The man telling the New York Times he’s sorry he supported Trump is the same man telling his brother last week that white Americans are the real victims.
I don't get the impulse to grab on to Tucker and hold him up as some kind of shining example because he says he's against the war. Most Americans are against the war. We don't lack for people who are against the war. You want to build an antiwar alliance, how about looking to the tens of millions of people who are truly sincere about it?
But as an old lefty with decades of antiwar experience (unfortunately) this is always the way it goes. The people who are already with us are never enough, are they? They're in the streets in their millions, they represent an actual majority of the population, but instead we imagine we're just one repentant Republican away from success.
Spot on, Parker. Was already thinking about Lyz's piece, and your previous work, and then you mentioned both. *ucker is a monster, always has been, and I don't trust him to ever be anything else.
Thank you Parker for your sane, well written analysis of the chameleon Carlson. I appreciate that you trace his M.O. over time and how the underlying tactic remains the same while the language shifts for the intended audience. I also appreciate that instead of vilifying individual print journalists you expose the underlying issue of framing while suggesting better questions that will give us different results instead of unwitting cooperation with his own agenda.
I wish fewer media outlets would ask what Tucker Carlson truly believes and instead just cite his actual past statements, highlighting his inconsistencies where they exist. At the end of the day, what he says and does matters. "What does he *truly* believe?" Who cares.
"Who cares?" is right. It's like the eternal question about whether Trump really believes the shit he says. A complete waste of time to even think about, and yet I find myself drawn into thinking about it more than I'd like. Most often in the form of: "Oh come on, he can't REALLY believe that!" And then I sense where that's headed and try to think of something else.
It would be good if, like in an essay, a journalist interviewing Carlson could narrow sharply the thesis statement they are testing - not ‘what does TC really believe’ which you will never get because it is too politically abusive for him to reveal [not that the NYT wouldn’t launder it anyway] and also such a broad thesis has a narcissistic supply element for a guy who literally thrives on being heard and seen, and laundering abusive devaluations of the Other.
Even the most seasoned and expert interviewer is still dealing with a diversionary artist. To keep forefront the position that *any* audience of TC’s is a target for being manipulated into giving consent to be duped and devalued, it might keep an interviewer strictly on developing that thesis. As much as the Garcia-Navarro tried, as PM noted, he is as big a narc as one is ever going to meet. His whole life is this gig.
Going into an interaction with such a personality can only be sustained if all the strategies of dismantling a seasoned manipulator are employed. Grey-rock, waiting at non answers and returning to thesis. Doing the meta-dance conversation [eg the argument of ‘tone’ he used with Lenz], following squirrels [‘killing children’] and other rhetorical diversions is the playbook narcissistic discourse. The latitude of ‘what he believes’ is too broad a basis for interviewing him. We know what he believes, ‘how TC pulls this shit off’ - as Molloy and Lenz etc have used, would be so much more expansive.
I have this weird defect in my brain where I'm able to assess whether a thing is good or bad without needing to compare it to some other totally unrelated thing.
I don't get the impulse to grab on to Tucker and hold him up as some kind of shining example because he says he's against the war. Most Americans are against the war. We don't lack for people who are against the war. You want to build an antiwar alliance, how about looking to the tens of millions of people who are truly sincere about it?
But as an old lefty with decades of antiwar experience (unfortunately) this is always the way it goes. The people who are already with us are never enough, are they? They're in the streets in their millions, they represent an actual majority of the population, but instead we imagine we're just one repentant Republican away from success.
Tucker Carlson pretending to move left is even less believable than that like 6 weeks Megyn Kelly tried that.
Spot on, Parker. Was already thinking about Lyz's piece, and your previous work, and then you mentioned both. *ucker is a monster, always has been, and I don't trust him to ever be anything else.
Tucker's the broken clock that's right twice a day. But there's a reason we don't use broken clocks.
“The infighting on the right is genuinely useful. Boosting the people doing it is not.”
Bars.
Spot on, as always.
Thank you Parker for your sane, well written analysis of the chameleon Carlson. I appreciate that you trace his M.O. over time and how the underlying tactic remains the same while the language shifts for the intended audience. I also appreciate that instead of vilifying individual print journalists you expose the underlying issue of framing while suggesting better questions that will give us different results instead of unwitting cooperation with his own agenda.
I wish fewer media outlets would ask what Tucker Carlson truly believes and instead just cite his actual past statements, highlighting his inconsistencies where they exist. At the end of the day, what he says and does matters. "What does he *truly* believe?" Who cares.
"Who cares?" is right. It's like the eternal question about whether Trump really believes the shit he says. A complete waste of time to even think about, and yet I find myself drawn into thinking about it more than I'd like. Most often in the form of: "Oh come on, he can't REALLY believe that!" And then I sense where that's headed and try to think of something else.
I turned off the Daily's interview with Carlson.
"Nobody, in his telling, should be punished for the circumstances of their birth." OTOH, Obama "really hates white people." That's projection for you.
It would be good if, like in an essay, a journalist interviewing Carlson could narrow sharply the thesis statement they are testing - not ‘what does TC really believe’ which you will never get because it is too politically abusive for him to reveal [not that the NYT wouldn’t launder it anyway] and also such a broad thesis has a narcissistic supply element for a guy who literally thrives on being heard and seen, and laundering abusive devaluations of the Other.
Even the most seasoned and expert interviewer is still dealing with a diversionary artist. To keep forefront the position that *any* audience of TC’s is a target for being manipulated into giving consent to be duped and devalued, it might keep an interviewer strictly on developing that thesis. As much as the Garcia-Navarro tried, as PM noted, he is as big a narc as one is ever going to meet. His whole life is this gig.
Going into an interaction with such a personality can only be sustained if all the strategies of dismantling a seasoned manipulator are employed. Grey-rock, waiting at non answers and returning to thesis. Doing the meta-dance conversation [eg the argument of ‘tone’ he used with Lenz], following squirrels [‘killing children’] and other rhetorical diversions is the playbook narcissistic discourse. The latitude of ‘what he believes’ is too broad a basis for interviewing him. We know what he believes, ‘how TC pulls this shit off’ - as Molloy and Lenz etc have used, would be so much more expansive.
once, under oath, he said that people knew better than to believe him because we was an entertainer, not a journalist. got it.
“Is that worse than killing kids?” For a second there, I thought he was going to talk about aborted fetuses.
I have this weird defect in my brain where I'm able to assess whether a thing is good or bad without needing to compare it to some other totally unrelated thing.
Sadly, there's always somebody killing (real) kids somewhere.