The Tucker tantrums

The only thing rightwingers have to rage (about) is rage itself

© 2020 Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license

At Rolling Stone Tim Dickinson has a roundup of rightwing reactions to this week’s firing of Tucker Carlson by Fox News. Excerpt:

Donald Trump’s spokesperson met the news on Twitter with a semi-conspiratorial take that Fox News is now a beholden part of the establishment. “Fox News is controlled opposition,” she wrote…

Lawmakers expressed their outrage over Carlson’s split with the network. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance called Carlson “the most courageous person in American media”…

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had harsh words for the network, tweeting that she would “stand with @TuckerCarlson,” while accusing Fox of caving “to the woke mob.”

“Americans no longer blindly watch the news like they did decades ago, they only watch the ones who have courage to tell the truth. Americans are about to quit watching,” Greene added.

The far-right tastemaker Catturd posted on Twitter that this was a death knell for the Murdoch-controlled network [“The end of Fox News”]…

Oh, and here’s a screenshot from Fox rival screamer network Newsmax:

If you were a stranger to this civilization (lucky you!), there would be many things confusing about this, not excluding the concept of “far-right tastemaker Catturd.” You might also be puzzled to hear the complainants’ rage at Fox News, especially if you were informed that the poison Carlson poured into the brains of the complainants was exactly the same as what the network had been feeding these complainants for many decades. It might then seem to you as if they were in effect complaining that a brewery to whose products they were addicted had fired their favorite bartender, and that the reaction was outsized, considering the poison they brewed and that the complainants consumed remained the same.

Even weirder, Dickinson also cites some prominent wingnuts who imply that Fox is siding against Carlson and his minions with… Dylan Mulvaney, the trans woman whose brief connection with Bud Light recently threw Rightwing World in paroxysms of rage:

In a popular post on Truth Social, right-wing country star Travis Tritt connected the Fox News fallout to the recent Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney controversy, writing: Obviously, Fox News doesn’t know their customer base any better than Anheuser Busch knows theirs.” Jack Posobiec, the alt-right commentator and onetime “pizzagate” conspiracy theorist, picked up a similar theme, asking on Telegram: “How long before Dylan Mulvaney is announced as Tucker’s replacement?”

What’s especially weird about this is that Fox News has been whipping the anti-trans Bud Light frenzy even more than Carlson (or anyone else) has.

We often go over the many amazing examples of asymmetry between the left and the right (and of the prestige media that tries to flatten it out with its Bothsider coverage). But it’s still striking how different are the levels of threat each side presents to the other, even when you correct for ideological effect.

I mean, conservatives are not just trying to implement policies (such as they are), they are also and mainly trying to literally obtrude into liberals’ lives (and the lives of women, trans people, minorities, etc.) with an escalating series of abortion bans (North Korea, I mean Dakota, got on the total ban-wagon this week) and anti-LGBTQ laws, and by loosening red state gun laws to the point where strapped rural rageaholics constitute a sort of Bizarro-World posse comitatus who make it increasingly dangerous for non-members to even ring the wrong doorbell without getting blown away — and who labor through their gun-nut legal groups (and crackpot judges) to try and make blue states as gun-crazy and dangerous as they are.

And with what do liberals threaten conservatives? We don’t want to make them have abortions they don’t want, nor take birth control, nor be trans or gay or in drag, nor read books or live in the big bad cities. And though we do want gun control, there has never been a gun control law proposed in this country that would prevent any conservative from owning as huge a private armory as they desire; for them the most intrusive possible measures might be those that would keep them from carrying loaded assault weapons in supermarkets and coffee shops that don’t want them.

No, liberals mainly threaten conservatives by their mere existence. Conservatives are mad that trans people exist. They’re mad that people live in cities and watch foreign movies and take their own children to Drag Queen Story Hour. They’re mad at corporations, not for depriving them of their products, but for also marketing their products to people they hate.

And because this rage is apparently inexhaustible, conservatives have enough left over after a long day of spewing it at the people who live and think differently than they do that they can then turn it on their own kind — like Fox News — over what in a different context we might call purity politics — that is, who’s truly, deeply, viciously rightwing enough, as seen in the current frothing rages between Trumpkins and supporters of the less charismatically fascist DeSantis. (Given that both of them are monsters, it’s amazing there’s anything to froth about — though I guess in the Trump era of the politics of personal assault, there’s always a reason.)

I only hope enough of the more elderly among them stroke out from anger that we can overcome their gerrymandering and voter suppression and keep them from ruining our lives.