn’t really “sober” when I wrote this.
Kowalko – You’d rather have your candidates lose? This doesn’t make any sense.
That wasn’t The Rev, it was Kowalko. Not that there’s much difference in tone.
Almost got threatened with a ban when I wasn’t here! Lol.
Kowalko – I think in the long run we both want to defeat the same people. And the “high horse” comment should have gone to Jason. Told you I wasn’t sober!
Nathan,
I probably wont stay sober either. My point is, however, that “winning” a “job” for yourself does not mean “winning” (in any way shape or form) for those who elected you or need you to help them. They are (as often as not) “losing”
Representative John Kowalko
I read through the Nicholas Confessore article earlier. An 8-year old Tucker is still weeping somewhere……Another excerpt: ” In 2013, Fox gave him a shot in its minor leagues as a weekend co-host of “Fox and Friends,” the popular morning show. The hours were terrible — Carlson, a night owl, once fell asleep on air — and the work sometimes fluffy. But it put him back in the game, and it helped pay the bills. His media career had given him adventures and an exciting life, he told a Caller colleague in 2015, but it had been hard to earn the kind of living he aspired to. “I’ve sweated a lot about money, a lot,” he said. “And continue to, probably more than a 45-year-old should.”
At the time, Carlson was locked in an increasingly bitter inheritance battle. His mother had died a few years earlier in France, apparently without a will, leaving her sons and her second husband, Michael Vaughan, to divide up her estate. Alongside her paintings and jewelry were the dregs of the Miller ranching fortune — a share of mineral rights sprinkled over 68,000 acres of inland central California and valued at around $37,000.
The orderly disposal of the estate was interrupted in the fall of 2013, according to court records in California, when one of Vaughan’s daughters from a prior marriage discovered a handwritten will that left everything to him. It also included a one-sentence codicil: “I leave my sons Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson and Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson one dollar each.”
Tucker Carlson and his brother sued, alleging that the will was a forgery; a forensics specialist brought in to examine it stated that it was probably authentic. Carlson’s uncle asserted that the “discovery” of his sister’s will occurred only after a new well on the family’s California property began pumping out hundreds of barrels of oil. In court filings, the Vaughans now valued the estate’s mineral assets at $2.6 million. The litigation was still going on years later when Carlson showed up on Carolla’s podcast to hawk “Ship of Fools,” his Fox-era jeremiad about America’s selfish elites. “She didn’t raise us, she was horrible, and then she dies and causes all these problems,” Carlson told the host, describing a conversation with his brother. “And he goes, ‘It’s just perfect; she’s a bitch from the grave.’”
But another, more consequential family feud was unfolding inside the Caller. At the start of Obama’s second term, a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight tried to resurrect immigration reform. Carlson was already known to his staff as an immigration hawk; in office debates, he would sometimes invoke Lewiston as a kind of personal turning point, telling colleagues that he had watched Somali refugees ruin the city. In 2013, he met Stephen Miller — future architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, then a congressional aide working to defeat the Gang of Eight — and found in him a kindred spirit. Although Carlson allowed the Caller’s pro-immigration writers free rein, the site’s news coverage of immigration reform, led by a reporter named Neil Munro, was relentlessly hostile. Miller and his allies on the Hill fed Munro a steady diet of tips and story suggestions. The Caller’s audience loved it.
“Immigration was always the most animating thing; it wasn’t even close,” said a former Caller employee familiar with the site’s readership metrics, who requested anonymity for fear of antagonizing Carlson.”