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In an extraordinary rebuke, the Pentagon and several senior members of the US military called out Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday for a sexist segment in which he mocked women serving in the armed forces.

"So we've got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits," Carlson snarked. "Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It's a mockery of the US military."

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin shared the same "revulsion" that many military leaders have expressed about the comments Carlson made.

To understand the importance and unimportance of Tucker Carlson, it’s necessary to rewind the clock all the way back to the period just after Donald Trump won the 2016 election

We knew who Donald Trump was, but we didn’t know what Trumpism would be.

Trump could be contained. He could be channeled. His political appointees would keep him sane.

You may have seen the tins that contain 15 little white rectangles that look like the desiccant packs labeled “Do Not Eat.” Zyns are filled with nicotine and are meant to be placed under your lip like tobacco dip. No spitting is required, so nicotine pouches are even less visible than vaping. Zyns come in two strengths in the United States, three and six milligrams. A single six-milligram pouch is a dose so high that first-time users on TikTok have said it caused them to vomit or pass out.

We worry about bad actors bullying, luring or indoctrinating them online

I was stunned by the vast forces that are influencing teenagers. These forces operate largely unhampered by a regulatory system that seems to always be a step behind when it comes to how children can and are being harmed on social media.

Carlson’s monologue was an expansion of themes that have dominated his reinvention as a Trump-era populist — the general folly of elites, the unwisdom of the bipartisan consensus on immigration and foreign policy, the failure of Republican leaders to defend the national interest.

But in expanding on those themes he went somewhere that Fox hosts rarely go — from culture into economics, from a critique of liberal cosmopolitanism into a critique of libertarianism, from a lament for the decline of the family to an argument that this decline can be laid at the feet of consumer capitalism as well as social liberalism.

One set of responses accused Carlson of a kind of conspiratorial socialism, which exaggerates economic misery, ignores capitalism’s fruits, and encourages ordinary people to blame shadowy elites instead of cultivating personal responsibility.

“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

The response was immediate, and hostile. The president’s allies in conservative media and their legions of devoted Trump fans quickly closed ranks behind Ms. Powell and her case on behalf of the president, accusing the Fox host of betrayal.

“How quickly we turn on our own,” said Bo Snerdley, Mr. Limbaugh’s producer, in a Twitter post that was indicative of the backlash against Mr. Carlson. “Where is the ‘evidence’ the election was fair?”

Carlson argued that white supremacy is a fake crisis cooked up by Democrats as a campaign ploy. “It’s actually not a real problem in America,” Carlson said, adding later, “This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

violence tied to far-right ideologies have killed roughly as many Americans since 9/11 as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State combined.

The president has often called Hispanic migration an “invasion” — language echoed in a manifesto police believe the accused El Paso shooter posted online decrying a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Fox has long reinterpreted manifest destiny as a media product, treating the American mind as a vacant space upon which any dream, or any delusion, might be constructed

America deployed as an easy branding exercise is not new. What is new, though, is the insistent ahistoricism of this version of America. Also new—and given the way propaganda has worked in the 20th century, this should serve as a dire warning—is the notion that the facts of the past should be sources only of national pride.

“People on the right seem to be sort of sacrificing the Confederacy, to some extent, because it doesn’t do the work they want it to do,” Karp told Slate’s Rebecca Onion. “What does work is laying claim to the nation at the heart of the idea of America. Not in the old-school ‘the founders were geniuses and set aside universal freedom from everyone’ Lynne Cheney kind of a way, but in a new school way that just says, ‘America, fuck yes!’”

In his vicious and ad hominem way, Carlson is doing something extraordinary: He’s challenging the Republican Party’s hawkish orthodoxy in ways anti-war progressives have been begging cable hosts to do for years. For more than a decade, liberals have rightly grumbled that hawks can go on television espousing new wars without being held to account for the last ones. Not on Carlson’s show.

