Tucker Carlson: Defiance Not Defense
I’m a Virginian.
My governor and attorney general pranced about in blackface. My lieutenant governor is accused of rape.
Yet these three genuinely disgusting dudes show no signs of slinking away from Richmond in disgrace.
So remind me why in the world I should care about tasteless jokes Fox News personality Tucker Carlson made on a shock jock radio show a decade ago, when he worked for CNN and MSNBC.
Yet Media Matters - a far-left George Soros-funded outfit - just released a compilation of offensive Carlson comedy bits from dusty “Bubba the Love Sponge” radio shows in an effort to silence Fox’s boyish host who specializes in skewering liberals.
They want advertisers to boycott his program. They want Fox to sack him. They want Carlson and his conservative opinions off the air.
Carlson’s fast becoming Fox’s most popular host. Filling in nicely where Bill O’Reilly left off several years ago.
“So far in 2019, Carlson’s 8 p.m. program on the Fox News Channel is averaging 2.9 million total viewers per episode, which is 41 percent more than Chris Hayes on MSNBC and a whopping 122 percent more than CNN’s Anderson Cooper.” The Wrap.
One can only imagine Carlson’s ratings from last night, when he opened “Tucker Carlson Tonight” not with an apology but with a tirade against the “American outrage machine” that demands that things said “in jest” or taken out of context must result in the ruination of anyone targeted by anti-free speech extremists.
This happens on both sides of the political divide, of course. It’s always overkill. Especially when leftist lynch mobs are unleashed.
Look, I never listened to “Bubba the Love Sponge” - until yesterday, anyway - but I know shock jocks. Shoot, I’m a fan. For years I began each morning with Don Imus. And I listened to Howard Stern every chance I got. They’re the godfathers of raunchy radio. Both of these wild men were hired and fired with regularity over the years by station managers who loved their ratings, but feared the FCC.
Guests on their free-wheeling radio shows always knew their job: To say crazy, off-the-wall stuff that left the audience gasping in disbelief. (Stern is still broadcasting. Imus retired about a year ago.)
Unlike other public figures who’ve been confronted with ancient jokes and quotes, Carlson is not backing down or begging for forgiveness. On Monday night he declared that Fox News stands as a lone island in a “sea of sameness” on television. An island that is despised by those on the left.
Earlier in the day he fired off a Tweet, saying he wasn’t going to cower in the face of the latest attack.
Defiance, not defense.
Why not? It works in Richmond.
