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The New York Times’ Pathetic Hit Job on Tucker Carlson Fails Miserably

Last weekend, New York Times “political and investigative reporter” Nicholas Confessore disgorged more than 20,000 words in an effort to smear and vilify Fox News host Tucker Carlson and his viewers. Confessore’s real goal, obviously, was to terrify Carlson’s advertisers to withdraw from the highest-rated cable TV talk show in America. Carlson, Confessore and the Times want readers to think, is nothing more than a televangelist for “white nationalists.”

Confessore offers not just one but three absurdly long and profoundly idiotic pieces to his Carlson hit job. The first story will suffice to get the flavor. That’s where Confessore uses the word “racist” no fewer than 10 times to describe Carlson as a bigot who intentionally stokes “white resentment” for his more than 3 million viewers who are also supposedly “racist,” and probably smelly, and poorly educated, too.

This is the same newspaper that covered up the Holocaust, ignored Joseph Stalin’s manufactured famine that killed anywhere from 7-13 million people between 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, and relentlessly smeared Ronald Reagan.

This is the same newspaper that accused Sarah Palin of being culpable for the 2011 shooting of U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords in Tucson, the same newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize after spending two years falsely accusing Donald Trump of being a Russian agent, and the same newspaper that ignores and covers up Joe Biden’s family corruption, mental and physical incapacitation, and destruction of our country as he opens our border to millions of illegal aliens, undermines the energy industry, and blows up our economy with disastrous inflationary spending.

Still, wretched track record and all, the attacks against Carlson were vicious and completely unwarranted.

According to the Princeton-educated and Pulitzer Prize-winning Confessore, Carlson, “has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news—and also, by some measures, the most successful.”

Evidently, when someone who isn’t a left-winger happens to be successful and has a large following, it must be because that person is a white supremacist.

Along with “racist,” Confessore uses the phase “white nationalist” no fewer than 10 times in the first piece and suggests that Carlson “has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas.”

In other words, millions of people don’t tune in to Carlson’s program because he’s handsome, intelligent, hilarious, refuses to talk down to his audience, and has the courage to speak about issues other conservatives won’t touch. Oh no, it’s as simple as “racism sells.” Carlson is the white supremacist version of Ibram X. Kendi. 

But Confessore wasn’t finished with his brilliant analysis. (With all of those words, how could he be?) Carlson’s show, he writes, 

teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege—by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain . . . Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as ‘criminal mobs.’

So according to Confessore’s crack investigatory work, all of those things he listed are just imaginary grievances. There is no reason for Americans to deplore the 2020 BLM riots that left 2,000 police officers blinded or injured, more than two dozen people dead, and property damage that reached $2 billionthe most expensive in insurance history. It defies all reason that black business owners wouldn’t invite “fiery but mostly peaceful” protesters to incinerate their life’s work and investment. Of course they would want to defund the police! Justice demands it!

The crisis at the southern U.S. border must be a figment of Carlson’s imagination. Have hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from more than 100 countries poured across the border every month since Joe Biden took office? Well, sure. But let’s pay no mind to the debate currently roiling the Democratic Party about the wisdom of ending Title 42, the COVID-era legislation that lets border officials immediately deport illegal aliens for health reasons. The old economic argument against unfettered immigration—an argument that certain Democrats embraced as recently as 2015—is simply “racism” now. There’s no longer any reason for white, blue-collar workers to worry about illegal labor depressing wages and straining public welfare systems. And, of course, illegal aliens never, ever break the law

At this point, you’re probably wondering where Confessore’s evidence is that Carlson is a racist. Well here it is: “Among the most frequent recurring characters on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight,’” Confessore writes, “are Black politicians like the Democratic congresswomen Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar and Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Mr. Carlson has portrayed, against the available evidence, as a kind of shadow president. He regularly disparages Black women as stupid or undeserving of their positions.”

Just so we’re clear, Maxine Waters is not a corrupt and embarrassing dolt who gives special favors to her husband, who once called for violence against Trump officials, made a fool of herself in front of CEOs of America’s largest banks, and who threatened more violence if jurors didn’t reach the “right verdict” in the Derek Chauvin trial. No, actually, Waters is a delightful, smart, and ethically sound public servant!

The same is true of Kamala Harris. She’s not a cackling, incoherent imbecile who speaks to her audience as if they have lower IQs than her own. She’s actually done an impeccable job with handling the border crisis, and dealing with Ukraine, combined with her vast knowledge of foreign policy. And no, don’t you dare believe for one second that she was picked for this job because of her skin color, even though that’s exactly what her decrepit boss told us, or that she’s advanced this far in her career because of her relationship with Willie Brown. No, according to Confessore, if you believe any of that, you’re racist and sexist and that’s all there is to it.  

And the same is true of Ilhan Omar. She’s not an ungrateful immigrant who bashes this country any chance she gets, or a raging anti-Semite. Like Watters and Harris, she is also warm and wonderful. Smear them and you’re a white supremacist. Got it?

For Confessore, Carlson’s greatest sin may be his refusal to accept the narrative that the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was an “insurrection” and an assault on democracy. “Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack ‘barely rates as a footnote’ . . . Accuracy isn’t the point on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’”

As American Greatness senior contributor Julie Kelly has documented here and on her frequent appearances on Carlson’s program, the only people who died on January 6 were unarmed Trump supporters—notably Ashli Babbitt, who was shot without warning at point blank range, and Rosanne Boyland, whose death the D.C. coroner ascribed to an Adderall overdose. Carlson has rudely pointed out the federal government’s double-standard in going easy on rioters who attacked and damaged federal courthouses in 2020 while keeping January 6 demonstrators charged with nonviolent offenses such as trespassing in solitary confinement ahead of their trials.

But accuracy isn’t the point at America’s benighted “newspaper of record.”

Fortunately, Tucker Carlson is not going anywhere.

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About Carpe Diem

Carpe Diem is the pseudonym for a writer who was a speechwriter in the Trump Administration.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images