Tucker Carlson takes on Sidney Powell

 “For more than a week, Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story,” Carlson said in a segment called “Standing Up For What’s Right” on Thursday night. “This election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software in order to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The other day on television, Powell said of Trump that when the fraud is finally uncovered, ‘I think we’ll find he had at least 80 million votes.'”

“In other words,” Carlson continued, “rigged software stole about seven million votes in this election.”

Carlson then plays a clip of Powell at a press conference with Rudy Giuliani in which she claimed to have discovered an algorithm with the ability to “flip votes.” Powell says this algorithm “probably ran all over the country” and added that “we might never have uncovered” the software “had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm.”

“Sidney Powell has been saying similar things for days,” Carlson said, resuming his commentary. “On Sunday night, we texted her after watching one of her segments.”

“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” he continued. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of self-government. Not a small thing.”

“We took Sidney Powell seriously,” Carlson said. “We had no intention of fighting with her. We’ve always respected her work.”

But Carlson had questions about Powell’s claims.

“We simply wanted to see the details,” he continued. “How could you not want to see them? So we invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week actually and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention.”

But there was a problem.

“She never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests,” Carlson said. “Not a page.”

“When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” he added.

“When we check with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either,” Carlson continued. “Nor did she provide any today at the press conference.”

“She never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another,” he went on. “Not one.”

“So why are we telling you this,” Carlson asked rhetorically. “We’re telling you this because it’s true. And, in the end, that’s all that matters: The truth. It’s our only hope, it’s our best defense. And it’s how we’re different from them, we care what’s true. And we know you care too, that’s why we told you.”

“Maybe Sidney Powell will forward soon with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it,” Tucker speculated. “Maybe she will, we are certainly hopeful that she will.”

I have had my differences with Carlson over the years, but I am grateful for his decision to tell the truth about Powell’s claims. I’m sure it was not an easy decision and Carlson admitted as much the following day when he said that he had “heard from a lot of people,” including people in the Trump Administration, since the original segment aired.

In his update, Carlson says that he, along with the people who called his show, believes that the election was “not fair” and that he is “willing to believe any explanation for what happened,” but that he has still “not seen a single piece of evidence showing that software changed votes.”

“It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, it might have happened,” Carlson said. “It means they haven’t seen any evidence that it happened.”

Carlson goes on to say that other members of the Trump legal team and the Trump Administration have also not seen evidence of Powell’s claims, but adds that Powell now says that she expects to be able to prove her claims in court within the next two weeks.

So save the date. The election is already two weeks past and the Trump campaign has been claiming fraud almost since Election Day. Yet, as I pointed out earlier this week, Rudy Giuliani admitted in court that the Trump campaign was not making legal allegations that fraud had been committed in Pennsylvania. However, if Powell’s statement is accurate, we can look forward to evidence by December 5. Mark your calendars.

There’s an old saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and Tucker is right that Powell’s allegations, if true, would constitute the greatest crime in American history. The American people should not be expected to take allegations about unprecedented voter fraud purely on faith. Powell should present her evidence to the country rather than making extraordinary allegations that she is not willing or able to back up. There is another old saying that applies as well: Put up or shut up.

I disagree with Carlson that the election was unfair. I have yet to see any evidence of widespread fraud that could have shifted the outcome of hundreds of thousands of votes across five states. In my opinion, Donald Trump’s loss can be easily explained by a number of factors, including the pandemic and its associated recession, but especially the fact that President Trump spent four years playing to his base at the expense of alienating moderate and independent voters.

A big part of Republican surprise at the outcome of the election is that we live in different media bubbles. In the Republican media bubble, we were told for four years that Donald Trump was the greatest and most popular president in history. In reality, his average approval rating never approached 50 percent, which goes a long way towards explaining the outcome of the election. I applaud Tucker Carlson for breaking out of the bubble now to tell his audience the truth about the fraud allegations.

Maybe there is evidence of widespread election fraud. If there is, I’d love to see it so that I can examine the claims objectively. The will of the people in the election should be honored regardless of which candidate won.

But if Powell and the Trump cannot support their allegations, we need to know that too. Hopefully, when the matter is settled, the American people will remember who lied to them and who told them the truth, because trying to overturn an election based on fabricated claims of fraud is just as bad as doing it with a software algorithm.

How Badly Do Republicans Want To Keep Losing?

As Donald Trump lurches toward what appears to be a landslide loss this November, many Republicans are already looking towards 2024. Even if the president ekes out another Electoral College victory, he will term-limited in four years and the party will need another standard-bearer to carry on the Trump legacy. Many in the GOP are looking towards Fox News personality Tucker Carlson as that candidate.

