Tucker Carlson has fully left the neoliberal reservation. He is now broaching the sacred cows he presumably was prevented from touching as a Fox News host.
In a podcast from March, he mused about whether Building 7 imploded on itself due to uncontrolled structure fires or whether there might be some other plausible explanation.
Tucker is getting too close to the truth! pic.twitter.com/H97SuNBnGK
— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) April 30, 2023
“If you say, like, ‘What actually happened with building 7? Like that is weird, right? It doesn’t—like, what is that?’… If you were to say something like that on television, they’d flip out. They would flip out. So you’d, like, lose your job over that.
It’s an attack on my country. Can I ask? I don’t really understand. Do buildings actually collapse? No, they—maybe they do. I don’t know. But, like, why can’t I ask questions about that?”
Media Matters and other corporate media have, predictably, pounced to smear Carlson as a “conspiracy theorist.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently appeared on a podcast and pushed a central tenet of the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job.
Fortunately for Carlson, and anyone who espouses skepticism of the official 9/11 story, the “conspiracy theory” smear has lost its luster thanks to egregious overuse.
Due to mainstream media framing, one might be forgiven for writing off such skepticism of the 9/11 story the government told as “fringe.” In fact, according to a 2016 poll, “54.3 [of American respondents] percent agree or strongly agree” that the government is concealing what it knows about the 9/11 attacks—an even higher share of respondents who believed the government lied about the JFK assassination or aliens.
What we’re witnessing here is the influence—pernicious or constructive, depending on your perspective—that Alex Jones has exerted over Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s respective worldviews in recent years.
Here’s my prediction, not limited to 9/11 conspiracy theories but Carlson’s rhetoric more broadly: wherever he lands next, perhaps on his own platform, Carlson is going to make the Fox News version of himself look milquetoast in comparison.
At Fox, he was hamstrung by all of the respectability norms designed to safeguard the official narrative related to any given topic: the ongoing Russia proxy war, climate change, et al.
In the future, he won’t have those institutional constraints, and the corporate media and government censors like AOC who attempted to silence him by getting him taken off the air at Fox, and then celebrated on social media after they claimed their scalp, may live to regret the monster they have unleashed on American political discourse.
Call it the Dark Carlson effect.
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