It’s not as cold and grey here in Western Colorado where we’re famous for enjoying over 300 days of sun a year as it is in a lot of the rest of the country. But it’s still cold and it’s grey and it’s a perfect day for making a pot of hearty soup and a loaf of bread. I was going to take the entire day off. Then I read this piece on Tucker Carlson that I need to share with you and here I am back to work. But since I’m cheating and mostly just re-posting something written by someone else, and even after I’ve driven 100 miles to buy some humanely raised and humanely slaughtered (if there is any humane way to kill something) meat for that special wienerschnitzel Christmas meal my wife insists on, I think there will still be time for both the bread and the soup. There will definitely be time for a cocktail.
You know that I’m concerned about our democracy and you know that I believe that those who are trying to remake it in their own image are using racial fear and a resentment they create and then stoke – e.g. The Great Replacement Theory - and the ballot box to achieve their goals.
And then there’s Tucker, still believing in a democracy that is for the people, by the people, and of the people…so long as those people all look like him and are of the landed class. All others need not apply.
But I am still stunned when the Tucker Carlsons of the world praise authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán of Hungry and then shun and disparage the Ukrainian people and their leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Opinion piece by Greg Sargent. I’ve partly edited it for relevancy and clarity. You can read the entire piece here.
“After Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a rousing speech to U.S. lawmakers this week, Tucker Carlson unleashed a diatribe that put schoolyard sadists everywhere to shame. “No one’s ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before,” he seethed, slamming Zelensky as a “strip club” manager whose presence was “humiliating” to “the greatest country on Earth.”
Carlson’s attack on the Ukrainian president, whose olive green garb was meant to dramatize his country’s wartime plight, has sparked outrage because of its demeaning quality at a time of extraordinary duress for the Ukrainian people. But this episode deserves a deeper look than Carlson’s adolescent belittling usually merits.
Carlson’s rant carried a more hateful edge than usual, a kind of shrill fury. Perhaps that’s because Zelensky’s presence before Congress was far more humiliating to Carlson and his ideological comrades than to anyone else: It demonstrated how badly they misjudged Ukraine’s will to resist Russian conquest and the durability of the U.S. commitment to our beleaguered ally.
This represents the failure of a worldview, a strain of far-right authoritarian populism, that goes well beyond Ukraine. A whole lot of things have happened that — in Carlson’s mental universe — were not supposed to happen.
In his diatribe, Carlson depicted Zelensky as little more than a sleazy street thug who had come to “demand money” from Congress, telling his audience that the lawmakers “love him much more than they love you.” He exaggerated Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war, depicting Ukraine as the unreasonable party.
Carlson has long insisted that Ukrainians are “pawns” in the United States’ quest for “regime change” in Russia, predicting our warmongering would trigger nuclear catastrophe. He has trivialized the invasion as a faraway “border dispute,” and has scoffed that Democrats are hypnotizing Americans into feeling “hate” for Russia.
Carlson’s obvious bet has been that voters wouldn’t care about the conflict and would see little virtue in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Lawmakers would ultimately abandon the cause.
But Zelensky’s appearance itself forcefully repudiated all of this. It demonstrated that Ukrainian resistance is driven by its people’s own extraordinarily courageous commitment to self-rule. It showed that U.S. support for Ukraine is unwavering. It displayed the success of President Biden’s careful balance, which has enabled Ukraine to regain substantial ground while avoiding direct U.S. escalation, refuting Carlson’s predictions otherwise.
There is an ideology behind all that wrongness, and Carlson has clearly laid it out. It tells Americans that Democratic elites prioritize Ukraine’s border over our own — they love Zelensky more than they love you. This conflation of the two borders, a widespread right-wing populist trope, encourages Americans to turn inward in multiple ways, washing our hands of responsibility for international allies and desperate migrants alike.
This worldview also rails against elite wokeness. Carlson frequently tells viewers that the same elites who want people to hate Russia and are obliterating the southern border are also brainwashing kids with anti-White racism.”
Tucker Carlson would have been a starry-eyed acolyte of Alexander Stevens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America. Carlson and his followers stand on the shoulders of those that came before them who thought the framers of the Constitution got it all wrong when they claimed that all men are created equal and entitled to certain inalienable rights. In his now-famous 1861 Cornerstone speech, Stevens laid out his - and Carlson’s - world view in clear, unambiguous language that we can all understand, “Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Add “immigrant” to “Negro”, add a large dose of fear, and there you have it - Authoritarianism over Democracy.