Tucker Carlson, Your Boss’s Favorite Fake “Populist”

[basquebromance]

i agree with the premise of the article

Tucker Carlson, Your Boss’s Favorite “Populist”

Tucker Carlson likes to style himself a populist. But every time there’s a fight over something that might actually make life easier for working-class people, he never misses the opportunity to take the side of big business and the rich.

jacobinmag.com

"Watching Carlson’s show means wading through an ocean of passionate, angry screeds taking aim at all sorts of the usual right-wing bugaboos: mask and vaccine mandates, immigrants and refugees, critical race theory, crime, wokeness, trans people, and so on. What you won’t find — despite the host’s preferred self-image as a tribune of the downtrodden working stiff — is discussion of any of the pocketbook issues immediately pressing to most working Americans, whatever their backgrounds — the kind of issues you’d expect an actual populist would be focused on.

to be fair, over the past year, Carlson has, on occasion, discussed some of the major economic questions confronting the country. He just happened to take the side of employers and the rich on every one of them

Take expanded unemployment insurance, a pathbreaking policy that actually began under Donald Trump, and which lowered US poverty, kept families afloat in a once-in-a-century crisis, gave many low-wage workers their first taste of a halfway decent living standard, and allowed them the breathing room to get off the hamster wheel and rethink their careers and life paths.

Not to Carlson. Despite his show’s paeans to the working class, he is firmly opposed to the measure, complaining in May that the government was paying people “up to $700 a month not to work” and blaming it for the country’s labor shortage — a claim repeated endlessly by corporate executives and neoliberal pundits, but one that facts on the ground consistently showed was untrue. (Even his fans were wise to this nonsense, with one commenting, “Who can live on 700 a month. Not a great point Sir. The rest was well said!”)

Too bad if you’re one of the nearly 60 million Americans working for a small business — Tucker Carlson’s brand of economic populism doesn’t apply to you."

 

[Darkwind]

^^ Rent free ^^

This post is nothing but the normal troupes of the left and their utter lack of emotional maturity does not allow anyone to question how any of that makes life better.

 

[basquebromance]

more great xcerpts:

What about the eviction ban, another Trump policy that Joe Biden inherited and had to be strong-armed into making even a token attempt to fight for? At that point, millions of Americans were at risk of eviction, at a point when the pandemic was killing a thousand people a day.

You will not be shocked to learn Carlson’s main concern was the landlords set to throw these people out on the street. “Tenants are no longer required to pay their rent,” howled Carlson, raging that the government had “decided to nationalize America’s rental properties” (if only), and attacking “Sandy Cortez and the Squad” for not calling for a mortgage moratorium they in fact had called for several times — because “the banks are huge Democratic donors,” as he explained. “It is property owners who will suffer.”

Okay, but what about the sprawling, Bernie Sanders–authored reconciliation bill the Democrats spent months half-heartedly trying to pass? Once upon a time, before the party caved to corporate interests, that bill had all manner of provisions that someone interested in the economic security of American families would support: expanding Medicare to cover more people and treatments, letting the program negotiate for lower drug prices, free community college, and universal childcare and pre-K, to name a few. But for months, a blade dangled over these programs’ future, care of corporate Democrats like Manchin and Sinema. Surely Carlson would have used his considerable platform to push back, no?

By this point, you probably won’t be surprised to learn Carlson barely even mentioned the bill or any of these individual provisions. In fact, the only times Carlson has talked about the bill have been to vehemently oppose it. Back in April, he issued the standard neoliberal talking point that the bill wasn’t about physical infrastructure but about “social engineering,” and that the viewer would have to pay for it through tax hikes, because “Biden wants to just punish you.” The latter argument was especially curious, since at that point the only tax hike announced was one on corporations, which two-thirds of Americans supported. But it does suggest who Carlson’s actually talking to in these segments.

Once again, Carlson squared the circle of pretending to champion the working class while opposing policies it would benefit from, all by simply pretending those policies were something else — a “race-based redistribution plan,” as he put it in April. Later, in September, with many of the bill’s most important provisions under threat from a full-scale corporate assault, Carlson simply didn’t bother talking about them at all, instead zeroing in his outrage on one line that mandates fines for businesses with unvaccinated workers.

 

[Oddball]

i agree with the premise of the article

Tucker Carlson, Your Boss’s Favorite “Populist”

Tucker Carlson likes to style himself a populist. But every time there’s a fight over something that might actually make life easier for working-class people, he never misses the opportunity to take the side of big business and the rich.

jacobinmag.com

"Watching Carlson’s show means wading through an ocean of passionate, angry screeds taking aim at all sorts of the usual right-wing bugaboos: mask and vaccine mandates, immigrants and refugees, critical race theory, crime, wokeness, trans people, and so on. What you won’t find — despite the host’s preferred self-image as a tribune of the downtrodden working stiff — is discussion of any of the pocketbook issues immediately pressing to most working Americans, whatever their backgrounds — the kind of issues you’d expect an actual populist would be focused on.

to be fair, over the past year, Carlson has, on occasion, discussed some of the major economic questions confronting the country. He just happened to take the side of employers and the rich on every one of them

Take expanded unemployment insurance, a pathbreaking policy that actually began under Donald Trump, and which lowered US poverty, kept families afloat in a once-in-a-century crisis, gave many low-wage workers their first taste of a halfway decent living standard, and allowed them the breathing room to get off the hamster wheel and rethink their careers and life paths.

Not to Carlson. Despite his show’s paeans to the working class, he is firmly opposed to the measure, complaining in May that the government was paying people “up to $700 a month not to work” and blaming it for the country’s labor shortage — a claim repeated endlessly by corporate executives and neoliberal pundits, but one that facts on the ground consistently showed was untrue. (Even his fans were wise to this nonsense, with one commenting, “Who can live on 700 a month. Not a great point Sir. The rest was well said!”)

Too bad if you’re one of the nearly 60 million Americans working for a small business — Tucker Carlson’s brand of economic populism doesn’t apply to you."

"Jacobinmag":....Butt sniffers of Robespierre....No wonder they hate Carlson.

 

[Dogmaphobe]

The political operative who wrote this wants his fellow Stalinist Democrats to be the boss.


Of you and me, of everybody, in all aspects of our lives down to the iota, forever and ever, and with no possibility of our ever escaping it.

 

[basquebromance]

love the ending to the article:

His shtick is the bread and butter of business-friendly politicians: divide the working class on fault lines of race and cultural issues, and package a defense of the interests of business and the wealthy in lazily pseudopopulist terms, so that the “haves” who watch you feel like they’re the put-upon little guy, and the “have-nots” think you’re on their side.

But as we’ve seen with Carlson’s coverage this year, sooner or later you have to take a side on an issue. Siding with the rich and powerful once might be an exception. When you do it again and again, maybe you’re just another corporate stooge.