The Other McCain

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The Left’s Tucker Carlson Fixation

Posted on | February 26, 2021 | Comments Off on The Left’s Tucker Carlson Fixation

Tucker Carlson makes a lot of money, so he can afford to live almost anywhere, but lately he’s been living rent-free inside the heads of liberal journalists like Megan Garber of The Atlantic. Some of us can remember when The Atlantic was not a partisan propaganda operation, and it’s sad to them in “skin suit” mode, as Iowahawk would say.

Ever since Carlson rode to the top of the heap at Fox News, he’s had a target on his back, and has manfully stood firm under the scrutiny. And by “scrutiny,” of course, I mean, relentless defamation. Last summer, one of Carlson’s top writers got exposed as a Thought Criminal, and yet the departure of Blake Neff seemed to have no effect on Carlson’s performance. He never flinched, so to speak, and it must be driving his enemies crazy (or crazier, actually, since they were pretty much bonkers to begin with) that nothing they do seems to faze him.

So I glanced at Memeorandum this afternoon and saw a link to Megan Garber’s article, “American Cynicism Has Reached a Breaking Point,” which is . . . something else. What triggered Garber was Carlson’s Tuesday monologue in which he mocked CNN’s Brian Stelter for claiming that the QAnon conspiracy theory is being spread by the “right wing” and “radicalizing Americans.” And let’s just make clear that there is no amount of mockery greater than Brian Stelter deserves. He can never be mocked too much or too often. For some reason, however, this Carlson monologue inspired Megan Garber to write a 3,000-word essay in which she mentions a lot of things that have nothing to do with Tucker Carlson, but never once does she mention the name “Brian Stelter.”

What lies at the heart of Garber’s grievance — other than the fact that Tucker Carlson hasn’t been banished from TV, deplatformed on social media, and generally silenced — is that millions of Americans don’t believe Joe Biden actually won the 2020 election. As I have elsewhere explained, skepticism toward the 2020 election is entirely justified, once you realize that Biden’s combined margin in four states — Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada — adds up to slightly more than 75,000 votes. A little less than 13 million total votes were cast in those four states, which means that the average margin was around 0.6%. Flipping those four states from Biden to Trump would have shifted enough Electoral College votes to re-elect Trump. If you don’t think Democrats could find a way to fabricate an extra 12,000 Biden votes in Georgia or Arizona, you suffer from a deficit of imagination.

So while I certainly do not claim to have specific proof that the presidential election was “rigged,” it seems to me ludicrous for liberals to claim it’s a “conspiracy theory” to doubt the outcome. And that’s what the liberal media’s endless blabbering about QAnon is really about. What they’re saying is, “See? These right-wing kooks believe this bizarre stuff about satanic cannibal pedophiles, which is just slightly more outrageous that believing that Biden didn’t win the election.”

QAnon, in other words, is a special breed of “squirrel.” On the one hand, calling attention to a kooky fringe belief distracts from the real issues surrounding the 2020 election (e.g., universal mail-in balloting as an avenue for fraud) while, on the other hand, it serves as a convenient smear to discredit anyone expressing skepticism toward the result. If it can be shown that some election skeptics are also into QAnon, then it is easy to imply that every election skeptic is a conspiracy theorist.

Megan Garber does not want to give an inch to anyone who doubts the legitimacy of Biden’s election, and therefore she dubs anyone expressing doubt about the result as promoting “The Big Lie”:

Cynicism, at scale, makes democracy’s most basic demand—seeing one another as we are—impossible. And America, at the moment, is saturated with it. Cynicism makes daily appearances on Fox (and on Newsmax, and on One America News Network). It was the molten core of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the only real message Rush Limbaugh had to give. It lurks in the language of QAnon. It lives in the Big Lie. It seethed in the violence of the Capitol insurrection. It has made suspicion an easy sell.

Do you see how easily she slides from one thing to another? Fox News, NewsMax and OANN are all part of the same vast iceberg of right-wing “cynicism,” which connects Trump to Limbaugh to QAnon to “The Big Lie” to the Capitol “insurrection.” So if you ever listened to talk radio, you’re a deluded conspiracy theorist, and if you ever watched NewsMax, you’re complicit in the January 6 “insurrection.” It’s all connected, see?

Two words, my friends: Pepe Silvia.

Do you see how the rage at Tucker Carlson — from Megan Garber, from Brian Stelter, from every other liberal journalist inside whose head Carlson has been living rent-free for months — is driven by fear? If these liberals were really confident in the effectiveness of their influence, if they really believed they were capable of persuasion and that the facts were on their side, why would they care what Tucker Carlson says?

I don’t lose any sleep over the fact that millions of people watch Rachel Maddow. It doesn’t bother me that people I disagree with have TV shows with enormous audiences. As much as I despise the New York Times, I haven’t organized a campaign to get them kicked off Twitter.

What bothers Megan Garber is the haunting fear that most people aren’t really buying what she’s selling. Her fear about the Capitol “insurrection” has little to do with any actual crimes committed by the 800 or so people who trampled down the barricades on January 6. Her fear is based in the knowledge that there are tens of millions of Americans who, while they might not be willing to storm a police barricade, nonetheless have some basic sense of agreement with those who did. These tens of millions of law-abiding citizens might frown on the rowdiness of the mob that rioted at the Capitol, but they harbor profound doubts about the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Garber knows this, and she realizes that it is basically impossible to overcome those doubts. There is no way you’re ever going to convince me that the vote total in Fulton County, Georgia, was legit, and I know that there are many millions who would say the same thing.

You can send a link to this post to Megan Garber on Twitter and ask her: Do I seem stupid? Am I ignorant? Uninformed? Deranged? Am I crazy — and are the many millions of others who agree me also crazy — to suspect that the Magical Mail-In Ballot Bonanza was a pre-planned fraud?

Sweetheart, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.

Tucker Carlson’s mockery of Stelter annoys people like Megan Garber because she knows we’re all laughing along with Tucker. And in laughing at Stelter, we’re also laughing at anyone who takes him seriously. Now let Megan Garber write another 3,000 words about that.

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Category: Media Bias

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