If Tucker Carlson seems a little lost at the moment—that’s because he is. At least, that’s what Media Matters researcher Kat Abughazaleh says, and she has to watch the fire-breathing Fox News host every day for work.
Abughazaleh joins this week’s episode of Fever Dreams to talk about her recent New Yorker profile, which peels back the layers of America’s most-watched cable news host. She says Carlson has seemed especially lost in recent weeks, especially given the bombshell revelations from his own text messages revealed as part of Dominion Voting Systems $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network.
“He seems kind of depressed right now,” she said. “Like on Friday, it really seemed like he was just trying to get through the hour, because his whole facade is gone now… He doesn’t like his audience, he doesn’t like the people he works with, he doesn’t believe almost anything he says and he spreads hate for the money and for fun.”
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Then, Fever Dreams digs into the obfuscation being performed by Fox and others in the conservative media after one of the country’s worst banking collapses. Even for those steeped in current culture war topics, it was genuinely shocking how quickly American rightwingers blamed last week’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on “wokeism,” hosts Kelly Weill and Will Sommer said.
“This, I think, is part of their quest to make every current event about their niche grievance of the day,” Weill said. “And as soon as the bank crashed, commentators on the right started digging through bank literature for any kind of corporate-speak about not being racist, or not being discriminatory against gay people.”
Like so many of these things, it is really an effort to avoid recognizing the obvious problem, Sommer said. “Especially, the thing we have to also acknowledge here is that the head of this bank successfully lobbied to have regulations reduced back during the Trump administration.”
Plus! In the podcast’s Fresh Hell segment, Weill and Sommer discuss the worst-dressed man in North America—Jordan Peterson—and how exactly he styles the atrocious outfits he’s recently become known for.
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