Carlson responded that Boot had been so “consistently wrong in the most flagrant and flamboyant way for over a decade” in his support for wars in the Middle East that “maybe you should choose another profession, selling insurance, house painting, something you’re good at.”

On Iran, Carlson made an argument that was considered too dovish for even mainstream Democrats to raise during the debate over the nuclear deal: He questioned whether Tehran actually endangers the United States

To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.

Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.

The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.”

In a Monday night monologue targeting the White House and military leaders over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Carlson demanded resignations. He also said: “When leaders refuse to hold themselves accountable over time, people revolt. That happens.“We need to change course immediately and start acknowledging our mistakes. The people who made them need to start acknowledging them or else the consequences will be awful.”

Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive group, said: “When there’s another big violent rightwing flashpoint that captures attention, way too many in media will wonder out loud: ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Were there the signs?’“You don’t need to wade into the online fever-swamps to see the cauldron of extremism simmering. Fox News is ratcheting up heat and legitimising nightly.“Fox News, not Facebook, will be the driver of the next insurrection. Plain and simple.”

in March, the Lancet published a letter smacking down “conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence in April issued a statement supporting that consensus.

The point of all this background? When Carlson invited Yan to appear on his show, they were challenging a hardened scientific consensus on SARS-CoV-2. A news program would, accordingly, lay out the prevailing view and walk viewers carefully through the contrary allegations, complete with the views of other virologists and detailed explanations of the science.

Instead, Carlson allowed Yan to state her case, which included statements like this one: “So, together with my experience, I can tell you, this is created in the lab. This is from that template owned by [the Chinese] military and also, it was spread to the world to make such damage.”

The Content Cycle, a phrase I did not just come up with right now, describes how content arises from the internet, is absorbed into cable television, and then gets redistributed back into the internet for the cycle to begin anew.

Like the water cycle, the Content Cycle provides sustenance and habitation to a multitude of organisms, and in many ways it exists independently of human thought

Stage One: Raw Content. The content cycle almost always begins with content that is freely distributed on a large social network.

“Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes—civil rights, women’s rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual revolution, etc.—and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what they are doing to you.”

Untruths hurt real people. Try having dinner with a 79-year-old who watches Tucker Carlson every day. They’re anxious, angry, trapped in their own heads, and thinking of themselves as aggrieved victims. That’s why every assertion and argument on matters of national import that a popular TV-news host offers is “meaningful” and “important,” especially if it’s crafted to provoke an emotional response in viewers.

Uncertainty and fear over the economic impact of stay-at-home orders is fueling a sort of culture war between conservatives, whose political strength now comes from rural America, right now less affected by the virus, and liberals, whose urban strongholds have been most affected by it.

uncertainty over the White House's plans, from an abandoned idea to waive restrictions by Easter to a confusing set of business advisory groups, has led to greater uncertainty about when it would be safe to work and shop again. That uncertainty has mobilized conservatives and Republicans in the states. Like the tea party protests of 2009, the “reopen” protests were heavily touted on conservative radio and Fox News, which helped fuel turnout, which then became part of the story.

Resistance to the stay-at-home orders has grown fastest in Michigan, for two reasons: Whitmer has issued especially strict limits on movement and commerce, and she is increasingly being discussed as a running mate for Joe Biden

Allowing the U.S. government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.

While this won’t surprise most people, it likely came as a shock to many QAnon followers. According to that movement’s expediently evolving lore, March 4 — the date on which U.S. presidents were inaugurated until the mid-1930s — was when Mr. Trump was to reclaim the presidency and resume his epic battle against Satan-worshiping, baby-eating Democrats and deep-state monsters.This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.On March 2, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that militia extremists might be plotting to overrun the Capitol complex and “remove Democratic lawmakers.” The details of the possible plot were hazy, but the threat unnerved enough people that House leaders canceled Thursday’s session. The voting schedule was condensed, and lawmakers left town early for the weekend.Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOf course the safety of lawmakers and other Capitol Hill workers must be a priority. But allowing the government to be held hostage by political extremists is unacceptable.The current security threat is not expected to dissipate any time soon. If anything, the intelligence community has cautioned that the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol may have emboldened extremists. Having sacked the Capitol, the lunatic fringe is now dreaming of a bigger, bloodier encore.

Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida delegation’s mini-Trump, is in full froth. “Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA,” he charged last month. Last Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the speaker, arguing that General Honoré’s criticism of the police and lawmakers was “disqualifying.” On Thursday, Tucker Carlson told viewers: “Honoré is an unhinged partisan extremist. He’s nuttier than anyone affiliated with QAnon.”

Everyone was wearing a mask, including the two stern ladies sitting right behind Joe Biden: the speaker of the House and the real president. They were masked up -- all of them were -- like outlaws. But here’s the weird part: all of them have been vaccinated. They’ve told us that. So there was literally no reason for any of them to be wearing masks, but they wore them anyway.  

Language is designed to communicate ideas, but not when Joe Biden uses it. Wednesday night’s speech was a cluster bomb of clichés meant to knock you senseless and make you surrender. Americans choose "hope over fear," Biden droned, "truth over lies," "light over darkness." We lost track after that. Our brains shut down. Mission accomplished. The news media didn’t care

Technically, Biden is now the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. Maybe someone, somewhere ought to keep track of what he’s doing. But no, reporters covered Joe Biden like he’s an actor on a press tour for the hot new summer blockbuster alongside his dazzling co-star, Kamala. 

he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.

Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.

Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.

In addition to the discrete conservative factions Cass and Carlson represent, there is another dissident wing of conservatism, represented by the Niskanen Center, which attempts to appeal to moderates and centrists of both parties.

indsey, in contrast to Cass, is far more critical of the contemporary right than of the left.Over the course of the 21st century, the conservative movement, and with it the Republican Party, has fallen ever more deeply under the sway of an illiberal and nihilistic populism — illiberal in its crude exploitation of religious, racial, and cultural divisions; nihilistic in its blithe indifference to governance and the established norms and institutions of representative self-government. This malignant development made possible the nomination and election of Donald Trump, whose two years in power have only accelerated conservatism’s and the GOP’s descent into the intellectual and moral gutter.

Wilkinson explains:The project of fashioning an ethnoreligious American identity has always been in conflict with a dominant and defining American impulse: to get rich. The United States has always been a distinctly commercial republic with expansionary, imperial impulses. High demand for workers and settlers led early on to a variegated population that encouraged the idea, largely traceable to Tom Paine, that American national identity is civic and ideological rather than racial and ethnic.

When a CNN reporter asked if Trump had a response to the heroic Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed her to a Truth Social post that wasn’t about Navalny or Putin. It was about how awful America was.

Before Navalny’s death, Tucker Carlson — who scorned Ukraine’s desperate fight for its independence — cavorted in the Kremlin. His interview with Putin was so indulgent that even Putin complained of a “lack of sharp questions.”

At an Axios conference in Miami, Jared Kushner — who was festooned with $2 billion in Saudi investments after he left the White House — called Mohammed bin Salman a “visionary leader.” Asked about the crown prince’s complicity in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner replied with exasperation, “Are we really still doing this?”

In 15 minutes he denounced the obsession with GDP, the tolerance of payday lending and other financial pathologies, the fetishization of technology, the guru-like worship of CEOs, and the indifference to the anxieties and pathologies of the poor and the vulnerable characteristic of both of our major political parties. It was a masterpiece of political rhetoric. He ended by calling upon the GOP to re-examine its attitude towards the free market.

Carlson's monologue is valuable because unlike so many progressive critics of our social and economic order he has gone beyond the question of the inequitable distribution of wealth to the more important one about the nature of late capitalist consumer culture and the inherently degrading effects it has had on our society

Survey after survey reveals that a vast majority of the American people hold views that would be described as socially conservative and economically moderate to progressive. A presidential candidate who spoke capably to both of these sets of concerns would be the greatest political force in three generations.