Tucker Is No Alpha Male, So Why Is He Pretending To Be One?
There is a major flaw though in Tucker Carlson’s new mission to up America’s testosterone levels. And that is Tucker Carlson.
by Ben Cohen
The Alt Right believes that America is facing a crisis of masculinity. Feminists, the LGBTQ lobby, and beta male liberals are apparently conspiring to emasculate men, and thus lower testosterone levels in society so they can enact their “trans agenda”.
The hysteria is reaching fever pitch levels with activists like Matt Walsh inciting acts of terrorism against children’s hospitals for providing treatment for trans children and Tucker Carlson advocating violence against liberals for “grooming” kids.
“No parent should put up with this for one second, no matter what the law says. Your moral duty is to defend your children,” Tucker told viewers in response to a Canadian transgender teacher wearing oversized prosthetic breasts. “This is an attack on your children, and you should fight back.”
How tough of him.
For the Alt Right, the only appropriate response to the so-called trans agenda is fear, hatred, and violence. But there is something bigger at play here, and as usual, Tucker Carlson is at the forefront of this new and incredibly dangerous chapter in America’s culture war.
What does Carlson really believe?
Multiple media outlets have done excellent work uncovering the truth behind Tucker Carlson’s meteoric rise to the forefront of the MAGA movement. Journalists invariably come to the same conclusion about Carlson: he is a giant fraud.
Carlson comes from an unfathomably wealthy, elitist family but spent most of his career eking out a living as a moderate conservative on the outer edges of the mainstream media. He co-hosted an unsuccessful debate show that was humiliatingly destroyed by Jon Stewart, hosted another unsuccessful show on MSNBC, became a part time pundit for hire, then found a rich benefactor to bankroll a moderately successful conservative website. As far as careers for the ultra privileged go, Carlson was doing OK.
But Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson is an ambitious man, and his mid-life career crisis saw him take radical steps to rekindle his flagging professional prospects.
Refined MAGAism
As the Alt Right/MAGA movement grew, Carlson sensed a dramatic shift in America and quietly jumped on board. His traditionally conservative views began to morph, and fairly rapidly Carlson became a prominent voice for what his former editor at The Weekly Standard William Kristol called “ethno-nationalism”.
“Tucker Carlson was a great young reporter. He was one of the most gifted 24-year-olds I’ve seen in the 20 years that I edited the magazine. His copy was sort of perfect at age 24,” Kristol told CNBC’s John Harwood.
“He [Carlson] had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism, I would say, paleo-conservativism. But that’s very different from what he’s become now. I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethno-nationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way.”
Carlson, then an infrequent Fox News guest and contributor, was rewarded in 2017 with the top job in all of cable news. He replaced Bill O’Reilly on the 8 p.m. ET time slot and became the most prominent voice on the network.
Donald Trump of course was the stirrer-in-chief, but Carlson found a lucrative new niche translating Trump’s incoherent babble into concise ideology for the new majority of Republican voters. Trump controlled the mob, but Carlson soothed the nerves of more educated, refined Republicans attracted to ethno-nationalism.
Over time, Carlson as simply followed the crowd and become more racist, more nationalistic, and more bigoted. Carlson’s main skill has always been sensing which way the political winds are blowing (most likely by paying attention to young, virulently racist researchers and writers he hires) then using it to create powerful propaganda for his nightly show. Carlson is extremely talented in this regard, and wields enormous power over the GOP. Republicans watch his show religiously, not because they like what he has to say, but because Carlson knows their voters better than they do. Carlson can make or break a conservative politician, so they treat him with the same deference they show Trump.
A new front in the cultural war
The war on trans people is just another front in America’s intractable cultural conflict, and one Carlson is now exploiting with great fervor. He sees a unique opportunity to keep himself at the forefront of the Alt Right movement, and is crafting a uniquely disgusting narrative for his audience.
There is a legitimate debate over the influence of the trans movement in America today — the use of new pronouns, participation in women’s sport and so on. These topics should be dealt with compassionately and sensibly, particularly given the trans community is one of the most marginalized and threatened groups in human history. But Tucker Carlson has no regard for the vulnerable in society, so he views trans people as cannon fodder for his highly profitable war on liberals.
Carlson’s latest, more violent rhetoric is an indication that he is worried — not about trans people of course — but of the floundering movement he has attached himself to. Americans around the country are rejecting right wing extremism even though we are facing record inflation and a serious cost of living crisis. The GOP bet that extremism would sell in an extreme environment, but evidence indicates they might have miscalculated.
So Carlson is doing what all extremists do when faced with an existential threat; he is upping the ante.
Just one problem…
There is a major flaw though in Tucker Carlson’s new mission to up America’s testosterone levels. And that is Tucker Carlson.
The Fox News propagandist is very good at crafting macho talking points, but he is noticeably un-athletic, wields a visible paunch, and has soft, salmon-pink skin. Carlson dons Georgetown boating attire, has a strikingly high pitched, whining voice, and is about as far from an alpha male as you could possibly get. Despite his obsession with testosterone, Carlson has almost no masculine presence whatsoever and thus appears not to understand how preposterous his latest media stunts look.
Over the past few weeks, Carlson has been very busy attaching himself to as many tough guy alpha-males as possible. Unfortunately it has lead to some unintentionally hilarious visual spectacles — none of which give Carlson the masculine boost he so craves.
In a truly bizarre media exhibition designed to promote manly American men doing manly things, Carlson recently sat down for an interview with the ultra macho UFC head honcho Dana White:
Strangely, no one on Carlson’s team thought it wise to point out that him sitting in an MMA cage wearing a country club outfit with Venetian loafers might make him look ridiculous. But there was Carlson, belly bulging over his belt line opposite ultra macho male Dana White talking about a sport he has no interest in and has never watched.
Then over the weekend, Carlson flew to California as part of an even weirder PR stunt where he delivered a eulogy at the funeral of Ralph “Sonny” Barger, the founder of the notorious criminal gang, the Hells Angels. Carlson, who has about as much in common with biker gangs as Donald Trump does with Icelandic women’s literary clubs, pretended that he had always been a fan of Barger and believed he was the epitome of what it meant to be an American. His speech was, well, just weird:
These peculiar deviations in Carlson’s media programming have a specific intention — and that is to ingratiate the privately educated polemicist with the mob. Carlson believes if he brownnoses tough guys, he gets access to the red blooded Americans he needs to keep his influence alive. Because the truth is, Donald Trump’s influence in America is waning, and more educated Republicans are fleeing the party in droves. Tucker Carlson isn’t getting dumber — but his audience is. So like any half decent grifter, the Fox News host is giving them what they want.
It isn’t clear whether his audience will catch onto this obvious ruse, but the further down the rabbit hole Carlson gets, the more ridiculous and humiliating it will become. Carlson’s happy place is a country club filled with ludicrously wealthy elites like himself. Now he has to pretend to like criminal biker gangs and pose for selfies in Stockton California, a place he has only flown over on his way to wine tasting events in Napa Valley.
It is a hell of his own making, and now he has to stay there.
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I would love to see Tuckums at a Hell's Angels house party trying to fit in.
Perhaps if Tucker was on the "receiving" end of this toxic masculinity rape culture he so wants to ignite, he'll learn the hard way exactly what it is that he's enabled & find himself in a bit of a quandry for being soft & "allowing it" to happen?