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Just a reminder that Tucker Carlson is a proven liar and despised trump during his presidency. I would take what Tucker Carlson says with a heavy grain of salt, if you choose to even believe it at all.
I'm not sure I understand this point - Vance also despised Trump at the start of his presidency.
From where I'm standing, both Vance and Carlson seem to fundamentally be opportunists, flexible seekers of power and influence who are willing to reinvent themselves, to re-cultivate their public personas, to suit changing times. In this specific case, they both shifted populist as the Republican centre-of-gravity moved.
I agree that Carlson's stated political views are probably insincere, or at least, a mixture of sincere-if-vague conviction with tactically shifting to match the equally shifting and inchoate views of his audience. But I doubt Vance is much different either.
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Yes, this is what Reddit said about that. But I don't recall any Tucker segments from around then where he lavishly praised Trump? I consider Trump a narcissist and mostly a fool, and I thought his presidential term was horribly ineffective. Nevertheless, I agreed with Tucker segments at the time. I understand that many progressives learn third-hand that Tucker Carlson Tonight was the "Praise God-Emperor Trump Show", but was there actual lying here or just a clickbait insinuation of it?
Label it whatever type of argument you want. But the fact is Tucker Carlson carried Trumps water for four years. Of course Carlson has always been a hack, but the hypocrisy of his texts are next level.
His segments were largely about dishonest media, cancel culture, GOP politicians betraying their base, and the administrative deepstate. You can call this "carrying water for Trump" because the people who vote for Trump also complain about these things. To me, it was "accurate political commentary".
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I honestly never understood this point. I used think Marco Rubio was a great politician and would be my ideal president. My views have changed a lot. I can’t imagine anyone who better fits the term “empty suit”.
Tucker was firing off texts blasting trump 5 years ago? So what?
The biggest mystery to me about Marco Rubio is why anyone likes him. He's weird looking, short, not charismatic, seems perpetually nervous, not particularly articulate, seems not to have ever had an original thought in his life. He seems most famous for 1. dramatically failing to out-Trump Trump in the 2015 Republican primaries, 2. short-circuiting in Chris Christie's gravitational well and repeating the line "let's dispel with the myth that Obama doesn't know what he's doing" at least three times, 3. drinking too much water in some SOTU response, and 4. trying to pass amnesty for illegal immigrants. What is the case for Rubio? I am perplexed at Florida Man's improbable success.
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Should we just forget people’s utter hypocrisy? That’s the so-what. In my opinion, Tucker Carlson has been one of the handful of the top most norms-damaging individuals in the United States over the past 5 years. He has shown he is a liar and not trustworthy, so why should we take anything he says now at face value?
Nobody actually cares about people's utter hypocrisy. I have been extremely consistent in my belief that any news organisation or political figure which advocated in favour of the Iraq war permanently destroyed their reputation and legitimacy. The Trump years were full of the same - a mixture of both blatant falsehoods and artful deceptions. Nothing Carlson did even comes close to the WMD case, or the outright lies given professional gloss during the Biden Laptop saga.
That said, if you want to start holding media figures and organisations to account for peddling falsehoods and lies, I'm right there with you - as long as that's your actual motivation rather than some kind of partisan concern.
To Tucker’s credit, he loudly and publicly says “I fucked up on Iraq and it is my biggest mistake.”
Maybe there are others but I think most media just move along. I appreciated that he owned his failure. Maybe it’s an act but he seems to have really taken it to heart. He was probably the only person on Fox that criticized Trump over Solemni (sp?). He was probably the only person on Fox at the start of the Ukraine war to pump the brakes. Maybe it doesn’t come from a well thought out place but being burned on Iraq seems to have made him reflexively against any foreign entanglements.
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If by "top" you mean something like "top 100K", maybe. That list is absolutely swarmed with all the other journalists, as well as academics, politicians, appointed bureaucrats, judges, captains of industry, artists, etc.
No, I meant top 10.
Well, I think that requires a willful glossing over of all norm breaking behaviors we've seen from the people I outlined, both as individuals, and as a class.
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We just had a whole cadre of leftist media (eg NYT, WaPo, CNN) pretend the president wasn’t senile for three years. Yet we are attacking Tucker? Physician heal thyself.
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Good, the status quo norms got us into Ukraine-sandpit-boogaloo and would get us into a hot WW3 sooner if they would have gotten hilldawg into office.
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Preachy, smarminess of Glenn Beck 2.0 for real but with even more disdain for the truth. I hope he doesn’t manage to somehow launder his own image back to respectable.
Yep. I don’t think he’ll be able to launder it back to respectability, at least for those who are able to detect lies and deceit.
Interesting that he just spoke at the RNC. Looks like he’s back to riding trumps coattails.
Edit: and to be honest I don’t think he’s had any respectability since John Stewart showed what an ass he is on live television.
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Okay, I'll bite. What, specifically, have you found objectionable? I admit that I have limited knowledge of Tucker Carlson except for maybe 3 or 4 interviews of perhaps 1 hour each. He seemed forthright, well-intentioned, and informed. He is wrong about climate change, though. What else is he wrong about?
On a personal level, people say that he is an absolutely kind and wonderful person to be around which counts a lot in my book.
I still have a set of notes floating around for one day I watched a whole show or two back in 2020 election season and recorded my specific takes on it if that would be interesting as its own post? But the abridged version is that he would applaud people who thought differently than him for the bravery of coming on the show and then almost never let them speak. His show repeatedly would contain notable errors that more disciplined journalism would have caught. As Fox argued in court, his show was entertainment. Of course there's also some leaked texts where he both expresses his feelings which were outright at odds with his on-air opinions, strongly suggesting at least some level of disingenuousness. The overall tenor of the show was kind of gish-gallop style, where segments of opinionated commenters would be aired one after another, smashed together at breakneck pace in a parade with little actual engagement other than a furrowed brow and "oh that's interesting" interspersed with mantra-like platitudes such as "THEY want to lie to you but WE tell the truth". It was a ceaseless, unrelenting setup of grievance and pre-packaged thoughts with no space to breathe or even think provided in most all the segments. I think on some level I understand frustration with mainstream media as it is, but the kind of us-vs-them mentality constantly pushed on the show felt incredibly excessive and eminently hypocritical.
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