Tucker Carlson likes to brand himself as a real man of the people.
Politicians, big business, the media, they are all on the same side.
Taking on the liberal elite.
Now Democrats have become the party of the elite professional class.
And standing up for everyday Americans
It’s not a left right thing.
It's a ruling class versus everybody else thing.
He wrote a whole book about how America's selfish ruling class
is bringing the country to the brink of revolution.
Division helps them maintain their power
even as it destroys our country.
The Atlantic even called him the bow tied bard of populism.
The actual problem is the corrupt and decadent leadership
of our own elites.
The he elites.
Liberal elites.
It is sickening and we've had enough of it.
There's just one problem with Tucker's
man-of-the-people shtick.
.
Yeah.
Tucker's full name is Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson.
His stepmom is the heiress to the Swanson frozen food empire.
He went to an elite boarding school in Rhode Island,
got famous for wearing bow ties on national television,
and has spent his professional career bouncing between
cushy cable news jobs.
By all measures, Tucker Carlson is a member
of the American elite.
So what is going on here?
Why would a guy who bragged about being an out-of-the-closet elitist
host a show where he rails against the ruling class?
There's actually a pretty simple explanation
for Tucker's new shtick.
And it's called "false consciousness."
But see I'm an out-of-the-closet elitist.
I don't run around pretending to be a man of the people.
The elites to whom the rest of us mere plebes look on in awe.
I’m absolutely not a man of the people at all.
False consciousness is one of those phrases
that grad students use to sound smart at parties.
But essentially, it's a term in Marxist theory
that describes when working class people
are tricked into accepting their exploitation.
So let's say you and your co-workers
are feeling frustrated and start thinking of forming a union.
To stop you, your boss might say
"you don't need a union.
The real problem is all these women
taking maternity leave.
If they weren't taking so much time off
we'd all be able to go home right now."
Or they might say
"it's these damn privileged millennials.
They're so obsessed with work-life balance that
we all have to pick up the slack.
Get mad at them."
The boss convinces the workers to accept their exploitation
by pointing their anger in the wrong direction.
Or as Tucker Carlson would say:
One thing you will learn when you grow up in a castle
and look out across the moat every day hungry peasants
out in the village
is you don't want to stoke envy among the proletariat.
Thanks Tucker.
So how do you keep the hungry peasants in the village
from storming the castle?
Enter Tucker Carlson Tonight.
The show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity,
smugness, and groupthink.
Since it launched in 2016,
Tucker's show has been a festival of false consciousness,
bombarding viewers with an endless supply of culture war bullshit.
Can transracial be the new transgender?
What's so upsetting about lady-specific Doritos?
If yoga is racist is hot yoga more racist?
To be fair, this isn't unique to Tucker.
Fox News' MO is using culture war stories
to distract from right wing economics.
But what makes Tucker unique is how often he uses
the language of anti-elitism
while ignoring real exploitation.
Take the 2017 Republican tax cuts for example.
It's the largest tax cut in the history of our country
and reform.
Republicans spent months promising their tax cuts
would help the middle class,
including during several segments on Tucker's show.
This is really about a middle income tax cut.
OK.
That of course turned out to be a scam.
The overwhelming majority of those tax cuts
went to corporate shareholders and CEOs.
It's a giveaway to the very rich,
permanent tax cuts for corporations,
and almost nothing for the average person.
So what was Tucker Carlson, populist hero,
talking about the week that happened?
Racist trees.
In Palm Springs, California, city officials are planning
to clearcut a grove of tamarisk trees because they're racist.
Ah yes.
Racist trees.
I'm willing to believe you that there was racist intent
in placing these trees.
Why are we punishing the trees for that?
Tucker spent twice as long talking about this
random tree story as he did about the tax cuts.
Does that seem a little unfair?
If you were a tree you might feel a little differently.
This is false consciousness in action.
Convince workers to focus their rage at targets that don't matter.
Racist trees.
And they'll be too distracted to notice the ones that do.
It's a giveaway to the very rich.
Don't want to stoke envy.
Tucker does this all the time.
Last May, Congress rolled back regulations
meant to stop Wall Street from creating another financial crisis.
The financial institutions spent
two hundred million dollars in lobbying.
This is the kind of thing real populists hate.
Big money rules and the needs of ordinary people gets ignored.
But Tucker didn't mention the rollback once.
Instead he was dedicating multiple segments
to a random dude who refused to move out of his parents house,
which Carlson saw as proof that millennials were too entitled.
I think that probably does have something to do with
the safe space movement.
So just to recap:
instead of talking about bank deregulation,
we got one multimillionaire complaining
to another multimillionaire about how
millennials are too entitled.
False consciousness.
Amazing the country this is becoming,
we're dedicated to chronicling it for you in all detail.
Last February, Trump made it easier for lenders
to give out predatory payday loans,
which trap working class people in cycles of debt
they can't get out of.
Many of these loans have interest rates
of four hundred percent.
The move was a huge win for predatory lenders,
who Democrats have been trying to regulate for years.
This is a lobby that's extraordinarily powerful.
They have members and the members want results.
But Tucker didn't mention the move once.
Instead, he spent the week blaming Democrats
for focusing on identity politics.
Elections in this country used to be based on issues
or that was the common agreement, anyway.
The left is too distracted by global warming
or the lack of transgender SEAL teams to pay any attention.
You spent three days on the racist tree story.
False consciousness.
Okay, last one.
In May, House Republicans passed huge cuts
to Medicare and Medicaid.
This bill cuts taxes for massively high income people
by hundreds of billions and cuts the health care
of low and middle income Americans by hundreds of billions.
If there was ever a time they get mad at the elites,
this was it.
I think this is one of the largest pure redistributions
from poor to rich in one bill we've ever seen.
But Tucker Swanson Carlson treated the whole thing like a big joke.
The left has had a full psychotic break.
Then he turned to the stories that really matter:
atheists getting rid of a park bench in Pennsylvania,
Michael Moore saying something mean about Trump,
and a random academic paper suggesting we should eat bug meat.
When Al Gore starts serving crickets for lunch on his private jet,
I'm in.
The largest redistribution from poor to rich we've ever seen.
Don't want to stoke envy.
The goal of Tucker's show isn't to challenge the elite.
It's to make sure you never realize who they are.
To get you so mad at atheists, feminists, immigrants,
millennials, trans people, college students,
pot smokers, vegans, the NFL, Brooklyn witches,
and Lena f*cking Dunham
that you don't get mad at the people who are actually in charge.
Tucker Carlson isn't a populist.
He's a safety valve.
A way to make sure that, if the hungry peasants in the village
get angry,
they don't take it out on the party
giving tax cuts to him or his multibillionaire boss.
You're his bitch.
I'm 100 percent his bitch.
Whatever Mr Murdoch says I do.
I would be honored if he would cane me
the way I cane my workers.
My servants.
He's a phony.
And if that sounds harsh,
don't take it from me.
Take it from Tucker Carlson, in 2003,
talking about Bill O'Reilly,
the man who's fox news slot he would one day take over.
I think there's kind of a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick
because it's sort of built on this perception that
he is the character he plays.
He is every man, he's not right wing,
he's a populist fighting for you against the powers that be.
And that's great as a shtick.
But I'm just saying the moment that it's revealed
not to be true, it's over.
Right?
Because the whole thing is predicated on the fact that
he is who he says he is and
nobody is that person,
especially not someone who makes a million,
or many millions a year.