Tucker Carlson, Unmasked

The self-styled champion of individual liberty wants you to call government agents to punish Americans for their parenting.

Social media has so conditioned people to expect hyperbole that there’s a perverse satisfaction when a clip is truly as bad as advertised. Last night, a viral tweet claimed that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson had told his audience to harass people on the street wearing masks—and to “call the police immediately; contact child protective services” if they saw a child wearing one.

Surely, this couldn’t be a fair description; naturally, it was. Having spent the early part of the month espousing the white-supremacist “great replacement theory,” Carlson is now seeking to use the power of the state to harass and immiserate his political opponents:

Carlson delivered his rant with the combination of astonished indignation, obvious bad faith, and smug sarcasm with which he delivers everything these days, a volatile mix that makes it impossible to know when and to what extent he’s trolling. Like his fellow traveler Donald Trump, Carlson delights in making appalling statements with a straight face and then insisting he was just joking; unlike Trump, Carlson has in the past shown enough of a sense of humor that you can’t discount that possibility.

Trying to figure out Carlson’s “real” feelings is not only impossible but beside the point. Whether he’s disingenuous or delusional, many people will hear what he says and take it seriously and literally. We have several recent examples of the Fox audience being misled into believing falsehoods, including denying the reality of COVID-19 and subscribing to bogus claims about fraud in the 2020 election.

Carlson’s diatribe is a useful data point for how American conservatism has transformed, especially in the Trump era, from a movement that (at least putatively) believes in limited government to one that primarily prizes marshaling the power of the state to punish those who disagree with itWith Trump in eclipse, Carlson is the most visible face of the new conservative movement.

Although Carlson makes a lot of ridiculous claims in a short period in this clip, it is his comments about children that are most disturbing. After complaining that mask mandates imposed by the state are equivalent to living in North Korea, Carlson executes two athletic rhetorical maneuvers. First, he goes from describing mask wearing as excessive to describing it as abusive, and second, he elides the difference between a government mandate and a personal choice.

“As for forcing children to wear masks outside, that should be illegal,” Carlson sputters. “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from seeing someone beating a kid at Walmart: Call the police immediately; contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse, and you’re morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”

One doesn’t need a lot of imagination to game out where this is going. Some viewers will take Carlson’s possibly arch exhortations to heart. They’ll call the police and child protective services. In most cases, authorities will ignore those calls. In some cases, especially if the callers repeatedly summon police as Carlson demands, they could be charged with filing false claims; it’s a good bet that neither he nor Fox News will be there to help them if they are. In other cases, encounters will end poorly for the innocent parents involved. The news is full of examples of how police called to respond to petty or wholly imagined offenses end up gravely injuring or even killing people. (Carlson believes Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted.)

But when government authorities fail to intervene—because, of course, no laws are being broken—Carlson’s fans may feel the moral obligation to take matters into their own hands, just like Edgar Maddison Welch, who stormed into a Washington, D.C., pizzeria heavily armed in 2016, because he wanted to prevent child abuse that he wrongly believed was occurring there. No one was hurt in that incident, though someone easily could have been. Welch spent about three years in prison.

Carlson’s argument isn’t really about masks. As he grudgingly admitted, the Biden administration had already signaled that new guidance would soon make clear that mask wearing outside is not necessary for fully vaccinated people; the CDC released that guidance this afternoon. Perhaps the change could have come faster, but conservatives have traditionally applauded the deliberate process of government, because it prevents tyranny and abuse of citizens.

Even after new guidance, some people will decide to continue wearing masks outside. Perhaps they feel more comfortable that way. People exercising sometimes extreme caution about their health is neither new or a nuisance. Perhaps they are immunocompromised, or have immunocompromised family members or friends. Ultimately, it’s none of my business or Tucker Carlson’s business why they are doing so, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, which neither he nor anyone else has established they are.

