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    Tucker Carlson makes insinuating remarks on women in new leaked video

    In the latest leaked behind-the-scenes video of Tucker Carlson, the now fired rightwing Fox News host makes insinuating comments about a makeup artist, about what women do in the bathroom and if they ever have pillow fights.The footage was published on Thursday by the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America.In the video, Carlson asks the unnamed staffer, “When they go to the ladies room and ‘powder their noses’, is there actually nose-powdering going on?”The woman says: “Sometimes.”Carlson says: “Oooh. I like the sound of that.”The footage follows the leak to the same outlet of video of Carlson making coarse remarks about a woman and Fox News viewers; a discussion of sexual technique with the British TV host Piers Morgan; disparaging remarks about the Fox Nation streaming service; and comments about a lawyer who deposed Carlson in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit, who the host calls a “slimy little motherfucker”.That $1.6bn suit, over Fox News’s broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 US election, was settled last month for $787.5m. Shortly after that, in a surprise development, Carlson was summarily fired.Why Fox News decided to remove its star prime-time anchor is the subject of widespread reporting.Earlier this week, the New York Times published a racially inflammatory text message Carlson sent after the Capitol attack. That message was redacted in Dominion filings but other messages, including abusive comments about Trump advisers and allies, were released.Comments about Fox News executives were also reportedly linked to Carlson’s firing, including one in which he is reported to have called a female executive a “cunt”. A former booker on Carlson’s show also filed suit, alleging a misogynistic working atmosphere.Fox News has not commented on why Carlson was fired. It has called the suit from the former booker, Abby Grossberg, “unmeritorious” and “riddled with false allegations against the network and our employees”.Last week, a person close to Carlson told the Guardian the firing was not over abusive messages or crude comments.“An elderly Australian man” – the Fox News owner, Rupert Murdoch, 92 – “fired his top anchor with no warning because he was so offended by a dirty word? Stupidest explanation ever. Please. A big decision requires a powerful motive. Naughty words in text messages don’t qualify.”In the footage released on Thursday, Carlson is seen on-set, having makeup applied by an unidentified woman. He says: “Can I ask you a question? You don’t have to answer, it’s personal.”The woman indicates assent.Carlson says: “I’m not speaking of you, but more in general with ladies, when they go to the ladies room and ‘powder their noses’, is there actually nose-powdering going on?”The woman says: “Sometimes.”Carlson says: “Oooh. I like the sound of that.”The woman says: “Most of the time, it’s lipstick.”Carlson says: “Do pillow fights ever break out? You don’t have to, you don’t have to –”The woman says: “Not in the bathroom.”Carlson says: “OK. Not in the bathroom. That’d be more a dorm activity.”After an unintelligible remark off camera, Carlson apologises.“I’m sorry,” he says. “You are such a good sport. Such a good person. Thank you. I know you do, but you do not deserve that. And I mean it with great affection.” More

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    CNN’s planned town hall with Donald Trump faces pushback

