Bang Chugga Chugga Bang

"journalism"

They’re not talking about a person. They’re signaling about a half-examined symbol. It doesn’t mean anything — or, rather, it means precisely as much as it would if they stood in a circle and shouted DEVIL DEVIL DEVIL. It’s a ritual.

You’ll be tired of hearing me talk about Tucker Carlson, but again, it’s not about Tucker Carlson. The cartel no longer hears itself; it chants its slogans, but doesn’t perceive them.

So. A just absolutely wretched news website called Puck — built around, I’m sorry, a supposed team of “elite, genre-defining journalists” who come from major celebrity-fellating publications like Vanity Fair and the Hollywood Reporter — pours out this mindless pile of shit about Folk Devil Man:

See, he’s in a BUNKER. See, like HITLER, get it? Get it? Now you know what kind of cleverness it takes to be an elite, genre-defining journalist.

The story about the bunkered Nazi begins with a spicy personal vignette, because elite journalist Tina Nguyen actually met Tucker Carlson a long time ago. He told her — brace yourself for this — that he knew someone from a place she mentioned:

I went to high school with one of your teachers, he told me, alarmed. Then, without pausing for a beat, he continued: I hate him. Tucker then launched into a juicy story: back when they were both teenagers, this rival had tried to flirt with Tucker’s girlfriend, a slight that he—now a fully-grown adult—could not move past. I hate that fucker, he repeated, eyes burning.

I was 22, straight out of Claremont McKenna. And though I barely knew this teacher, I found this whole bit hilarious. So wait, I asked between cackles, who won? Another beat: I did, he responded. I married her.

Boom, baby, BOOM! How much of a NAZI is Tucker Carlson? So much that he…doesn’t like a man who tried to fuck his wife. Really makes you despise him, right?

People who write like this don’t know what they’re writing. They aren’t thinking about the content of the story they tell; they write with a performative automaticity, middle school cool kids shitting on the person they’ve perceived to be unpopular with the other Mean Girls. It’s a performance of jeering at a scarecrow for an audience that’s been trained to cheer when someone jeers the scarecrow. They’re looking around the schoolyard as they type, checking to see if the other cheerleaders are giggling.

The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson did this, years ago, with Rick Santorum, a politician I couldn’t stand: He got word that Santorum had held his wife’s dead baby and mourned the child’s death, and so he told that hilarious story on television. “He’s not a little weird,” Robinson said on MSNBC. “He’s really weird.” Robinson was shocked by the response to his commentary, because Rick Santorum was a designated scarecrow. He thought this was a clever message: Rick Santorum mourned his dead baby! What a loser! When you’re a narrative-reciting machine that automatically dispenses attacks on designated members of an out-group, you don’t know what human beings are going to think about the anti-scarecrow tokens you semi-consciously dispense.

So then Puck goes on about Tucker Carlson being driven off of Fox News, describing something you’ve probably just seen with your own eyes:

On Wednesday, Carlson reciprocated in the form of a grainy video published on Twitter, straight from his home in Florida, on the same set where he shot his Fox Nation show Tucker Carlson Today, as if he was occupying enemy territory. Though he didn’t mention Fox or his firing, Tucker darkly alluded to censorship in the American discourse: “Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left but there are some and that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope.” 

The subtext of the video was clear to the 13 million-plus people who watched it and read about it, especially those who consume right-wing news: Tucker Carlson, a man who does not let go of slights, was truly digging in—using the rhetoric of free speech, that modern right wing trope, to negotiate publicly with Murdoch and use the press to launch his next thing, whatever that might be. 

A “grainy video” — again, you can test that claim with your own eyes — full of dark allusions and veiled threats, drenched in “the rhetoric of free speech, that modern right wing trope.” What function does “as if occupying enemy territory” serve in a sentence about someone shooting video at his home studio? How does that sentence work? How does the claim that he darkly alluded to something match the ending of the same paragraph about what he actually said, there is hope? He darkly said there is hope?

How much stupidity and clumsiness can be packed into a couple of short paragraphs?

The news media — the elite, genre-defining journalists, God help us — are all about twelve years old in their souls. They recite the expected noises. And they’re useless. Tucker Carlson is the Demon of the Week, ritually denounced because the noise-making machine needs a Demon of the Week. It’s ghoulish, mindless idiocy, and they’ll be back next week with more. None of it means anything at all.