It is interesting that NPR thinks Tucker Carlson is important enough to be one of their “Newsmaker” interviews. How much news does that racist fuckwit make these days, sitting in front of a microphone in the ass end of Maine to record his podcast, yammering about the antichrist or the best place to find a lobster roll in Kennebunkport or whatever else crosses his feral mind?
Because there is a large range of topics one could ask Carlson about in an interview. Granted, everyone thinks the topic they want to ask him about is the most important one. Is he mad at Fox for firing him? Is he running for president in 2028? Did he give up the bowties because they clearly had choked off too much oxygen to his brain?
Steve Inskeep had the opportunity this week. He could have asked Carlson about his animosity towards immigrants that so often veers into flat-out xenophobia. He could have asked about the controversy almost a year ago when he hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes for a friendly interview, which led to the Heritage Foundation nearly collapsing when its president refused to denounce him and a boatload of its employees quit in protest.
Because if you aren’t asking Tucker Carlson about his white supremacist beliefs, what are you interviewing him for? You can listen to a couple of episodes of his show and hear pretty much everything you just traveled to Maine to hear in person. Carlson has been spouting the same crap about immigrants for years. He has said they make the US “poorer and dirtier.” He has pushed the Great Replacement theory that you used to have to go to Aryan Nation barbecues to hear about. He thinks immigration into the US should be “shut down” until we achieve some vaguely defined national unity.
But no, Inskeep and Carlson had a conversation we can only describe as “genial.” Inskeep let the flannel-clad twit ramble on with his straight-from-the-fever-swamps conspiracy theories. Such as this one, which came up during a discussion of why Trump wouldn’t release the Epstein files:
“So I said, why don’t you just release all the files? You said you would, and I don’t think it’s going to hurt you. And he said, oh, this is all a plot to discredit me. It’s like Russiagate, which was a plot to discredit him, and totally absurd, actually. And I often said that on Fox, and I mean it, and it turned out to be true. It was absurd.”
We’re not going to rehash the entire Russiagate thing, except to remind everyone that the basic thrust of it — that the Russian government ran influence operations and reached out to the Trump campaign to offer to help him beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 — has been found to have happened by every credible investigation, including the Republican Senate. Tucker may not believe those investigations, some of which were bipartisan in nature; he may think both Democrats and Republicans are worthless members of the “uniparty” who secretly agree on lots of stuff, as he told Inskeep. But he’s wrong.
Granted Russiagate wasn’t what Steve Inskeep was interested in, but he still let Carlson use NPR’s airwaves to flat-out lie.
Or there were the moments when Carlson addressed the Russia-Ukraine war by saying that “we are prosecuting a war against Russia” and that Russia was “provoked” into attacking Ukraine. Again, we’re not going to rehash the last 4.5 years, but what provoked Russia is that Ukraine is not part of it, and Vladimir Putin has all sorts of nutty ideas about how it used to be and should be again. Thus, the invasion.
To Carlson, this is Great Power stuff, and Russia should be allowed to control its own sphere of influence, just like America gets to control the Western Hemisphere and China gets to control the Pacific. Basically, he’s still the sort of conservative who wishes he could still be 12 years old, when no one expected him to care about anything but himself.
In short, there was nothing newsmaker-y about this interview. Even Carlson’s revelation that Trump said “we all die anyway” when Tucker expressed fears that he was going to start a nuclear war is not really newsy. Trump has had that attitude about death and catastrophe for years.
Tucker gets this light treatment from the media all the damn time, and we are quite sick of it. He’s a repellent bigot repeating the same crap that nativists have been saying for centuries. It’s boring.
If we could interview Tucker Carlson — assuming we could spend even 30 seconds on so much as a Zoom call with him before jabbing sharpened chopsticks into both our eyes — we would ask him about how he’s a white supremacist and a bigot and an overgrown frat boy who probably has a stack of T-shirts with George Lincoln Rockwell’s face on them in his dresser.
We guess we wouldn’t be so much asking him questions as we would be telling him to take a long walk off a short pier and French kiss a giant squid. Assuming a giant squid wouldn’t hurl him back on the beach while grumbling, Goddammit, I wish the humans would stop dumping their trash into my ocean.
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Fucking NPR. Their superpower is making atrocities seem palatable.
Yet another reason why I gave up on NPR since it has now totally surrendered to Trump.