Tucker Carlson is a hypocrite who pretends to be on the side of the common people, while secretly selling them out to the highest bidder.
Have you seen Rutger Bregman’s unaired interview with Tucker Carlson? If not, go watch it now. Or if you have, go watch it again – I’ll wait.
So, Tucker Carlson starts out quite chummy, but gets flustered when Rutger Bregman gives a critical comment about Fox. Tucker starts to stutter, but he finds his footing and they go into a somewhat substantive discussion, till Bregman starts to attack Trump, then Fox and finally Carlson personally. After a while Carlson loses it and starts swearing at Bregman. This pretty much ends the interview, both knowing this won’t make it to air.
A marketing stunt?
Was this just a simple marketing stunt Bregman pulled? The crux is in the words ‘just’ and ‘simple’. Because it was a marketing stunt, for sure. Bregman knew his combative style would result in conflict and not make it to air. He calculated that he would reach many more people by going viral through other media and he acted accordingly – this footage wasn’t captured by accident.
Let’s say Rutger had used the conventional approach instead and had a little 5 minute segment on Carlson’s show, where he would just be critical of Davos and rich people not paying taxes. The take away for Carlson’s viewers would have been that Carlson is on their side against the ‘global elites’.
But he isn’t. And that was wat Bregman wanted to expose, which Carlson wouldn’t have let him do on his own show. So Bregman pretended to be interested in appearing on Carlson’s show and gave his criticism directly to Tucker. Who clearly hardly ever gets challenged like that and as a result lost his cool.
Who is Tucker Carlson and who does he work for?
Tucker Carlson is one of the opinion stars of Fox News. Fox News has a clear conservative bias and is pretty much the propaganda arm of the Republican Party – or the Republican Party is the political arm of Fox News. They are very intertwined. And both pledge fealty to the incredibly rich, because they are the ones who pay them (yes, there are billionaires on the Democrats side, but they are a small minority).
This is why Republicans are against taxing the rich more, combating global warming, giving everybody access to healthcare, etc. All of these are popular with the American people and even have majority support with Republican voters. But they are not popular with the donors, so nothing happens.
Putting the con in conservative
Going against the will of your voters is a dangerous thing to do, so you need to pull the wool over their eyes. So you blame immigrants and the global elite. The word ‘global’ is important here: these are outsider elites, like George Soros; not insider elites, like the Koch brothers.
Rutger mentions the Kochs and the Cato institute. Carlson is a senior fellow at Cato, an influential rightwing think tank that helps develop policy that is favorable to the most dangerous industries: fossil fuel, mining, healthcare insurance, tobacco, finance, incarceration, etc. The policy then gets pushed by Republicans in congress and sold to the public through Fox News. This is the corruption Rutger is talking about.
What is the antidote?
Bregman knew Carlson wouldn’t allow him to be directly critical of Fox and Carlson, on air. This is why he did what he did and hoped it would catch fire, just like his comments on a small panel discussion at Davos would do. It’s a very clever marketing ploy, as the attention allows him to direct part of it towards his own platform: The Correspondent.
It is unfortunate that the message will probably not reach many of Tucker’s viewers. But they are very hard to reach for him, anyway. People aren’t swayed by rational arguments when they are tribal. Fox viewers have made their choice and five minutes on a channel that spews lies 24 hours a day, wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
By building a platform that counters Fox’s bullshit on a much bigger scale, Bregman understands that losing a battle might help win you the war.