That’s the sort of personal choice that conservatives have also traditionally defended. Though Carlson masquerades as a defender of free speech (one of several poses he’s tried on over the years), he must know that the government has no business telling citizens what they cannot wear. It is, to borrow Carlson’s analogy, like being forced to wear a Kim Il Sung pin in Pyongyang. Unlike mandates to wear masks, which stem from a public-health interest, a government rule punishing people for wearing masks during a pandemic serves no compelling interest. As for children, conservatives have long argued that families should enjoy autonomy about their parenting decisions, without undue interference from the state.

But Carlson doesn’t object to the state harassing people or exercising undue power. He delights in it, as long as the state is harassing the people he hates. The crueltyas my colleague Adam Serwer has said, is the point. This is the lodestar of the Trump and post-Trump GOP, which values owning the libs above allnot merely rhetorically, but with the fist of government. Thus Trump asserted that he had the authority to override state and local coronavirus shutdowns (before hastily backtracking when it became clear that he had no such power). He sought to involve the federal government in decisions of colleges and universities in order to muzzle speech. And he celebrated police violence, even as he moaned that he was the victim of overzealous law enforcement.

It is tempting to read incoherence in Trump’s arguments, or in Carlson’s: How can they both be against government mandating masks, on the basis of personal liberty, and also demand that the government prevent people from wearing them? In fact, the principle is straightforward enough. Small government for me, but not for thee.

 

The Republican Economic Plan Is an Insult

It’s bad faith in the name of bipartisanship.

So 10 Republican senators are proposing an economic package that is supposed to be an alternative to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The proposal is only a third of the size of Biden’s plan and would in important ways cut the heart out of economic relief.

Republicans, however, want Biden to give in to their wishes in the name of bipartisanship. Should he?

No, no, 1.9 trillion times, no.

It’s not just that the G.O.P. proposal is grotesquely inadequate for a nation still ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond that, by their behavior — not just over the past few months but going back a dozen years — Republicans have forfeited any right to play the bipartisanship card, or even to be afforded any presumption of good faith.

Let’s start with the substance.

By any measure, January was the worst pandemic month so far. More than 95,000 Americans died of Covid-19; hospitalizations remain far higher than they were at previous peaks.

True, the end of the nightmare is finally in sight. If all goes well, at some point this year enough people will have been vaccinated that we’ll reach herd immunity, the pandemic will fade away and normal life can resume. But that’s unlikely to happen before late summer or early fall.

And in the meantime we’re going to have to remain on partial lockdown. It would, for example, be folly to reopen full-scale indoor dining. And the continuing lockdown will impose a lot of financial hardship. Unemployment will remain very high; millions of businesses will struggle to stay afloat; state and local governments, which aren’t allowed to run deficits, will be in dire fiscal straits.

What we need, then, is disaster relief to get afflicted Americans through the harsh months ahead. And that’s what the Biden plan would do.

Republicans, however, want to rip the guts out of this plan. They are seeking to reduce extra aid to the unemployed and, more important, cut that aid off in June — long before we can possibly get back to full employment. They want to eliminate hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments. They want to eliminate aid for children. And so on.

This isn’t an offer of compromise; it’s a demand for near-total surrender. And the consequences would be devastating if Democrats were to give in.

But what about bipartisanship? As Biden might say, “C’mon, man.”

First of all, a party doesn’t get to demand bipartisanship when many of its representatives still won’t acknowledge that Biden won legitimately, and even those who eventually acknowledged the Biden victory spent weeks humoring baseless claims of a stolen election.

Complaints that it would be “divisive” for Democrats to pass a relief bill on a party-line vote, using reconciliation to bypass the filibuster, are also pretty rich coming from a party that did exactly that in 2017, when it enacted a large tax cut — legislation that, unlike pandemic relief, wasn’t a response to any obvious crisis, but was simply part of a conservative wish list.

Oh, and that tax cut was rammed through in the face of broad public opposition: Only 29 percent of Americans approved of the bill, while 56 percent disapproved. By contrast, the main provisions of the Biden plan are very popular: 79 percent of the public approve of new stimulus checks, and 69 percent approve of both expanded unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments.