Politico interviewed 16 prominent Republicans who said that there was an “emerging consensus” that Carlson would “be formidable” if he decided to run. Carlson’s monologues are popular within the Republican Party, his show is currently the most-watched cable news program ever, and his friendship with Donald Trump, Jr. might be parlayed into valuable Trump endorsement.

“He’s a talented communicator with a massive platform. I think if he runs he’d be formidable,” Luke Thompson, a Republican strategist who worked for Jeb Bush’s super PAC in 2016, said of Carlson in the Politico piece.

“Let me put it this way: If Biden wins and Tucker decided to run, he’d be the nominee,” said Sam Nunberg, a 2016 campaign advisor to Donald Trump. However, Nunberg is skeptical that Carlson would leave his lucrative television career for politics.

Like Trump, Carlson has no political experience and has never run for office. Like Trump, many people believe that he is unlikely to give up his private-sector career for a political campaign. Not so fast, says Rich Lowry of National Review.

“No one can dismiss this and say it’s completely implausible.” Lowry told Politico. “There is at the very least a significant faction within the Republican Party that [Carlson] has a huge stake in and arguably leadership over,” adding, “If he has political ambitions, he has an opening. He has a following and a taste for controversy. He’s smart, quick on his feet and personable. Political experience matters less than it once did.”

Indeed, Carlson, who is a strong Trump supporter, would be a lot like Trump Part Deux. The question for Republicans is whether the country would be willing to take a chance on another amateur rabble-rouser after its failed experiment with Donald Trump. Like Trump, Carlson is a figure who is mostly popular within the Republican Party and Fox News watchers, rather than the moderates and independents who decide elections.

Through a fluke of the Electoral College, that base was enough to eke out a victory in 2016 against a historically bad Democratic candidate. It looks increasingly likely that the mix will not be enough to defeat a slightly less bad candidate in 2020 or in 2024 when Democrats might finally pick a competent and lucid politician.

Like Trump, Carlson is not a traditional Republican. I’ve criticized Carlson in these pages in the past for sounding like a Democrat himself, for praising Elizabeth Warren‘s anti-corporate rants, and for propagating conspiracy theories that the World Health Organization was planning to use the pandemic as an excuse to send armed squads to break up families (yes, seriously). In a healthy Republican Party, Carlson’s monologues would be seen as the rantings of a crazy person, not a potential frontrunner.

My prediction is that Donald Trump will lose big this November. If intelligent people still run the Republican Party and make up its voter base, they will change course and run far away from people like Tucker Carlson and the Trumps, who preach to a shrinking choir and write off ever-larger swaths of the electorate as unwinnable.

After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican Party commissioned an after-action report to find out what went wrong and what the party could do better. Among the recommendations from that 2013 report were that the party should reach out to minorities and gays, embrace immigration reform, and eliminate the echo chamber in which Republicans largely talk to themselves. Then in 2016, the party went completely in the other direction when it threw in its lot with Donald Trump.

The bargain worked in the short-term with a victory over Hillary Clinton but the party paid the price in 2018. Another installment seems likely to be due this year.

The bottom line is that Republicans have to do better at winning minority votes. Trump won in 2016 despite winning only eight percent of blacks and 28 percent of Hispanics per Roper exit polling, but that victory, in which the Democrats won the popular vote, is going to become increasingly harder to replicate.

The simple reason is that the share of white voters is declining. In 2016, white voters made up 70 percent of the electorate compared with 81 percent in the 2000 election.

There are two ways to deal with that changing reality. One is to become a “big tent” party while the other is to double-down on rallying the base and trying to preserve the white majority through restrictive immigration policies. So far, the GOP has chosen the second option.

An alarming statistic is that Mitt Romney won a larger (47.2) percentage of the vote when he lost than Donald Trump did (46.1) when he won the 2016 election. The GOP was hemorrhaging voters even when Trump won by a fluke. That’s no way to build a political party in the long term.

After the Republican Party loses this November, there will be time for soul-searching and recriminations, just as there were after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012. The lessons of the 2013 report are still waiting to be acted upon. Maybe Republicans will heed that advice in 2024. Or maybe they will nominate Tucker Carlson.

