A night after defiantly declaring that he would not “bow to the mob” amid a firestorm of controversy over misogynistic and racist comments he made during appearances on shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge’s radio show from 2006 to 2011, top-rated Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that he is the victim of a left-wing authoritarian conspiracy to “disappear” anyone with “dissenting political opinions.”
Carlson, who was heard defending statutory rape, calling women “extremely primitive,” and describing Iraqis as “semi-literate primitive monkeys” in the old audio recirculated earlier this week, began Tuesday night’s broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight as he so often does: by playing the victim.
The Fox News host went all out in portraying the backlash against him as part of a leftist plot, at one point even appearing to invoke the Holocaust and likening social media bans on conservatives to enforced disappearances.
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“Ever notice how certain people have started to disappear? he asked his audience, adding that those disappearing aren’t “vagrants or runaways” but “fairly prominent well-educated people with dissenting political opinions.”
Noting that suddenly you “can't find their videos,” “they’re not showing up in your Facebook feed” and you can’t “buy their books on Amazon,” the conservative commentator said that this is because they’ve been banned from certain platforms for being labeled as “dangerous extremist” and “Nazis.”
“For the public good they have been shut down, disappeared,” Carlson said, without naming “them.”“You are a little surprised to hear this. They didn't seem evil to you or radical. They were just free-thinkers saying something a little different from the party line on CNN.”
Claiming that most people don’t complain about this because they don’t want anyone to know they are watching “forbidden videos,” Carlson then declared this is what an “authoritarian society looks like” before stating that it was “only a matter of time before they came for Fox News.”
The Fox News primetime star, in the third month of an advertiser boycott, then took aim at other cable news channels and urged his audience to sic the IRS on Media Matters for America, the liberal watchdog group that compiled and released his old radio clips.
Carlson claimed the non-Fox mainstream media all but takes its story assignments from Media Matters, a group he decried as a “George Soros-funded lobbying organization” that “often uses propaganda from the Southern Poverty Law Center to bully” other news outlets.
After delivering some personal insults to other members of the media, such as calling CNN’s Brian Stelter a “eunuch” (again), Carlson then claimed that Media Matters was breaking the law and called for action against them.
“During the Obama administration, Media Matters held weekly strategy discussions with the White House about how to hurt its political enemies,” Carlson declared. “Media Matters kept an enemies list of Republicans to destroy, including Steve King of Iowa. This is a violation of federal tax law. Tax-exempt nonprofits cannot function as an arm of a political party. Media Matters clearly does.”
This, he concluded, means that you and every other taxpayer is subsidizing attacks on our own First Amendment. “Why is this? How can this be happening? Maybe someone should call the IRS tomorrow morning and find out.”
Nowhere in his monologue did Carlson express any contrition for the radio recordings Media Matters found of him saying Iraqis should “just shut the fuck up and obey,” that women “just need to be quiet,” and that rape doesn’t really count as rape if the “rapist… has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person.”
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