    The announcement that CNN will host a New Hampshire town hall event for Donald Trump was met with widespread criticism on Monday.Angelo Carusone, chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog, said: “The transparent attempt to goose their ratings does feel at least a little odious. But all the more reason that they need to get this right.”Judd Legum, author of the Popular Information newsletter, said: “First, CNN systematically purged anyone on the network who was deemed too anti-Trump. Now this.”Keith Olbermann, a Trump critic and former MSNBC host, said: “I think we can say Chris Licht’s conversion of CNN into a political and journalistic whorehouse is complete.”Licht took over from Jeff Zucker as CNN’s chief executive last year, with a mission to remodel.Announcing the event to be held at St Anselm College on Wednesday 10 May, CNN said: “The former president and 2024 Republican presidential candidate will take questions from [anchor Kaitlan] Collins and a live audience of New Hampshire Republican and undeclared voters who say they intend to vote in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.”Trump and CNN were at odds throughout Trump’s run for the White House and his presidency, over what he deemed its hostile coverage and liberal slant. Collins, a morning show anchor, formerly worked for the Daily Caller, a website cofounded by Tucker Carlson, the far-right anchor fired by Fox News last week.In polling regarding the Republican nomination next year, Trump enjoys commanding leads.He continues to peddle the lie that Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was the result of electoral fraud. On 6 January 2021, he used that lie to incite an attack on Congress now linked to nine deaths and carried out by supporters seeking to block Biden’s win.More than 1,000 arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached a second time but acquitted when Republican senators stayed loyal to him.He now faces a federal investigation of his election subversion and incitement of the Capitol attack, as well as a state election subversion investigation, in Georgia, in which indictments are expected this summer.In New York, Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges over a hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. In the same state, a civil rape case brought by the writer E Jean Carroll is at trial while a civil lawsuit brought by the state continues, over Trump’s tax and business practices.Jack Smith, a federal special counsel, is also investigating Trump’s retention of classified materials.CNN said it had “a longstanding tradition of hosting leading presidential candidates for town halls and political events as a critical component of the network’s robust campaign coverage”.It also said the Trump event would be “the first of many in the coming months as CNN correspondents travel across the country to hear directly from voters”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCarusone said: “Donald Trump is the frontrunner for Republican nomination; it benefits no one to pretend otherwise.“But this is risky business and CNN should go into this clear-eyed: Trump will lie and he will attack. Trump has been repeating the same torrent of lies in his speeches and interviews with rightwing media figures for months. Nothing he will say will be new.“So if CNN lets him get away with it unchallenged, they have no excuse. CNN isn’t being graded on a curve here.”Carusone also pointed to cable networks’ struggles since Trump left office.“I can’t help but notice that this comes just as Fox’s ratings are in freefall and CNN’s shift hasn’t born any fruit,” he said.David Rothkopf, a Daily Beast columnist and author of Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, called CNN’s decision “irresponsible”.The town hall, he said, would be “a sham if it does not lead with the question, ‘You lead an insurrection against the government of the US, why should any American voter support a candidate who sought to undermine the constitution, institutions and values he was sworn to uphold?’”A CNN spokesperson said: “There is certainly a lot of news to cover with him and we’ll do that next Wednesday.” More

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    Tucker Carlson said Fox Nation streaming service ‘sucks’, leaked video shows

    Before he was fired by Fox News, rightwing TV host Tucker Carlson said the Fox Nation streaming service for which he produced content “sucks”, leaked video showed on Monday.The news follows widespread reporting that comments about his employer, including “highly offensive” remarks about executives, contributed to Carlson’s shock firing last week.In the new footage published by Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog, Carlson discussed an interview with the controversial rightwing social media star Andrew Tate.Carlson spoke to Tate in August 2022. Some of the footage was shown on Fox News, trailing a longer broadcast on Fox Nation.In December 2022, Tate was arrested in Romania over allegations of rape, people trafficking and organised crime, which he denies.In the leaked video, Carlson sat on his Fox News set, talking by phone to an unidentified male Briton and gave an unflattering opinion of the Fox Nation website and the size of its audience.“I don’t want to be a slave to Fox Nation, which I don’t think that people watch anyway,” Carlson said.Discussing what he would wear for the interview, Carlson said: “I want it to look official. I don’t want it to be like bro talk … But nobody’s going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. So I’d really like to just … dump the whole thing on YouTube.“But anyway, that’s just my view. OK. I’m just frustrated with it. It’s hard to use that site. I don’t know why they’re not fixing it. It’s driving me insane. And they’re like making, like, Lifetime movies but they don’t … work on the infrastructure of the site.“Like what? It’s crazy. And it drives me crazy because it’s like we’re doing all this extra work and no one can find it. It’s unbelievable, actually.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionContent produced by Carlson for Fox Nation included Patriot Purge, a conspiracy-laced documentary series about the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, and The End of Men, which included a discussion of testicle tanning.On the footage leaked to Media Matters, Carlson said: “We’re like working like animals to produce all this content, and the people in charge of [Fox Nation] … like, they’re ignoring the fact that the site doesn’t work. And I think it’s like a betrayal of our efforts. That’s how I feel. So I, of course, I resent it.”Fox News declined to comment. It has been bullish about its streaming service.The New York Times has also said it obtained video of Carlson speaking off-air.In its footage, the paper said, Carlson discusses “‘postmenopausal fans’ and whether they will approve of how he looks on the air. In another video, he is overheard describing a woman he finds ‘yummy’.” More

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    ‘They say I’m ancient’: Biden speech to White House media proves to be one for the ages

