Tucker Carlson Proves The Link Between White Nationalists And Misogynists
If you're surprised that white nationalism and misogyny go together like peanut butter and jelly, you have not been paying attention.
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by Justin Rosario
On Sunday, Madeline Peltz at Media Matters published a compilation of clips of Fox News host Tucker Carlson being exactly who we all knew he was:
Between 2006 and 2011, Tucker Carlson spent approximately an hour a week calling in to Bubba the Love Sponge, a popular shock jock radio program where he spoke with the hosts about a variety of cultural and political topics in sometimes-vulgar terms. During those conversations, Carlson diminished the actions of Warren Jeffs, then on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list for his involvement in arranging illegal marriages between adults and underage girls, talked about sex and young girls, and defended statutory rape.
Carlson, who was hired by Fox News in 2009, also used sexist language to talk about women, including then-co-workers at NBC and public figures. He referred to Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis Stewart as “cunty,” called journalist Arianna Huffington a “pig,” and labeled Britney Spears and Paris Hilton “the biggest white whores in America.” He also said that women enjoy being told to “be quiet and kind of do what you’re told” and that they are “extremely primitive.”
If you're in the mood to punish yourself, you can listen to the audio but, frankly, I wouldn't recommend it. It's fucking awful. It's just a couple of douchebags feeding off of each other. This is after Jon Stewart had destroyed Carlson on Crossfire and he'd landed a job at MSNBC (yeah, that was a thing for almost four years). Clearly, good ol' boy Tucker needed someplace to let his hair down and vent his rage at women.
These days, Tucker Carlson is known as a the leading voice of the white nationalist movement on Fox News, eclipsing even Sean Hannity in terms of pushing the envelope. Before that, he was one of the leading sexists on the right. That's why I was absolutely not surprised in the slightest to find out that Tucker Carlson, upstanding family man and father of three daughters, is a misogynist to the bone. To be a man and a white nationalist almost invariably means to be a misogynist.
Still, if the left is hoping this will take down Carlson, they are in for a very disappointing couple of weeks. Being exposed as a man who despises women will not hurt his popularity with his audience. It will, in fact, serve to bind them more closely to him. Carlson already hits the white nationalist pleasure center of the right and now the misogyny button? He couldn't be more perfect unless he was straight up Aryan. Mondays' release of audio recordings of Carlson being a racist prick will only add to his legendary status in the eyes of his hate-filled audience. Throw in a little homophobia and you've got a trifecta going that's going to make his groupies order plenty of Viagra.
Carlson already knows this, too. Just take a look at how he's responding:
He's quite happy about this. It's going to boost his ratings and it won't cost him anything but a few advertisers. Even if it cost him a lot of advertisers, it won't matter and Carlson knows it. As the beltway magically just learned recently (but we've all known for years), Fox News is in the business of pushing the right's agenda and right now, tucker Carlson is their top salesman. His show could have zero advertisers for a year and he'd still be on the air. He's too valuable. Once he gets away with this, and he will, expect him to ramp up the misogyny on his white power hour.
If you're surprised that white nationalism and misogyny go together like peanut butter and jelly, you have not been paying attention. You can have misogyny without white nationalism but white nationalism breeds misogyny just like it breeds terrorism. This is something the women of the alt right have been discovering over the last couple of years:
Women in the "alt-right" "are constantly harassed by low level anonymous trolls trying to put us in our place," self-described "Ethno Nationalist" Tara McCarthy wrote on Twitter Sunday, in a moment of revelation that was well-known to basically anyone else. "The ultimate goal seems to be to bully us off the internet."
I wrote about this at the time and, honestly, I had no sympathy for these deluded idiots. The alt-right's founding action was "Gamergate," a coordinated attack on women. What they did think it was going to be like going forward? Equality of the sexes?
White nationalism is so rooted in misogyny that the movement started to recruit members from the Men's Rights Activist (MRA) movement. If you're not familiar with the MRA, first, dog bless your happy ignorance, second, they're to women what the alt-right is to blacks, Jews, and Latinos (and more). They're so drenched with loathing of women, white nationalists have found that it's extremely easy to turn that hatred towards ethnic groups instead of just the opposite gender.
The reason is so simple that I'm sure many a white nationalist has been kicking themselves for the last three years for not thinking of it sooner. The entire premise of the white nationalist movement is to glorify white men by painting them as the victim of a vast conspiracy to oppress them. Sure, that doesn't make a lick of sense but these are people who believe that the color of their skin and the fact that they have a penis makes them "superior." Rationality is not going to be a strong point for them. Recruiting men who already think women are out to destroy them isn't that much of a stretch. Hate is extremely fungible, especially when it's based on phony victimhood in the first place.
The bottom line is that white conservative men are incredibly weak and fragile. When faced with a world in which they are no longer the entire focus of all attention and power, they've collectively gone insane with rage, jealously, and bitterness. Tucker Carlson plays to that fragility every night and his audience loves him for it. Now that they know he talks about women in the same demeaning, hate-filled language they do, he'll have cemented his status as a rock star among white nationalists. And that will make him all but untouchable at Fox News who no longer cares about maintaining any kind of pretense of being a legitimate news organization.
The upside, such as it is, is that the longer the right goes on acting like savages in full public view, the harder it will be to put on a funny hate, call themselves "Independents," and hit the rest button in a few years when Trump is gone and the Republican Party has been smashed at the ballot box. And, in part, we'll have Tucker Carlson to thank for feeding the right's worst impulses.
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