Originally published on The Resurgent

No, Tucker Carlson, WHO Is Not Going To Rip Families Apart

A new Coronavirus conspiracy theory was launched by Tucker Carlson on Fox News a few days ago. You may have seen the clip in which Tucker plays a snippet of a World Health Organization official who says, in Tucker’s words, “in response to the spread of this virus authorities may have to enter people’s homes and remove family members, presumably by force.”

The clip is genuine. It is Tucker’s characterization of it that is false.

The WHO official in question is Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, and the clip was from a March 30 briefing at WHO headquarters in Geneva. Carlson plays about 30 seconds of an answer from Dr. Ryan, but the entire transcript of the briefing is available on the internet here.

In Carlson’s clip, Dr. Ryan says, “In most parts of the world, due to lockdown, most of the transmission that’s actually happening in many countries now is happening in the household at family level. In some senses, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now, we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner.”

Frowning at the camera, Tucker offers his translation, saying, “Just so you know, we’re coming to your house, seizing your children, and, quote, isolating them in a safe and dignified manner.”

As many conspiracy theorists are wont to do, Tucker takes a soundbite out of context, changes the meaning to suit his own ends, and emerges with something totally different from what was originally said. In other words, Tucker is lying.

Here is Dr. Ryan’s statement in context (remember that if you want the full context, you can read the entire transcript of the briefing):

So yes, we need the information technology tools. They help. They are not the solution. Right now, we don’t have an alternative to what we would’ve considered in the old days. boot-leather epidemiology. Public health practitioners, doctors, nurses, community workers, working with communities to detect cases at community level. And the most likely person to become a case is someone who’s been a significant contact of another case.

And at the moment, in most parts of the world, due to lockdown, most of the transmission that’s actually happening in many countries now is happening in the household at family level. In some senses, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now, we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner.

That’s what I was saying previously about the, the, the transition from movement restrictions and shutdowns and stay-at-home orders can only be made if we have in place the means to be able to detect suspect cases, isolate confirmed cases, track contacts, and follow up on the context health at all times, and then isolate any of those people who become sick themselves.

Note that Tucker’s incendiary claims of health authorities using “force” and “seizing” children are entirely absent from Dr. Ryan’s comments.

Instead, Ryan is saying something completely different from what Carlson alleges. He’s talking about removing people who are sick and isolating them so that they don’t infect their family members. This would presumably be done voluntarily in a hospital since most people would not want to make people they love sick with a deadly virus. Ryan never implies anything else.

Ryan also never mentions force and he doesn’t single out children. Those terms exist only in Tucker Carlson’s paranoid delusions. Presumably, Carlson thinks that the family members will be trucked off to FEMA concentration camps or abandoned Walmarts for re-education, but he doesn’t say.

Tucker Carlson’s fearmongering is particularly dishonest because he is a Trump supporter. Does he think that President Trump is going to allow the World Health Organization to come into the United States and start kicking down doors and ripping families apart? If he really believes this, why is he supporting Donald Trump?

At this point, I have several acquaintances who are suspected of having COVID-19 but who have not been diagnosed due to lack of tests. In almost all cases, they were told to stay home unless they have trouble breathing. This is consistent with CDC guidelines and is part of an attempt to avoid overwhelming hospitals.

However, if infected people stay home, there is a risk that their family members will become infected, as Dr. Ryan points out. As the curve of cases flattens and decreases, it will become more feasible to isolate Coronavirus patients in hospitals, where they can be treated quickly, and avoid infecting others, rather than keeping them at home. This is a good thing. When it happens it will mean that there are few enough COVID-19 patients that they are being treated like typical victims of an infectious disease. Going to the hospital is standard procedure when hospitals are not overloaded beyond their capacity.

Tucker Carlson’s warning against the WHO is a blatantly dishonest attempt at pot-stirring in the midst of a real national crisis. If he doesn’t know his accusations are garbage, he should.

If you liked this article debunking Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy theory, please share it wherever you see the Carlson video posted.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Tucker Carlson: Elizabeth Warren ‘Sounds Like Trump At His Best’

No, that’s not a typo. Proving once again that Fox News is not a monolithic hotbed of conservatism, Tucker Carlson heaped praise upon none other than Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren on his show last night. A few months ago, I pointed out that the Fox host sounded a lot like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, he is openly praising Warren’s economic policy.

Carlson began by quoting a long, anti-corporate diatribe by Warren in which the Massachusetts liberal said, “Giant American corporations… wave the flag — but they have no loyalty or allegiance to America.”

“These American companies show only one real loyalty,” Warren said, “to the short-term interests of their shareholders, a third of whom are foreign investors. If they can close up an American factory and ship jobs overseas to save a nickel, that’s exactly what they will do — abandoning loyal American workers and hollowing out American cities along the way. Politicians love to say they care about American jobs.”

