Tucker Carlson and why selling groupthink had to end

26 April 2023

Tucker Carlson is out. Maybe it’s because of the $788 million in Murdoch moolah that went up in smoke. But, according to the Post’s Erik Wemple, maybe it’s not. What’s certain, as he said, is “a terrible individual” is gone.

For now.

It’s tempting to think, as Erik’s colleague Greg Sargent argued after news broke, that with the fall of Carlson comes the fall of maga. I don’t know about that, only because I doubt whether anyone can know. What we do know is choices have consequences, including unforeseen consequences.

A consequence of putting Carlson at the top of Fox, for nearly 15 years, was that every one of the Republicans, including the Stern Fathers of the Party, said the same thing, over and over, so frequently and so intensely, that the GOP not only said the same thing, but seemed to think the same thing.

Carlson is just one cog in the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, but that cog, without a shred of doubt, casts the widest, blackest and most poisonous shadow. Do not pity the poor heir to a frozen fish fortune. Sure, Tucker Swanson Carlson has been fired more than most. But he’s like herpes. It doesn’t matter how often he’s treated. He’s never going away.

While sameness of thought is typically good for capital, it’s bad when the political conditions, in which homogeneity had been operating, suddenly shift – as they did when Dominion Voting Systems sued Carlson’s employer for lies, though not explicitly told by Carlson, that lived in the petri dish of propaganda and poison Carlson was chiefly responsible for cultivating.

The more Fox told normal Republican voters that the criminal former president had been robbed by madeup forces in cahoots with Dominion Voting Systems, the more normal Republican voters said it back to Fox. The more they all said it together, in unison, the less any one of them thought about the wisdom of saying it. With so many people saying the same thing centered on the same lie featuring the same private firm, well, it’s hard to think of better conditions for Dominion Voting Systems striking back.

But it doesn’t take shifting political conditions for top executives of the country’s most lucrative media property to know that, over time, doing the same thing over and over doesn’t produce the same results. In fact, doing the same thing over and over, expecting everything to remain the same, is crazy. Top Fox executives are many things, but crazy isn’t one of them.

While it’s tempting to think the fall of Carlson means the fall of maga, I think it’s probably more useful to consider the development in simpler terms. We could be witnessing the fall of maga or we could be witnessing the fall of the way Carlson talked about maga – the end of the line when it came to forcing every one in the GOP to talk and think the same way, over and over, all the time, for fear being punished for disloyalty to the GOP.

We could be witnessing Fox executives conceding, without appearing to, that nearly 15 years of sellling authoritarian collectivism, though profitable while they lasted, are like all good things. Eventually, they come to an end.

While Tucker Swanson Carlson will never really go away, on account of his behavioral kinship to a sexually transmitted virus, he’s gone as far as Fox executives are concerned. The old play is played out. Getting everyone to say and think the same thing is now costing Fox more than it’s bringing in. This was, strictly speaking, a business decision. It was time to move on – to a new face who will replicate Carlson but make it seem fresh and new.

The irony is that liberalism, in the hands of liberals who have the power to do something about it, including the current president, had nothing to do with it. Today’s liberals are fixed on HYPOCRISY. For nearly 15 years, they beat that drum more times than Carlson fanboys tanned their testicles.

It’s a double irony. For this entire time, liberals felt obligated to poke holes in Carlson’s arguments, though Carlson himself felt no obligation to stand by anything he said. All liberals had to do was point out the obvious – that Carlson and the rest of the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, forced every one of the Republicans to say the same thing, over and over, to the point where they appeared to be thinking the same thing, too.

You don’t need to poke holes in authoritarian arguments when all you need to do is point out that people who say the same thing, and who think the same thing, can’t be trusted with anything, much less the whole truth. Liberals never saw the utility of this. They get no credit for Carlon’s fall, only Fox executives, who don’t spend their time congratulating themselves, but instead make practical decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

Carlson doesn’t work.

He’s out.

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