    Age shall not weary him, but it might provide some good punchlines.Joe Biden, the oldest president in American history, faced his biggest political liability with a smile on Saturday as he addressed a gathering of Washington’s political and media elites.The 80-year-old, who this week announced a bid for re-election in 2024, flipped between a pugnacious defence of press freedom and crisp one-liners at the expense of political opponents as he addressed the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner.As opinion polls show that a majority of Americans have little appetite for a second Biden term, with many citing his age as a defining concern, he chose not to hide from his most obvious vulnerability but run towards it.“I believe in the first amendment, not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it,” he said, referring to one of America’s founding fathers, who died in 1836.He went on: “Look, I get that age is a completely reasonable issue. It’s in everybody’s mind and by everyone, I mean the New York Times. Headline: ‘Biden’s advanced age is a big issue. Trump’s, however, is not.’”The president had a dig at Don Lemon, a CNN host who was fired this week after a series of missteps including remarks that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, 51, “isn’t in her prime” because “a woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s”.Biden earned a big laugh when he said on Saturday: “They say I’m ancient; I say I’m wise. They say I’m over the hill; Don Lemon would say, ‘That’s a man in his prime’.”There was also an indirect pitch that, despite concerns over his readiness for a gruelling election campaign, Biden is spoiling for the fight with Republican opponents.He said of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman from Georgia: “I want everybody to have fun tonight but please be safe. If you find yourself disoriented or confused, it’s either you’re drunk or Marjorie Taylor Greene.”Referring to Florida governor and potential presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’s protracted battle with Disney, he quipped: “I had a lot of Ron DeSantis jokes ready but Mickey Mouse beat the hell out of me and got there first.”And Biden said of House of Representatives speaker Kevin McCarthy: “Look, you all keep reporting my approval rating as 42%. I think you don’t know this. Kevin McCarthy called me and asked me, ‘Joe, what the hell is your secret?’ I’m not even kidding about that.”Biden also had fun poking fun at the media, especially Fox Corp’s recent settlement of a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5m in a case that centred on Fox News’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election had been manipulated in favour of Biden.“It’s great the cable news networks are here tonight. MSNBC owned by NBC Universal. Fox News owned by Dominion Voting Systems.” That line earned laughter and applause.“Last year your favourite Fox News reporters were able to attend because they were fully vaccinated and boosted. This year, with that $787m settlement, they’re here because they couldn’t say no to a free meal.”In a jab at former president Donald Trump, Biden quipped that comedian Roy Wood Jr, who also was a featured speaker at the dinner, had offered him $10 to keep his speech short. “That’s a switch – a president being offered hush money.”Earlier this month Trump was charged with 34 felony counts in a case involving an alleged $130,000 hush payment to an adult film star during his 2016 presidential campaign.Biden assured Wood: “I’m going to be fine with your jokes but” – he put on his trademark sunglasses – “I’m not sure about Dark Brandon.” This was a nod to an internet meme that began as a rightwing attack but has been co-opted by Biden’s supporters.Wood, a regular on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, naturally could not resist making Biden’s age a target. He said: “We should be inspired by the events in France. They rioted when the retirement age went up two years to 64. Meanwhile in America, we have an 80-year-old man, begging us for four more years.”For all the comedy, Biden also used his speech to issue forceful denunciations of attacks on press freedom and on misinformation that threatens to undermine democracy.The president and first lady Jill Biden met privately with the parents of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich upon arriving at the dinner. Gershkovich has been imprisoned in Russia since March after being charged with spying, despite strong denials from his employer and the US government.Also among the 2,600 guests in a cavernous hotel ballroom was Debra Tice, the mother of Austin Tice, who has not been heard from since disappearing at a checkpoint in Syria in 2012.Biden said: “Journalism is not a crime. Evan and Austin should be released immediately along with every other American detained abroad. I promise you, I am working like hell to get them home.”The president acknowledged Brittney Griner, a basketball player who was detained in Russia for nearly 10 months last year before her release in a prisoner swap. Griner attended with her wife, Cherelle, as guests of CBS News. “This time last year we were praying for you, Brittney,” Biden said.In another preview of a 2024 campaign theme, Biden condemned news outlets that use “lies told for profit and power” to stir up hatred. “Lies told for profit and power. Lies of conspiracy and malice repeated over and over again designed to generate a cycle of anger and hate and even violence.”The Washington black-tie dinner returned last year after being sidelined by the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Biden was the first president in six years to accept the invitation after Trump shunned the event while in office.This year the gala drew politicians including Vice-President Kamala Harris and celebrities such as actor Liev Schreiber and singer John Legend and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, a model and television personality. More

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    Joe Biden hails ‘absolute courage’ of detained journalist Evan Gershkovich