“But for decades, those same politicians have cited ‘free market principles’ and refused to intervene in markets on behalf of American workers,” Warren continued. “And of course, they ignore those same supposed principles and intervene regularly to protect the interests of multinational corporations and international capital. The result? Millions of good jobs lost overseas and a generation of stagnant wages, growing inequality, and sluggish economic growth.”

“What part of that statement did you disagree with?” Carlson then asked. “Was there a single word that seemed wrong? Probably not.”

“Many of Warren’s policy prescriptions make obvious sense,” Carlson added before gushing, “She sounds like Donald Trump at his best.”

I’m not sure whether that is more of an indictment of Trump or Warren.

Despite his embrace of Warren's economic policies, Carlson did stop short of endorsing her completely. He decried her “race hustling, gun grabbing, abortion extremist” positions and then said, “That is exactly the problem, not just with Warren, but with American politics.” In Carlson’s world, both Democrats and Republicans are “resolutely libertarian” while Democrats “nod in total agreement” because they are “on the same page” with respect to the defense of free markets and liberal social issues, such as the legalization of marijuana.

Carlson embraces President Trump’s “innovative new way to protect American workers from the ever-cascading tidal wave of cheap third-world labor flooding this country,” his plan to tax American consumers and businesses in hopes that the economic pain will trickle across the border to Mexico where it would, ironically, probably spur more economic refugees to cross the border in search of new opportunities in the United States. He also fails to note reports that Donald Trump supports legislation that would allow the states to decriminalize marijuana.

What Carlson admits that he wants is not a small government, conservative policy but big government economic policy paired with conservative social policies. In his own words, Carlson wants candidates who are “nationalist on economics, fairly traditional on the social issues.”

“Would you vote for someone like that?” Carlson asks. “My gosh. Of course. Who wouldn’t? That candidate would be elected in a landslide. Every single time.”

The Fox host asks rhetorically, “What if the Republican leadership here in Washington had bothered to learn the lessons of the 2016 election? What if they’d understood, and embraced, the economic nationalism that was at the heart of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign?”

Yet Carlson overlooks the fact that Donald Trump did not win in a landslide in 2016, losing the popular vote and winning the Electoral College by a margin of only 50,000 votes over a handful of states. He also seems to forget the drubbing that Trumponomics took in the 2018 midterms. Donald Trump’s economic policies have propelled him to a 42 percent average approval rating and, since the onset of the trade war, President Trump is even underwater in many typically red states. Polling shows that Americans are opposed President Trump’s tariff war by about a two-to-one margin.

Carlson is correct that “almost nobody speaks for the majority of voters,” but not in the way that he means. Where the parties come together is on spending more and on expanding government influence to control a larger share of American life. They just don’t agree on what to spend on or how they want to exercise that control. Voters need a candidate and party that will leave them alone to live their lives without government interference.

I’d vote for that.

Originally published on The Resurgent

What Do Tucker Carlson, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez Have In Common?

Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez have made the news recently with their attacks on billionaires and capitalism. As proof that politics makes strange bedfellows, however, Tucker Carlson, the conservative, Trump-supporting Fox News commentator is sounding more and more like the two Democratic congresswomen.

To make the point, look at the three quotes below and try to determine which came from Carlson and which came from Warren and Ocasio Cortez:

·        “I’m definitely against a system where really the only success stories are like 27 billionaires who hate America, which is where we are now.”

·        “Our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”

·        Uber is “not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity. Because you’re paying the welfare benefits for Uber’s impoverished drivers.”

If you suspected that this was a trick, you’re right. All three quotes are from Tucker Carlson. The first was from the 2018 Student Action Summit, the second from Carlson’s January 3, 2019 monologue in response to a Mitt Romney op-ed, and the third from an August 30, 2018 segment on his Fox News show. Without context, the lines could just as easily have come from Alexandra Ocasio Cortez or Elizabeth Warren, however.

Carlson’s rhetoric against billionaires and capitalism seems strikingly similar to Cortez’s statement last week that, “I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”

Adding to the populist pileup is Elizabeth Warren, who recently unveiled her plan for a wealth tax on the superrich. “We are now in an America where one-tenth of one percent has about the same wealth as 90 percent of America,” Warren said. “And here’s the deal. Forty percent of America today can’t come up with 400 bucks in an emergency. That is not an economy that is sustainable, and it’s not a democracy that’s sustainable.”

