F**king Mondays: Tucker Carlson Is Out!!

A huge victory for American society. Also, Jordan Peterson is insane, Jews don't suffer racism, and Trump's dumb 2024 strategy.

Fox News chief propagandist is now out

Welcome to “F**king Mondays” Banter readers, and your dose of sanity to set you up for the upcoming week!

Huge news: Tucker Carlson finally out at Fox!

This is probably the best news you could possibly wake up to on a Monday. Finally, finally, the most dangerous man in network news has “parted ways” with the Murdoch empire. As per the NY Times:

The network made the announcement less than a week after it agreed to pay $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit in which Mr. Carlson’s show, one of the highest rated on Fox, figured prominently for its role in spreading misinformation after the 2020 election.

In making its announcement, Fox offered a terse statement of gratitude. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” it said.

Reading between these “terse” lines, one can assume things did not end on a high note. It could have something to do with a lawsuit against Carlson by a former employee who claims she faced a “misogynistic and discriminatory workplace culture”, or the fact that his constant lying has put the company in serious legal jeopardy. Either way, this is a huge victory against the Alt political movements who revere Carlson as a brave truth teller, and a great loss for Russia given their reliance on him as a source for pro Kremlin propaganda:

We’ll have more on this in the coming days, so stay tuned.

The lovely Jordan Peterson

I haven’t been on Twitter for the past couple of weeks given there are now several alternatives gaining real traction with the public, but I logged back on recently only to be inundated with histrionic Jordan Peterson tweets. These insane attacks on “globalist” organizations appeared on my timeline:

It is amazing so many people herald this man as a paragon of intelligence, self discipline and moral behavior. His social media presence reveals him to be a deeply disturbed man in the depths of a very severe manic episode. Unfortunately he is bringing his 4.1 million Twitter followers along for the ride, dragging them into the Alt Right conspiracy world of evil globalists trying to trans your kids and inject them with heart stopping vaccine technology etc, etc. Twitter seems to be a good place for this kind of psychodrama, so I’m very glad the platform is dying.

Racism against Jews doesn’t count (again)

This is a big story in the UK: former shadow home secretary and Labour Party politician Dianne Abbott, who is black, sent a letter to the UK Observer about an article by Tomiwa Owolade titled: “Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated.” Abbott disagreed with Owolade’s argument that Irish, Jewish and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller suffer from racism. From the Guardian:

Abbott’s letter said that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people “undoubtedly experience prejudice”, but added: “This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.”

She added: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism.”

Abbott compared their plight with others – saying Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required in pre-civil rights America to sit at the back of buses, nor trafficked and placed into manacles on slave ships. She added they retained the ability to vote in apartheid South Africa.

Abbott has been suspended from the Labour Party for these comments and is being branded an antisemite, which I think might be a step too far. Abbott is certainly wrong and stupendously ignorant about the history of Irish, Jewish and Traveller people, but I don’t believe her statement minimizing centuries of grotesque racism against those groups was born out of malice. That being said, it is emblematic of the Left’s increasingly insane identity politics that is based on strict hierarchies of racial oppression.

I can’t speak with much authority on the violent racism Irish and Traveller people have suffered, but as someone of Jewish descent, I have some things to say.

Much of my family fled violent pogroms in Eastern Europe (now Poland, Russia and Ukraine) in the late 18th century and early 19th century to come to the UK. I had always wondered why we had no family links to places like Poznan in Poland, where my grandmother’s family came from. Of course the entire population was wiped out in the Holocaust, so we have no connection left. Again, not racism according to Dianne Abbott, because Jews don’t have dark skin and could have sat at the front of the bus were they in America at the time.

I know it’s sort of standard procedure in both the US and UK to cart ignorant politicians off to their respective Holocaust museums, but in this case it might be a good idea. Abbott can go and look at photographic evidence of Jews herded into trains with their babies and small children to industrial camps where they were used as slave labor, gassed with Zyklon b, burnt in ovens, then sprayed onto fields as fertilizer. Abbott might not think this counts as racism, but I can assure you the descendants of Holocaust victims have a different perspective.

It’s high time the Left stopped engaging in this ahistorical, divisive ideology that is becoming what it claims to oppose. Hierarchies of oppression are still hierarchies, and when suffering becomes currency in certain political circles, the more your group has suffered, the higher up you go. This isn’t to discount racism against black people (or anyone else), but to remember that no one has a monopoly on suffering.

Trump’s campaign to lose 2024

If you were going to choose the worst issue to run on as a Republican in 2024, you would probably do this (from Politico):

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday defended his efforts to limit abortion in a video address to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition.

In his remarks, Trump cited his appointment of three justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) to the U.S. Supreme Court. All three voted in the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationally.

“Those justices delivered a landmark victory for protecting innocent life. Nobody thought it was going to happen,” the former president said.

The Republicans flopped spectacularly in the recent midterms precisely because of this pivotal issue. Given Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, the House in 2018, the popular vote, the electoral college and both the House and the Senate in 2020, one would think he might have learned something from so much losing. But no, he is double down on the one issue that will ensure he loses again in 2024. So let’s hope he keeps it up.

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