Tucker Carlson took a break from his nightly anti-vax mandate rants to rave this week about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg taking paternity leave after he and his husband adopted twins: “Paternity leave, they call it, trying to figure out how to breastfeed, no word on how that went.”
The “joke” was homophobic and also just not very funny, but it also came from inside of a glass house. Yes, the woke culture that Tucker Carlson hates on nightly is in fact the same woke culture his employer has embraced. At least when it comes to parental leave and COVID policies, Rupert Murdoch’s evil empire is tough to beat.
While Fox News may be poisoning our airwaves and rotting the brains of a significant portion of the population, it happens to be a very good place to work. Don’t take my word for it, listen to that of Fox & Friends host Todd Piro (no relation to Judge Box of Wine Pirro) who wrote an entire opinion piece for the Fox News website about how much he enjoyed his six weeks of paid paternity leave: “I cannot thank Fox enough for providing all fathers who work here with such a generous paternity leave. This experience has changed me in a profound way and in ways I won’t fully comprehend until my daughter is older.”
Even Jesse Watters said of paternity leave, “Now I am pro-paternity. I used to mock people for taking paternity, I used to think it was a big ruse. But now, ya know, I wish I could take six weeks.” Of course Jesse could have taken six weeks; he’s entitled to it at Fox.
And then there’s COVID vaccine mandates. Tucker Carlson is very against them. He called the military’s mandate “a new political purity test. One designed to separate the obedient from the free.” He also said, “The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the freethinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who does not love Joe Biden, and make them leave immediately. It’s a takeover of the U.S. military.”
Carlson also insists he’s “not pretending at all” in a craven pursuit for “prestige or ratings,” but that his outrage is indeed “real,” as he’s gone so far as to call vaccine passports “Medical Jim Crow” as “the very same people who just the other day told us that segregation is immoral are now enforcing segregation.”
He might want to check out Fox News’ extremely strict vaccine passport policy. That inconvenient truth that came up when Tucker went on a Daily Caller podcast where liberal commentator Jason Nichols said, “You said Fox News has no vaccine mandate, but according to Newsweek, the company requires unvaccinated employees to submit to daily COVID testing, which is stricter than Biden’s mandate which calls for weekly testing for businesses that employ more than 100 people. Is Fox News denying the civil liberties of its employees by being stricter than President Biden?”
Carlson responded by laughing and saying “I don’t know. I mean, you should probably ask Newsweek, it sounds like they have a pretty precise handle on what’s happening,”
If Carlson wants a precise handle on what’s happening, he might want to search his inbox for an internal memo from Fox Corporation HR Chief Kevin Lord: “Following our request for employees to upload their vaccination status in our secure system, we are pleased to share that more than 90% of our full-time employees reported that they are fully vaccinated.”
Tucker once said, “Wokeness is a cult. They would let you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength.” He thinks liberal policies like vaccine mandates and paternity leave are damaging our American freedoms.
But if Tucker really wants to be free, he should free himself of Fox News, a bastion of vaccinated men who like to spend time with their newborn babies. After all, how can he fight the power if he himself is benefiting from the policies he is railing against?