The meeting of the minds between Carlson and the Democrats represents a crossover between the populist tendencies of the right and left. Carlson almost acknowledged this in a Jan. 26 interview with Salon.

“My intention in writing it [his monologue responding to Mitt Romney] was to remind the Republican Party that these are now issues of concern for you,” Carlson said, “because for a hundred years you represented capital over and against labor. I mean that's kind of the purpose of the Republican Party. They used to represent the investor class, right? So, the conventional criticisms of the Republicans as the party of management were 100 percent true, obviously.”

“What I wanted to remind Republican lawmakers was that it's no longer true, that's not your constituency anymore,” Carlson added. “You have a new constituency and it's people who are primarily wage earners and primarily, not low income, but lower income.”

Carlson seems to have bought into the liberal idea of a society that is divided into winners and losers rather than the traditional conservative belief that a rising tide floats all boats. A free market economy will necessarily produce wealthy people who have ideas that form the nucleus of companies that earn profits and create jobs. In contrast to the view that wealth is bad, the companies created by the wealthy help in the economy in two main ways. First, they provide jobs and, second, they provide products that raise the standard of living.

One such American success story is Amazon, but rather than celebrating the company that provides more than 600,000 jobs and made life better for millions, Carlson is critical. “Thousands of Amazon employees are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing because their wages are too low. And guess who pays for that? You do,” he wrote last year. “Frankly, I don’t believe that ordinary Americans should be subsidizing the wealthiest person in the world because he pays his employees inadequate wages.”

Oops, sorry. Bernie Sanders actually said that. But Tucker Carlson made a statement that was very similar: “Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion. That’s enough to make him the richest man in the world by far, and possibly the richest human being in all of human history. It’s certainly enough to pay his employees well. But he doesn’t. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefit.”

Bernie and Tucker ignore the fact that there is no such thing as a bad job. Some Americans prefer part-time jobs so that they can spend more time with their families. Some take part-time jobs in addition to a full-time job. In any case, minimum wage jobs usually lead to higher paying jobs after the worker gains experience. This could be through promotions within the company or finding a better job at a completely different company. In any case, it is well established that mandating that companies increase wages [DT1] leads to fewer jobs.

The truth is that wages are increasing for all Americans. The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2018 that wages saw the biggest gain since 2009. While wages were slow to recover in the wake of the Great Recession as unemployment fell to less than four percent. As the economy grows, workers will benefit with higher wages as the market for labor tightens.

When conservatives embrace populism, they lose sight of the economic truths that have benefitted the West for hundreds of years. The result is a mishmash of emotion and policy that leaves both sides of the political spectrum confused and overlapping. That confusion didn’t begin in 2016 when Donald Trump espoused a trade policy that was very similar to that of Bernie Sanders. There was already a considerable anti-trade movement growing in the GOP even before Trump appeared on the scene, but the Republican populism was accelerated by the 2016 election.

Carlson’s solution seems similar to the Democrats in that he wants someone to direct the economy to do what he wants it to. He even told Salon that he is open to voting for Elizabeth Warren if she promises to exert centralized control over the economy in a way that he wants.

“If there was a Democrat in 2020 in this election who made that primary plank in the platform, I would vote for that person. That's how important I think it is,” Carlson said. “If Elizabeth Warren came out and said, ‘I wrote a whole book on this and I want our economy to support parents on one income, families on one income, not so we can hire some person from the Third World to work at minimum wage and raise your kids, but so that you can have an intact family. You can live in a way that we all know is better.’”

But Carlson’s goal of directing the economy to support single parents can only be achieved through bigger government that takes away wealth from people who earned it. That is not conservative or a free market policy.

Admittedly, workers have suffered over the past decade since the 2008 financial crisis. Wages were slow to recover in the Obama years and manufacturing jobs took a hit, although the populists misidentified the culprit. It was automation rather than outsourcing that caused much of the pain. Today, the economy seems to be undergoing a shift as part of the technological and internet revolutions, but a changing economy doesn’t mean that the underlying laws of economics are no longer valid.

Free market capitalism is still the ideology that has lifted millions out of poverty and the expansion of fairness through government control that Carlson and others seem to suggest would restrict the free market’s ability to help workers, not help it. Unfortunately, the idea that Big Government can make capitalism more fair is where the Democrats and the populist wing of the Republican Party come together.

Originally published on The Resurgent

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 [DT1]https://www.businessinsider.com/minimum-wage-leads-to-job-losses-2017-3