I have to confess that I never cared much for Tucker Carlson from back in his bow tie days. He just never seemed to be on point and was too much of an establishment guy. But he has really started coming into his own lately with his show on Fox News. He has been absolutely eviscerating his leftist guests by the simple expedient of asking them to explain themselves. They are so used to being the unquestioned moral authority on any subject, and so unused to having to address any differing opinions that they just go ape shit when pressed by very basic questions which they should have thought about before they took any of the positions they ended up taking.
I say this a lot, but a leftist can’t argue from first principles because they have none. They can be against both rape culture and for safe spaces, while also being for letting men into women’s restrooms and never see the contradiction. There is no basic set of values they are building upon. This is why all of their arguments begin and end with some form of “ism” charge against their opponents — racism, sexism etc… They seem completely oblivious to the fact that they have made no argument at all when they do that.
This first interview is with the New York Times public editor. She is so overmatched that she doesn’t even realize she is yielding as much ground as she is until it is too late.
Now obviously, a completely partisan rag like the Times can’t have a public editor with any teeth and this woman is about as assertive as you would imagine she would be given her position. If she ever put her foot down she would be bullied back into line in short order, and that is exactly what was done to her after this interview aired. She backed off calling the Tweets made by her colleagues inappropriate.
But what is interesting here is that at one point in the interview she starts to panic when she realizes how bad the Times is looking and she starts to flail around and throw in the typical leftist canards that they try to use to insulate themselves when they know they have been bad. In particular she mentions the criticism that there was not enough questioning of the WMD claim going into the run-up to the Iraq war. This is of course bullshit. But it illustrates how these people think. Never do they use an example like the lies told about the ACA which they gladly conveyed, or their writing glowing reports about brutal dictators such as Assad or Castro, or “hands up, don’t shoot” which they credulously and breathlessly supported. And of course no mention of needing to be more critical of the Iran deal in which we sent pallet loads of cash to the Iranians, allowed them to resume their nuclear bomb work and received absolutely nothing in return other than body bags and more hostages being taken now that we had established a market for them. Hell, Clinton made the same deal with North Korea and they don’t even question their reporting on that.
But this poor woman isn’t allowed to say any of those things even if she wanted to… and she just isn’t bright enough to ever question her underlying assumptions even though Tucker leads her through the process of how to do it. I bet used car salesmen love to see Time employees coming. Tell them something is “green” and they hand over a lot more money in exchange for nothing.
In the next video Tucker drives a Washington Post reporter into spams of anger just by calling her out on her obvious racism. She never, in a million years, thought anyone would ever question whether it is OK to be racist against white guys. Just watch the look on her face as she tries to maintain control while he is handing her ass to her.
She uses another typical trick here. She refers to some other leftwing study here and just thinks everyone should assume it means what she thinks it means and that we should accept that the motives of whoever conducted it are pure even though we know the social sciences have never produced much in their entire history which is very reliable. She is willing to use this slender reed as an excuse to accuse white guys of being racist in their motivations for the support of certain policies or candidates when we know for an absolute fact that they probably make up the least racist cohort of the electorate. And we know this not because we have divined the motivations of the other groups, or because we have some study put out by a rightwing source, but because they TELL us. They say straight out they will vote for Obama because he is black, or Hillary because she is a woman. They are not shy about it. They tout it. We don’t have to guess. Yet if that thought ever crossed her mind I have no doubt she would have to run down to the nearest S&M store and buy a whip so that she could scourge herself for the wickedness of her thoughts. That is what her religion would demand.
And what gets me is that these people are so arrogant and oblivious to their own natures that they keep lining up for this treatment while not bothering to prepare for the interview at all.
The best part about this next one is that at the end once Tucker gets her going he just sits back and enjoys the sight of it. I don’t know who the ditz is in this video. It becomes very clear about halfway into it that she has absolutely no idea what she is talking about and you can hear the angst in her voice as she starts to come apart. This is a thing of beauty.
She can’t cite a single thing the EPA nominee has done to warrant her disapproval with enough specificity for anyone to tell whether the position he took was reasonable or not. She just uses the usual fear mongering of how if someone is against any EPA regulation then they are for death to children, and birds, and small furry animals. There is absolutely no awareness on her part that it is impossible to produce no pollution at all, that there are trade-offs, and that there may be negative consequences of regulations which make it much worse to implement them than to go without them. This is just basic stuff that one should know about an issue before deciding on their stance.
She has some wishy washy degree in some sort of nonsense that has left her completely unprepared to think rationally. Think about it. This woman got all the way through a college program where they extracted tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from her purse and she has not been challenged enough to even know what constitutes a reasoned argument.
And finally, we have the biggest pompous ass of them all. Vibrators were originally invented as treatment for hysteria and this guy needs to go get himself a sybian to get over how worked up he is over Donald Trump. He is a businessman who says he will not do business with anyone who voted for or supported Trump.
Yeah, he’s a douchebag. Apparently he was fine with Obama calling out the Supreme Court, Fox News, picking winners and losers, restructuring 1/6th of the US economy by force and without any support at all from half the country, but by God if Trump tells the leftwing operatives who masquerade as reporters that he expects to be treated fairly then we are on the cusp of a 4th Reich. Whatever. Tucker treats him with the derision and contempt he deserves.
There are more of these. But what they all have in common is that the people Tucker is interviewing are morally vain and intellectually vacuous. They oreen and signal rather than reason. It is like some mating ritual for dullards. None of them know how to make an argument which addresses the issue, or how to stay on topic. They all veer into hysteria, or talking points, and when pressed for specifics so that there can be an exchange of ideas they come up empty. This last guy claims Trump is a fascist, and frankly I think an argument can be made that as large and intrusive as our government is that all of our presidents are fascists (Obama certainly enjoyed picking winners and losers), but he provides no specifics. In none of these videos do we even get to the point of having a reasoned argument because once again, to the left, a reasoned debate consists of them screaming racist, or fascist, or whatever and they never, ever bother thinking beyond that point.
I can make a very good argument that Obama is a fascist, right down to persecution of his political enemies by using the apparatus of government, to scapegoating and imprisoning people such as the fellow who made the Mohammed video, to outright killing US citizens by direct order through drone strikes. I would like to have seen this guy questioned more on specifics and then seen his worries about what Trump might do compared to what Obama actually has done, and then I would want to know when he is going to stop doing business with Obama supporters. Tucker does a good job with these interviews, but it would be even more fun if he would pin them down like that sometimes. Otherwise it is like trying to catch fireflies at night. The intellectual candle power isn’t all that much and it is hard to see above the ambient light. You have to kind of stoke it a little and get the flowing in the right direction to really have fun.