How Hate Figures Like Tucker Carlson Set Fire to American Democracy

Tucker Carlson and the Normalization of American Fascism

Image Credit: Fox News via ADL

Yesterday, the most unusual thing happened. The good people of the world…rejoiced. For a change. It’s a bleak age. And yet Twitter…anyone sane…audiences on shows…erupted in glee. Why? Because…Rupert Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson. LOL. Cause for celebration? Definitely. But let’s make no mistake. We never should have been here.

There’s almost no force in the world, and certainly not in America, more inimical to the cause of democracy than Faux News. And that’s happened in an even more sophisticated, weird, and disturbing way than you probably think.

Let’s quickly go over the history of Faux News. 

The channel was created by Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to appeal to a conservative audience, hiring former Republican media consultant and CNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO 

 So we have..Bill Clinton…to thank for this mess. He should own up to it, because when he deregulated everything from finance to telecommunications? He opened Pandora’s Box. He created modern-day monsters — not Medusa and the Minotaur, but Goldman Sachs and Faux News.

How did all this come to be? In 1996, the FCC passed a new act deregulating telecoms for the first time. 

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years. The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business — to let any communications business compete in any market against any other.

Sound anodyne, so let’s try a better description. 

Previously, the Communications Act of 1934 (“1934 Act”) was the statutory framework for U.S. communications policy, covering telecommunications and broadcasting. The 1934 Act created the FCC, the agency formed to implement and administer the economic regulation of the interstate activities of the telephone monopolies and the licensing of spectrum used for broadcast and other purposes.

The telecoms act of 1996 had incredibly far-reaching consequences, that Americans today still don’t understand. How did we get here? To this insane media landscape where…manfluencers tell young men that women are to be violently abused, and make fortunes from YouTube, which is Google, for doing so? Where every kind of lunatic is “free” to spread disinformation and misinformation, including, well, America’s enemies, like Russia, who openly use the internetas a tool of political destabilization? Thank Bill Clinton and the telecoms act of 1996. It changed everything. Before, the FCC’s job was to regulate. Now, it wasn’t to.

Media and information was to be a libertarian’s utopian paradise — free markets! Private enterprise! Competition!

And then Rupert Murdoch rolled into town. Before 1996, there was no Faux News. And guess what? America was a lot less crazy. Today, we look back on the 90s fondly, and nostalgia’s always a bit of lie, making the past look rosier than it was. But the 90s was a saner time, and anyone who was there, like me, can tell you that. That’s because, well, we didn’t have operations like Faux News acting at mega-scale to destabilize society.

I call Faux News an “operation” for a reason. It’s barely a business at all. Want to know why Tucker Carlson really got fired? The “news” end of Fox earns not even a billion dollars in profit a year — and the Dominion settlement was around that much. Carlson — whose show was the linchpin of the lawsuit — wiped out the entire network’s profits for a year.

Faux News illustrates an old, old dictum of monopoly capitalism. Maniacs and sociopaths who become billionaires are often willing to lose money on destabilizing society according to their whims — the cheeseball who bought Twitter comes to mind — but not too much. Not a business, because if you had a pile of money to invest? The last place you’d put it in is…LOL…news. That billion dollars in profit is a stunningly poor rate of return. If you wanted to make money? You’d do something — anything — else. Green energy, clean manufacturing, doesn’t matter. To put that in context, Ford — a long struggling company — is going to earn about $10 billion in profits this year. Cars do better than news.

So Faux News is an operation. It was never really designed to make money — maybe just not to lose it. Hence, Tucker getting fired for wiping out its ability to even break even this year — pushing it the brink, meaning everyone’s favorite sadistic lunatic grandpa Rupert is going to have shore it up with his own dwindling fortune. An operation designed to destabilize society, according to a certain set of political beliefs.

I won’t dwell on those — you know what they are. What you might not know is that Carlson hired noted supremacists to…LOL…literally write his copy. This is how what’s often called the “wingnut welfare” pipeline works. If you’re a fascist, Nazi, creep, maniac, lunatic, misogynist, bigot? Well, there’s a job and money waiting for you, if you’re loud and angry enough.