Get ready for “Dark Carlson”
I am not no way no how down with the 9/11 conspiracy theories; actually, I consider them absurd to the point of being laughable. Not that it would be at all out of character for our gone-rogue, patently evil and illegitimate central government to commit such a heinous atrocity against its own subjects if it suited them to do so; assuredly, it isn’t. No, it’s that, having seen those crackpot theories convincingly debunked by various different and distinct parties, they seem to me to be in direct conflict with Occam’s Razor, for one thing.
For another, out of the cast of literally thousands who would have had to be involved in pulling such a thing off—including some who had spouses and/or children die that gruesome day—not even one of them has come forward to make themselves filthy rich by putting together a tell-all book exposing said conspiracy? SRSLY? Not ONE?!?
Yeah, no. Ain’t buying it, not a bit of it. Peddle it someplace else, there’s no market for it here.
That being so, I find it singularly displeasing that Tucker Carlson seems to hold a contrary opinion on the (non-)issue.
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.
“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?”
Not exactly the most ringing of endorsements, but still. Congrats, Tucker, on having joined the august ranks of thoughtful, celebrity-supergenius luminaries such as Rosie “Fire doesn’t melt steel” O’Donnell, Martin Sheen, and Mark Ruffalo. Sheesh. But there might be something of a heartening aspect to this otherwise revoltin’ development, I suppose.
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.
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.
Heh. Dark Carlson? I love it. Well, okay then, let ‘er rip, Tucker. After all, pobody’s nerfect, right?
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