How Tucker Stopped Worrying About Being Bad At Phonics And Just Became Racist Instead
Hoo boy, the Washington Post is out with a long-read about "Tucker Carlson: Why?" You actually will want to read it. It's an in-depth examination of how some stupid white Little Lord Fauntleroy frozen dinner hellboy heir from La Jolla, California, became the 52-year-old white nationalist piece of shit he is today.
You see, it started with his first-grade teacher, Mrs. Raymond, who scarred him for life or something. He apparently wrote about this in his 2018 book, but we're pretty sure if we sent you on a scavenger hunt to find somebody who read that book, you'd give up and start day-drinking because fuck that, who wants to search for some pig that actually reads Tucker Carlson's books.
Anyway, Mrs. Raymond! Tucker says she was very mean and liberal and cried too much and was bad at teaching him phonics. He HATED Mrs. Raymond. He hated Mrs. Raymond so much he wrote about her in his 2018 book, when he was 49 years old. He hated her hated her hated hated her HATDE HR HARTTED HRRRRRR AHTED HERRTTR! (That's how Tucker might have written it, because apparently he was bad at phonics.)
He attended the elite La Jolla Country Day School, where a woman entered his life whom he grew to detest. It was his first-grade teacher, whom he referred to in his book as Mrs. Raymond. He caricatured her as "a parody of earth-mother liberalism" who "wore long Indian-print skirts. . . . She had little interest in conventional academic topics, like reading and penmanship." He recalled her sobbing theatrically at her desk, saying, "The world is so unfair! You don't know that yet. But you'll find out!"
Right, we bet.
Carlson said he just wanted liberals to "stop blubbering and teach us to read. . . . Mrs. Raymond never did teach us; my father had to hire a tutor to get me through phonics." Thus, Carlson says, he began his sojourn as a conservative thinker, questioning the liberals who he said were all around him, exemplified by his first-grade teacher.
LOL that's one way to make excuses for why Hooked On Phonics didn't work for you.
As you might imagine, Marianna Raymond, who is now 77, remembers all this differently. She says as a child he was "very precious and very, very polite and sweet," and had no clue she was the villain of Tucker's 2018 book. (Like most of us, we guess she played hooky from reading it. The Post profile has A LOT OF racist Tucker quotes from that book.)
"Oh my God," said Mrs. Raymond. "That is the most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard." She says she didn't wear those skirts, didn't cry all the time, oh and also she was the tutor Tucker's dad hired to teach dumb bad Tucker how to sound out words.
So there's a running theme of this article, and apparently of Tucker's life. He's the victim, and also everybody around him remembers things differently from how Tucker remembers them. We weren't kidding when we said this is literally an in-depth examination of what happened to Tucker to make him such a sad, whiny-ass snowflake racist. This is how WaPo describes its reporting:
What emerges is a portrait of an ambitious television personality who came of age in privilege — having grown up in an upper-class enclave and attended private schools — but who, by his own telling, is a victim.
The article doesn't spend much more time on Tucker's childhood. For instance, it doesn't have anything about that time Tucker beat up a gay guy in a bathroom and then started bragging about it, because we guess he thought it made him a real man.
It starts with an account of Tucker in 2003, visiting a dungeon in Ghana that held slaves headed for the United States. Tucker was with civil rights leaders. The thing everybody noticed was how Tucker exhibited a "total detachment from the reality of the event." It didn't personally affect Tucker, and plus slaves were Black, so there's that. Of course when he wrote about it later on for Esquire, it was all about how civil rights leader Rev. Albert Sampson, who was on the trip, was allegedly trying to do White Guilt to him and make him feel terrible.
Carlson devoted much of the article to his contention that Sampson was trying to make him feel responsible for Whites who enslaved Black people. Carlson, in a paraphrase, wrote that Sampson said that "if you're looking for a single cause of all the world's problems . . . look no further than the white race." He then wrote that Sampson "glanced up and saw me, the physical embodiment of eons of injustice and oppression."
Carlson wrote that he could barely contain his anger: "I longed for the cathartic release that would come from leaping across the table and smashing his nose."
Oh, little Tuckkker, always fantasizing about his fists solving his problems. Hey remember that time he beat up a gay guy in the bathroom? He probably wishes the Washington Post would tell THAT story, or maybe draw a porn cartoon of it where Tucker has very big muscles and a discernible bulge.
As with all the stories in this piece, that's not how Rev. Sampson remembers it:
Sampson, now 82, said in the interview that he never said the words Carlson attributed to him. "No," Sampson said. "The other side of it is, why didn't he embrace the words when I said, 'I love you.' He would rather solve a problem with violence than to embrace a man who has given his life to teaching nonviolence."
Sampson also specifically denied Carlson's contention that he suggested that Carlson, as a White man, had some responsibility for slavery or any other sins. "Not at all. He wasn't there in the 1800s," Sampson said.
Tucker wrote a book that year too. Bet Mrs. Raymond didn't read it. Probably couldn't deal with the phonics mistakes.
Anyway, the Post piece goes on and on, chronicling all Tucker's failed shows and insane white supremacist quotes from days gone by, like when he called Iraqis "semiliterate primitive monkeys," and when in 2006, he told shock-jock Bubba the Love Sponge that what America really needs is a president who will openly say, "Look, I'm a bigot." And of course it chronicles Tucker all the way up to the present, on his nightly White Power Hour, where he was screaming about scared white boy grievances long before his dumb racist viewers even learned to sound out "Critical Race Theory."
One of Tucker's responses to the story, which is just so very him, was "You want to make me shut up, so you call me a racist. I've seen it before." Whatever.
Joseph Azam, who quit as a senior VP at News Corp. not long after Tucker got his show, told the Post that Tucker "has positioned himself as the presentable face of White grievance." It tells the story of how in June 2017, Tucker tweeted, "Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here?" Azam came to the US from Afghanistan when he was a baby, and of course now he was a senior veep at News Corp. He responded to Tucker on Twitter, "If you come upstairs to where all the executives who run your company sit and find me I can tell you, Tucker. #Afghanistan." Not long after that, he quit, specifically because of the open white supremacist behavior of Tucker and the bigotry of other Fox personalities.
Azam really summed up how Tucker does things in a 2019 NPR interview the Post quotes:
"I think what Tucker does that is so corrosive is he makes people think that he's just putting the question out there," Azam said, adding later: "And that's a very effective way of communicating with a segment of the population that doesn't know what to think, but doesn't want to be told what to think."
He's just asking questions. And he's poisoning America and maybe your own personal rightwing relatives in the process.
Wonder if he wouldn't have ended up being such a worthless piece of shit if he had been better at phonics.
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