    Joe Biden has praised the “absolute courage” of Evan Gershkovich, the US journalist detained in Russia on espionage charges, and reiterated calls on Moscow for his immediate release.The US president said the Wall Street Journal reporter, who is the first correspondent since the cold war to be detained in Russia on spying charges, sought to “shed light on the darkness” of the country and said American efforts to get him home would not cease.Biden, speaking at an annual dinner for White House correspondents on Saturday night, directly addressed the parents of Gershkovich, who were in the room and were given standing ovations by the more than 2,000 attendees.“We all stand with you. Evan went to Russia to shed light on the darkness that you all escaped from, years ago. Absolute courage … to the entire family, everyone in this hall stands with you. We’re working every day to secure his release,” said Biden, noting the journalist’s letter to his parents that said he was “not losing hope”.Some guests at the Washington Hilton function wore buttons with “Free Evan” printed on them. The US has previously declared Gershkovich to be wrongfully detained, signalling that it views the espionage charges against him as bogus and that he is being held as a hostage.This week Russia’s foreign ministry denied a request from the US for a consular visit to Gershkovich, saying it was rejected in retaliation for the US refusing to grant visas to Russian journalists planning to accompany the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, on a trip to the UN. Gershkovich has been in custody since 29 March.Attendees to Saturday’s gala also included Debra Tice, the mother of Austin Tice, who has not been heard from since disappearing at a checkpoint in Syria in 2012. US officials say they operate under the assumption that he is alive and are working to try to bring him home.“Journalism is not a crime,” said Biden. “Evan and Austin should be released immediately, along with every other American held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad.“I promise, I am working like hell to bring them home.”The president also had warm words for Brittney Griner, who attended with her wife Cherelle. “I love this woman … this time last year we were praying for you, hoping you knew how hard all of us were fighting for your release. It’s great to have you home .. I can hardly wait to see you back on the court, kid.”The WNBA star endured a nearly 10-month detainment in Russia on drug-related charges. Griner was arrested in February 2022 at a Moscow airport after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. She later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years in prison. More

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    Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

    Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
    Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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    ‘Not a chance’: Fox News viewers reject Tucker Carlson’s replacement

