A Nauseating Lecture on Covid Responsibility from Someone Who Helped Our First Lockdown President Evade It
Tucker Carlson is essentially the George Santos of conservative media.
Within most categories of wrongdoing, there are varying degrees of brazenness corresponding to one’s comfort level with sin or vice: from simple acts of negligence, to petty crimes of opportunity, to capers meticulously planned out to cover one’s tracks, all the way to scams of such breathtaking scope, variety, and audacity that one gets the distinct impression that the scammer is almost proud of it—fraud for the sheer sport or artistry of it. See, for example, the recently-expelled George Santos.
It's hard not to see a similar spirit of shamelessness in this highlight from Tucker Carlson’s December 5 video:
Ever notice how the bigger the tragedy is, the harder it is for the people responsible to apologize? If I rear-end your car and crease your bumper, I’m happy to jump out and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t believe I did that.”
But if I were to say, invade Iraq under false pretenses and kill a million people and spend a trillion of your dollars doing it, I wouldn’t say a word. I would never admit that was a bad idea. I couldn’t. It implicates me too profoundly.
The same goes for if I, say, locked your kids inside for a year and destroyed their brains and prevented them from getting an education. Or if I, say, forced you to take a vax that didn't work that very well might have hurt you, I could never admit that I did that. I just couldn't. Because if I admitted it, I'd have to suffer the consequences.
Pandering isolationism is a core part of Carlson’s brand identity these days, so his peddling of debunked 20-year-old leftist talking points about the Iraq War (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) is nothing new. But there aren’t enough spit-takes in the world to adequately convey the nerve it takes for Tucker of all people to lecture others on not owning their Covid-19 mistakes.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Carlson went on Fox and blasted the Right for “minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” which he called “definitely not just the flu,” and while he didn’t specifically endorse lockdown policies, he presented them as possibilities without disapproval. Days later, he met personally with Donald Trump to urge the then-president to treat the virus like a bigger deal—and we all remember how that turned out.
It turns out that when Tucker said “I could never admit that,” he really was talking about himself.
But the past is the past, and the early days of Covid were a confusing time. Fair enough, but what about moving forward? As a popular voice in conservative media, someone who speaks regularly with an ex-president, gets to interview prospective successors, and whose friends and foes alike spread his every word far and wide, Carlson is ideally positioned to help prevent the country from having to endure anything like that in the next four years...like, say, confronting the president who unleashed the lockdowns to his face in a high-profile interview, or promoting the candidacy of America’s greatest warrior against the lockdowns.
Oddly enough, however, when Carlson had such an opportunity in September, 45 minutes face-to-face with Trump...he didn’t even mention Covid. No challenges about the lockdowns. Or masks. Or ventilators. Or Anthony Fauci. Or the massive "emergency" spending. Or the CARES Act’s groundwork for mail ballots. Or immunizing Big Pharma from the consequences of their actions. Or the “vax that didn't work that very well might have hurt you” that his interview subject refuses to repudiate. Or downplaying the disastrousness of one of Democrats’ worst Covid villains, Andrew Cuomo. Or denying he handled any part of the pandemic wrong.
Good call, Tucker, best not to ask Trump about any of that. It might have “implicated too profoundly” a candidate you were already on the record as wanting to win the Republican nomination, years after having been caught privately acknowledging after the 2020 election you considered him a “demonic force” you “hate[d] passionately,” to whom “there isn’t really an upside” because he was “only good at destroying”:
That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.
Fortunately for Carlson (and unfortunately for the country), he eventually found an upside to Trump: how monetizable his fans are.
It’s bad enough to be a partisan shill for a terrible politician who brings political and policy disaster everywhere he goes; there’s plenty of that going around conservative media these days. But what kicks the grift into performative shamelessness is when one goes out of his way to posture about moral culpability for the very things one has helped offenders evade responsibility for.
In some ways, Tucker Carlson is essentially the George Santos of conservative media, with one critical difference: Santos doesn’t have the benefit of major movement organs cashing in their credibility to claim he’s the opposite of what he is.
No wonder Tucker and Trump get along so well.