Tucker Carlson Matters

Tucker Carlson matters.

I’m not saying black lives don’t matter as well. They do. Of course, they do. I mean that sincerely.

Right now, a concerted effort to eliminate Tucker Carlson—his show, his views, his opinions, his advertisers, indeed his very presence in American public life—is being executed with violent precision by a group of very powerful Americans.

This is objectively wrong.

The eponymous “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is viewed by 4.2 million people on average every day, more than double the ratings of his network rivals on CNN and MSNBC in the same time slot. Carlson is even beating out his predecessor, the ratings’ giant Bill O’Reilly. Carlson’s nightly opening monologue has become appointment viewing for millions of conservatives around the country precisely because of his often-divergent take on our swirling news cycle.

When mainstream news outlets were broadcasting wall-to-wall impeachment coverage in January, Carlson was on an island warning of a novel coronavirus spreading in China. When war with Iran seemed like a foregone conclusion, Carlson broke with conservative orthodoxy and instead begged President Trump to keep America out of another endless war in the Middle East. As the unemployment rolls began swelling into the tens of millions in April, he rightly called out the continued use of H-2B visas that would bring in as many as 100,000 additional foreign workers—something on which the Trump Administration ultimately reversed course.

All of this underscores exactly why Tucker Carlson matters.

Yet despite his runaway success in the ratings, Tucker Carlson has lost seven high-profile advertisers over the course of 48 hours last week: Disney, Jackson Hewitt Tax Services, Poshmark, Vari, Papa Johns, and T-Mobile. This despite the fact that Disney finds it perfectly acceptable to do business with the Chinese Communist Party, which has placed a million Uyghurs Muslims in concentration camps. But of course, nothing to see here folks.

And why are these advertisers passing up the opportunity to sell their capitalist products to the millions of potential customers drawn to Carlson’s program? Well, because racism, of course.

Across the social-media sphere, Carlson’s words are being selectively spliced and deliberately misrepresented. Instead of being the target of Twitter’s “wrong think police” or being deleted as blatant misinformation (as would most certainly be the case if the shoe was on the other ideological foot), these clips are being rewarded on Twitter, delivering users huge spikes in engagement for those who post them.

After all, even to the Left, Tucker is nothing if not a ratings’ bonanza.

Users like Joy Reid, host of MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” shared one of these selectively-edited clips with her 1.7 million followers, receiving more than 18,600 retweets and 61,100 likes for her efforts at the time of this writing. In the clip, Carlson can be heard stating over the imagery of looters and rioters destroying property that almost certainly wasn’t theirs, “they don’t own this country, they didn’t build it . . . ”

To which Reid charged, predictably, racism!

“Except ‘they’ did build it,” tweeted Reid. “‘They built the wealth of the agricultural South & West. ‘They’ literally built the White House and ‘they’ built the railroads and ‘they’ built this uniquely American culture that includes Hollywood, jazz, rock & roll and hip-hop. America IS ‘they.’”

Had Reid played the full clip and not lied to millions of people (something she is accustomed to doing regularly from her perch at MSNBC), her followers would have heard Carlson refer to “vandals” in the sentence immediately before where she started the clip. Carlson’s point was that vandals didn’t build America. This, of course, is objectively true. People who steal, loot, and burn down cities did not, and could not, build something as great as America. His statement was directed as much at the white, upper-class members of Antifa as any individuals looting and vandalizing who might happen to be black or brown.

Carlson’s color-blind truth-telling went undetected or ignored by the racist, homophobe Joy Reid and her ilk, in favor of lazy (albeit effective) cries of systemic oppression.

What was Carlson’s other, unforgivable sin?

This time, Daily Beast contributing editor Justin Baragona posted the “damning” video, in which Carlson says, “This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through, but it is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you. And at this rate, they will.” The video has more than 5.4 million views and counting.

After far-left activist group Sleeping Giants tagged T-Mobile in a reply to the selectively edited clip, T-Mobile’s corporate Twitter profile assured users it would not be placing any more ads on the show. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert even chimed in with, “Bye-bye Tucker Carlson! #BlackLivesMatter.”

Ignoring the obvious spinelessness and intellectual laziness of corporate America, let’s just take Carlson’s assertion on its face. Once again, his boldness is proved accurate if you continue listening.

Tucker pointed out that if black lives truly did matter to Black Lives Matter, the group would be marching in the streets for the nearly 7,500 black people killed by other blacks every year, the vast majority in urban centers run by Democrats. They would be equally horrified by the disproportionate number of abortion clinics placed in the hearts of black communities. In New York City, this epidemic has become so horrific that more black babies are aborted than born every year. They would be deeply angry that over 70 percent of black children grow up without a father in the home. As it turns out, having two parents in the household is the single greatest predictor of future economic success. This is true for both whites and blacks.

But the activists aren’t sufficiently upset by any of that. You can’t get nearly as much ink spilled for the truth. And they hate that Tucker Carlson had the stones to call them on it.

Perhaps the bitter hall monitors at Media Matters, Sleeping Giants, and Right Wing Watch are so obsessed with Carlson’s words they are quarantining in their parents’ basements, combing through transcripts of his show, feverishly jotting down notes and taking pointers.

Perhaps they are intent on making Carlson’s words a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Statements of fact and opinion that were entirely within the bounds of reasonable conversation just last Sunday, suddenly a week later, were enough to get you fired from your job.

Thankfully for Carlson, he reveals the only answer that will save him and other conservative commentators from having their careers completely destroyed by the fakers and the liars, again just a few sentences later:

Anyone who knows the rage of the mob knows the feeling. It’s like being swarmed by hornets. You can’t think clearly. The temptation is to panic. But you can’t panic. You got to keep your head and tell the truth. Tell the truth. If you show weakness of any kind, they will crush you.

He was right again.

Tucker Carlson matters a great deal to America. Not only is it wrong to do to any human being what the activist mob is trying to do to him, but his contrarian, courageous truth-telling is in far-too-short supply in this chaotic, insane age. Whether you agree or disagree with him, the ability for his views to exist on a mainstream media platform must be preserved. Credit to Fox News for standing with him.

Other courageous advertisers should realize the opportunity before them, too. No doubt they would be richly rewarded if they buy up the recently vacated ad inventory. For the sake of America, I hope they will.