    There were a lot of questions floating around after Fox News unceremoniously dumped rightwing firebrand Tucker Carlson on Monday morning.Among them: can the conservative news channel effectively replace its most popular host, a grievance-filled firebrand who drew in more than 3 million viewers every night?The answer, on this week’s evidence, is no.Every night this week it has filled Carlson’s slot with Brian Kilmeade, an eager substitute who, in his regular role on the Fox and Friends morning show, serves as an excitable, unthreatening everyman.Every night viewers have given an unforgiving verdict on Kilmeade’s efforts: by turning off in their droves.It’s a shame for Kilmeade, but a clue as to how he might be received had already come early on Monday.“Join me tonight at 8 pm!” he tweeted an hour before his show started a now Tucker-free Fox News line-up. It turned out that not only did people not want to join Kilmeade, they were furious that he was going to be on air in place of their fallen hero.“Not a chance in hell ya sellout,” was one of the more polite online responses, while someone else noted: “I’d rather watch grass grow.”Undeterred, Kilmeade kicked things off on Monday with the briefest of references to the man he was temporarily replacing.“As you probably have heard, Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. I wish Tucker the best, I’m great friends with Tucker and always will be,” Kilmeade said.“But right now, it’s time for Fox News Tonight, so let’s get started!”For some people, it was time to get started on switching channels. On Monday the audience for Kilmeade, a less angry, less charismatic, apparently less race-obsessed host, was 47% of the number Carlson had attracted a week earlier, according to the Los Angeles Times.It isn’t just that Carlson’s departure has turned off viewers. The hastily renamed Fox News Tonight show appears to have actively driven people to Fox News’ competitors, with Newsmax in particular, seeing record ratings.Watching Kilmeade’s shows this week, it is clear that he is rather one-note. That note is attacking Joe Biden, which he has done enthusiastically, but with none of the vitriol of his predecessor.“Let’s get started!” Kilmeade declared (again) on Tuesday evening.“80-year-old Joe Biden is officially running for president again,” he said.“Big surprise. This morning he released the single most divisive campaign ad we’ll see in a long time, I hope ever.”When Biden ran in 2020, Kilmeade said he “campaigned on the idea that police are racist”. This was news to this observer, but never mind, because according to Kilmeade: “He’s not talking about that anymore.”Kilmeade pointed out – accurately – that the number of police officers in Seattle had declined. Crime has not gotten significantly worse: “The violent crime rate for the city of Seattle increased from 729 per 100,000 in 2021 to 736 per 100,000 in 2022,” but drug deaths, in common with the rest of the nation, have increased.Kilmeade said that the state of Washington is struggling to pass new drug laws, after a previous law was ruled unconstitutional by the state supreme court. As it stands drug possession will become legal in the state on 1 July.“The result of all that is that fentanyl is flowing into Washington state big time,” Kilmeade said, ignoring the fact that he’d just told us the law was in place through the end of June, and offering no source for the big-time increase.With Carlson, this would have been read as a deliberate misdirection. With Kilmeade, it’s not clear if he just got confused.After some more stuff on fentanyl – inevitably the blame was laid at Biden’s door, despite the Washington law being state, not federal – Kilmeade returned to Biden’s announcement.“Joe Biden announced today that he’s running for president, again. If he wins, he’ll be 82, when he’s done at the end of his term he’ll be 86,” Kilmeade said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In his announcement video today Joe Biden was as divisive, in my view, as he possibly could be. He said if you don’t vote for him, you are not interested in protecting democracy,” Kilmeade said of Biden’s ad.He apparently hadn’t seen Donald Trump’s ad, from earlier in April, in which the former president said he was running against “radical left lunatics”. In an ad from August 2022, three months before he announced his bid for the presidency, Trump talked ominously about “the tyrants we are fighting”.Kilmeade invited Marianne Williamson, the health guru and sometime vaccine skeptic who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, to take a pop at Biden.Instead he effectively gave Williamson four minutes of airtime to give a campaign speech, in which she touted universal healthcare and free college tuition. It’s hard to imagine Carlson doing the same.By Wednesday, there was a distinct sense that Kilmeade and his writers were running out of ideas.“Good evening and welcome to Fox News Tonight,” Kilmeade chirped at the top of the show.“Glad you’re here. You know, we told you last night about Joe Biden’s big 2024 campaign announcement video.”Kilmeade did not add: “Well giddy up, because we’re going to tell you all about it again,” but he might as well have done. He told viewers they should go on YouTube – “like I did today” – and look at the comments under Biden’s video.The comments were not kind, Kilmeade said, and he excitedly read a few out, after announcing that “the Democrats have embraced totalitarianism”.There followed a sort of whip-around, tick-the-boxes analysis of Biden’s presidency so far, featuring China, inflation, fentanyl, immigration and the government’s efforts to attract and retain women to engineering jobs.“It’s social engineering, not real engineering,” Kilmeade quipped.In sticking to his attacks on Biden, Kilmeade is on safe ground. But it isn’t going to excite a Fox News audience who Carlson has filled with a lust for blood.The appeal of Carlson wasn’t just that he didn’t like Biden. It was that there were loads of other things that upset him too: trans people, people of color, immigrants, many women, and the idea that white people may no longer rule the US with impunity.Perhaps Kilmeade just isn’t as angry as Carlson.He certainly doesn’t seem it. He isn’t as good a performer either – throughout the week the extent to which he was obviously reading the autocue became distracting, and viewers may have missed Carlson’s patented angry eyes, open-mouthed look.With Kilmeade, so far, proving unable or unwilling to plumb the same depths as Carlson, it’s hard to see him becoming a permanent replacement.Carlson’s great skill was giving the audience a wide variety of things to hate and fear. By contrast Kilmeade, with his comparatively milquetoast focus on Biden, is stuck in first gear. More

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    Tucker Carlson is not an antiwar populist rebel. He is a fascist | Jason Stanley

