Tucker Carlson has made his career out of two things—tasteless bow ties and tastelessly decrying the country’s “victim mentality” while consistently asserting himself as the supreme all-time victimhood champion, dominating the victim field by virtue of unifying pretty much the entire world (besides its white, 70-something-year-old dads) in wishing he would shut the fuck up. Of late, he has lost the bow tie but remains committed to using the idea of victimhood to his advantage, especially when it comes to victimizing other people.
The most recent example of Carlson’s strategy for staying famous, despite being almost universally reviled, is a recent claim that the New York Times was attempting to publish his address in order to incite its readers to harass him. (The Times has denied these claims.) Carlson then released the name of the reporter he believed was attempting to dox him, inciting his viewers to, instead, dox and threaten that reporter.
“They hate my politics. They want this show off the air,” Carlson reportedly said, on-air. “If one of my children gets hurt because of a story they wrote, they won’t consider it collateral damage. They know it’s the whole point of the exercise: to inflict pain on our family, to terrorize us, to control what we say. That’s the kind of people they are.”
Instead, Carlson flashed a picture of freelance writer Murray Carpenter and mentioned photographer Tristan Spinski, both of whom he said were attempting to reveal his home address, asking his viewers how these men might feel if someone were to say, publish their home addresses. And as if commanded to do so, Carlson’s viewers did just that.
If one believed that Tucker Carlson was a soulless piece of shit who would say or do anything to keep himself in the role of beleaguered, persecuted truth-teller for a gullible, easily outraged audience, one might wonder if Carlson invented this entire narrative to distract from the fact that a recent lawsuit accused him, along with colleague Sean Hannity, of sexual misconduct. But no matter what one suspects, it’s probably safe to predict he’ll soon enough present a case for victimhood in this lawsuit too. [Washington Post]
President Donald Trump’s commitment to protecting the legacies of dead American racists memorialized in statue form has, perhaps predictably, become a ruse for the Department of Homeland Security to spy on living Americans who might harm their country’s seemingly neverending supply of monuments to shitty people.
The DHS has authorized the collection of “information on protesters who threaten to damage or destroy public memorials and statues, regardless of whether they are on federal property.” This information will reportedly be collected from social media posts and other public sources of information but agents must “be able to articulate why someone is a threat,” rather than rely on “hunches.” If blog posts are added to that database, allow me to save government dollars and a long, boring crawl through my Twitter account: Fuck your ugly statues. I hope they all get torn down, melted, and re-made into monuments to RuPaul’s Drag Race winners, the cast of Steel Magnolias, and dead-before-their-time Instagram cats. [Washington Post]
- I am against all these GOP men yelling at Liz Cheney because it forces me to side with Liz Cheney. Could everyone I normally disagree with please go back to yelling the exact same thing? [Politico]
- A different Liz (Warren) has a plan. [New York Times]
- Not to be outdone, Joe Biden also has a plan. [Politico]
- Do not watch video of the mom wall singing “Hands Up, Don’t shoot” as a lullaby if you are not someplace you can cry comfortably. [Twitter]
- I may have racked up $120,000 in government loans getting a PhD in Victorian ghost novels, but I do understand money enough to know people who are good with money should be in charge of America’s money, which means I know more than the Fed. [AP]
- A program in Louisiana intended to help those who couldn’t afford their rent had to shut down due to the fact that no one can afford their rent right now. [Nola.com]
- Portland seems to be a test run for deploying federal agents to other cities, starting with Chicago. [ABC7 Chicago]
- At what point can we just start slipping a billion or so out of Jeff Bezos’s wallet for things like medicine and free covid-19 tests under the assumption that he’ll never miss it? [The Guardian]
- Trump has a new plan to target undocumented immigrants on the U.S. Census which puts one in mind of all those old plans he’s pitched for targeting undocumented immigrants using the U.S. Census. [CNN]
- Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf would like to reassure Americans that the only reason the DHS is brutalizing human beings is to protect inanimate objects. [Twitter]