So when one party is trying to pursue policies with overwhelming public support while the other offers lock-step opposition, who, exactly, is being divisive?

Wait, there’s more.

Everyone knew that Republicans, who abruptly stopped caring about deficits when Donald Trump took office, would suddenly rediscover the horror of debt under Joe Biden. What even I didn’t expect was to see them complain that Biden’s plan gives too much help to relatively affluent families.

Again, consider the 2017 tax cut. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, that law gave 79 percent of its benefits to people making more than $100,000 a year. It gave more to Americans with million-dollar-plus incomes, just 0.4 percent of taxpayers, than the total tax break for those living on less than $75,000 a year, that is, a majority of the population. And now Republicans claim to care about equity?

In short, everything about this Republican counteroffer reeks of bad faith — the same kind of bad faith the G.O.P. displayed in 2009 when it tried to block President Barack Obama’s efforts to rescue the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.

Obama, unfortunately, failed to grasp the nature of his opposition, and he watered down his policies in a vain attempt to win support across the aisle. This time, it seems as if Democrats understand what Lucy will do with that football and won’t be fooled again.

So it’s OK for Biden to talk with Republicans and hear them out. But should he make any substantive concessions in an attempt to win them over? Should he let negotiations with Republicans delay the passage of his rescue plan? Absolutely not. Just get it done.

Why did Ben Shapiro say that everyone has zip ties when there were several rioters in the Capitol building carrying them? What did he think they were going to use the zip ties for?

He’s being deliberately obtuse.

Ben Shapiro is not an idiot, but he’s the kind of guy who thinks that communicating poorly and acting smug when he’s misunderstood is the same thing as cleverness. And he’s the kind of guy who thinks that finding a definition that makes him technically correct is the same thing as winning an argument.

This tweet exchange is a great distillation of his entire personality. Someone asks why a regular person would even own zip-ties. In the context, it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that she’s referring to the ratcheted flexi-cuffs that the insurrectionists were carrying into the Capitol. Those have no use other than to restrain people, and have basically no legitimate uses outside of law enforcement and the military. The only people who aren’t in those fields who own one are either police/military wannabes, or people with very interesting private lives. The obvious point to the tweet is that even owning such a device (let alone bringing it with you when you break into the Capitol) shows exactly what kind of people we’re dealing with here.

Ben Shapiro, reading this, deliberately seizes on her exact words in an attempt to sound clever. After all, “zip-ties” technically refers to any kind of ratcheted cable tie, and those have many, many legitimate uses. Lots of people own them, I have a jar of them in my garage.

Of course, when it’s pointed out that those are obviously not what she meant, Shapiro throws his hands up, and responds with the classic “but you said…” After all, she said the word “zip-ties”, and that’s what “zip-ties” are, I can show you a dictionary. How was I supposed to know she was referring to police-style restraints? She didn’t say that. So I could only assume she meant the common piece of hardware! What was I supposed to do, pay the tiniest bit of attention to context? I’m technically right! I’m very clever!

This is exactly how Ben Shapiro operates. He looks for any word or phrase that someone on the other side of an argument uses, which he can then seize on, claim is wrong, and then declare victory. It doesn’t matter if the word choice has any relevance, whatsoever, to the argument in question, he’s proven the other person to be technically wrong, which means he must be technically right, which means he’s won the argument!

It’s a style of ‘debate’ that’s appealing to a certain mindset. It’s the equivalent of making fun of a typo or a grammatical error in something someone wrote, and then mocking them for being stupid, rather than paying any attention to something they’re actually saying. It has nothing to do with actually proving you’re right, and is based only on trying to embarrass your opponent. It’s the kind of thing you say when you’re fully focused on a very shallow version of “winning” rather than actually engaging or addressing anyone’s argument.

If your goal is to gain knowledge, understand perspectives, and change minds, it’s a deeply stupid strategy. But if your goal is to get retweeted because you “pwn’d teh libs”, then it’s actually very effective. Ben Shapiro knows exactly what he’s doing.