    Fox News has finally broken ties with its most popular star, Tucker Carlson. His ousting has been bemoaned by some commentators, who have taken Carlson to be a rebellious anti-war populist, evading easy political characterization. But is it really so complicated to classify Carlson’s political ideology?In late February 2022, then Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, began a pro-Russia monologue urging his audience to ask themselves the question: “Why do I hate Putin so much?” The gist of Carlson’s comments about Russia’s leader is that Putin should not be regarded as an enemy. Instead, the real enemies of America are those who call white Americans racist, those who teach so-called critical race theory in schools, business elites who ship jobs abroad, and those who imposed Covid lockdowns on the United States.In short, Carlson urged, the real enemies of America are internal – racial minorities, doctors and politicians, professors and educators, and large corporations who shift jobs to other countries. Carlson has been resolutely against US support for Ukraine. Insofar as Carlson has since that point gone to war, it has rather been against these supposed internal enemies.So, is Tucker Carlson hard to classify? On the one hand, he spreads tropes central to neo-Nazi propaganda, such as “white replacement” theory, suggesting that leftist elites seek to replace “legacy Americans” by foreign non-white immigrants. On the other hand, he denounces media, intellectual and political elites, as well as US intervention in Ukraine, platforming those who identify as the “anti-war left”, such as Jimmy Dore. How should we best understand this set of views? If Carlson has fascist sympathies, as do, quite inarguably, many of those who applaud him, how do we understand his firm stance against US military and financial support for Ukraine? Surely, historically speaking, fascism is not compatible with the isolationist position Carlson has urged.We should look to history as our guide here. But the history that best informs us in this case is not European history, but American history. Before the beginning of the second world war, all of America’s pro-fascist parties opposed US intervention on the side of its allies against Nazi Germany. Often, the opposition to the US supporting Britain against Nazi Germany was represented as “isolationism”.There were openly fascist organizations during this time, such as the German American Bund. Somewhat more ambiguous was the America First movement. As the historian Bradley Hart recounts, in a packed America First rally in Madison Square Garden in 1941, the Montana senator Burton K Wheeler denounced “jingoistic journalists and saber-rattling bankers” who were pushing the nation into war against Germany.While the agenda of some members of the America First movement at the time might have genuinely been pacifist, it’s quite clear that the main agenda was in fact support for Hitler. The America First movement had strong support from American fascist movements of various stripes. Its most prominent spokesperson, Charles Lindbergh, published the following words in support of his anti-war position in an essay entitled “Geography, Aviation, and Race” in Reader’s Digest in 1939:
    … It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on strength too great for foreign enemies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.
    It is simply inarguable fact that American racial fascism has a clear isolationist tradition, especially when the wars in question are against fascist opponents.But is Putin’s Russia fascist? In Russia, opposition politicians and journalists are regularly imprisoned or murdered. Russia has passed harsh laws against LGBTQ+ communities. Russia’s ideology is based on a militarized Russian nationalism, and its war against Ukraine is quite clearly genocidal in nature. Just as Nazi Germany represented itself as the defender of Christianity and Europe’s classic traditions against an existential threat posed by leftist atheist Jews, Putin represents Russia as the sole defender of the European Christian traditions against similar existential threats, such as “gender ideology”.Putin’s Russia is the international leader of the global far right, promoting ultra-nationalism, religious traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the world. If Russia is not fascist, then even Nazi Germany in the 1930s was not fascist. As the historian Timothy Snyder has urged, “we should finally say it”: Russia is fascist.Just as claims to be isolationists by American inter-war fascists were quite rightly taken to be expressions of support for Nazi ideology, there is good reason to take Carlson’s similar claims not as denunciations of American militarism but as expressions of support for Putinism, which he seems largely to share.What about Carlson’s scorn for the media, intellectual, financial and political elite, which he lacerates with regularity on his show? Here too there is little ambiguity. Carlson does not scorn all elites – after all, he himself was making as much as $20m a year from Fox news. He only targets certain elites. In the ideology of American fascism, the elites he targets are associated with liberal democracy and Jewish control.American fascists have always denounced the media, intellectuals and politicians. Carlson is careful to avoid explicitly antisemitic statements. But his show is the home of anti-Soros conspiracy theories. The antisemitism in his programming is clearly dog-whistled, and Jewish organizations have been among the first to cheer his ousting. Indeed, if Carlson did not regularly denounce media, intellectual, financial and political elites, regular targets of Nazi ideology, the case for calling him an American fascist would be much less clear.Nazi ideology supported strict gender roles – one of the central targets of the first mass Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 was Magnus Hirschfeld’s collection of LGBTQ+ literature, the largest in the world and the largest documentation of gender fluidity (Hirschfeld coined the term “transsexual”). Carlson has used his platform to denounce transgender Americans as existential threats to Christianity. Fascists target cosmopolitan ways as existential threats to masculinity – a viewpoint Carlson also clearly shares.Finally, fascism praises violence against democracy, valorizing violent street mobs attacking democratic processes and institutions as martyrs to the nation. Here too Tucker Carlson fits perfectly into the tradition.It is not difficult at all to classify Tucker Carlson’s political ideology. He is an American fascist, only the latest in a long historical line. More