The New York Times’ Tucker Carlson Hit Piece Exposes the Paper’s Systemic Racism - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The New York Times’ Tucker Carlson Hit Piece Exposes the Paper’s Systemic Racism
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Dr. Martin Luther King was a white supremacist.

So says the New York Times. And how does the Times know this — without saying it explicitly? It knows because Fox’s Tucker Carlson has the nerve — the nerve! — to hold up Dr. King as a role model on race.

Dr. King, of course, famously said this in his August 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

These words are at the core of Tucker Carlson’s frequently stated belief on race — as anyone (say, me) — who regularly watches his show can testify. As he says — a lot — Tucker is not about judging people by group or race, exactly the view of Dr. King.

But in the seriously systemic race-driven world of the New York Times, Tucker’s shared belief with Dr. King makes Tucker a — here it comes — RACIST! The Times writes:

His show may be the most racist program in the history of cable news.

The irony of those words coming from arguably the most racist newspaper in the history of major newspapers is enough to choke the entire field of horses registered for the Kentucky Derby. Talk about a lack of self-awareness.

But before we get to this appalling Times history — a history of serious racism that carries on to this very day — let’s start with the beginning of this jewel of a hit piece on Tucker Carlson.

The piece starts with an anecdote from 2018 when “Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America ‘poor and dirtier.’” Some sponsors had departed. The Times says that: “Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line.”

Yet the following night Tucker had documented his facts that, yes indeed, illegal immigration on the southern border was in fact causing environmental problems. And, reports the Times, no less than Fox’s founder Rupert Murdoch “praised his counterattack” and all was well.

Stop. Full stop to see how the left-wing Times and the left-wing media in general operates. Included in this opening charge was this — and note the links:

When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.

Follow the links and one finds both link to the same post from lefty Washington Post critic Erik Wemple, a longtime Tucker critic whom Tucker gleefully mocks with an alarmed Wemple image on a coffee mug.

The Wemple column about this dustup is headlined:

As advertisers flee, Tucker Carlson brands himself Mr. ‘Dirtier’

Wemple says that Carlson’s claim is “harmful and a clear-cut instance of polemical overreach.”

Really? “Harmful”? “Polemical overreach”? That’s what the Times wants you to think, which is why they made sure to link to the Wemple column.

Yet a full 12 years before Tucker said that America was getting dirtier because of illegal immigration, one Tina J. Terrell, the forest supervisor for the Cleveland National Forest, a subset of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, testified on the reality of this very subject to the U.S. House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. She said this:

… in 2005, over 370 acres of the National Forest burned due to illegal campfires and over 4 tons of trash was removed from the National Forest, much of which can be attributed to illegal immigration.

Got that? There is a professional bureaucrat with direct responsibility for the National Forest saying straight out that in 2005 — a full 13 years before Tucker discussed the topic — “4 tons of trash was removed from the National Forest, much of which can be attributed to illegal immigration.”

In 2015, three years before that particular show of Tucker’s, the Arizona Bureau of Land Management told Fox News:

In 2006 alone, more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along southern Arizona border, many in the meeting spots where immigrants rest, change clothes and wait to hitch a ride further north with a smuggler.

In other words, long before — years before — Tucker Carlson said a word on this subject in that 2018 show, there was one report after another from both state and federal agencies that documented in detail that yes, in fact, illegal immigration was causing serious environmental damage.

And oh yes. During the Obama presidency, the Arizona Bureau of Land Management reported that in 2009 alone environmental groups collected over 234 tons of trash, 800 tires, 404 bicycles, and 62 vehicles left behind by illegals crossing the border.

Yet when Tucker says the same thing? The Times starts its hit piece by saying, “His show may be the most racist program in the history of cable news.” Following this logic both the U.S. Forest Service and the Arizona Bureau of Land Management — not to mention both the Bush and Obama governments who issue reports on border pollution — were seriously racist.

Right.

Next up is the Times targeting Tucker for saying “those protesting” the George Floyd killing had become “criminal mobs.” In fact — and not mentioned by the Times — according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, there were 574 protests where violence was involved. And it documents that in those violent protests, “assaults on police officers, looting, and arson were the most common criminal activities.” The report specifically notes as well that:

In total, over the course of the civil unrest from May to July, more than 2,000 officers sustained injuries in the line of duty.

And oh yes, as the UK Guardian reported in the day:

At least 25 Americans were killed during protests and political unrest in 2020

Which is to say, Tucker was right.

Hilariously, the paper says that Tucker “exists in a carefully constructed bubble of his own — a retreat, and a bunker.” This from the paper where its own liberal-bubble staffers went berserk because editorial page editor James Bennet published a call from Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton to call in the military to restore order in the riot-stricken cities. In the resulting uproar over the piercing of the Times liberal bubble, Bennet resigned. Talk about a bubble.

But since the Times wants to satisfy its racist obsessions, let’s focus for a minute on the paper’s seriously racist past — and present.

New York Post columnist — and ex-Timesman — Michael Goodwin recently devoted some considerable space to the Times‘ history of— and addiction to — racism. One column was headlined this way:

The family that owns the New York Times were slaveholders:

You read that right. The paper that is hectoring Tucker Carlson about race was in fact the property of a family of slaveowners. Three of those family members signed up to fight for the Confederacy.

The Times “patriarch” was one Adolph S. Ochs, whose mother was such a staunch supporter of slavery and the Confederacy that she was once “caught smuggling medicine to Confederates in a baby carriage.” Ochs began his media career as the owner of the Chattanooga Times. Once having taken over the New York Times, Ochs brought his racism with him, making racism a standard trait in the paper. It would run editorials that said, for example (in 1900), that the Democratic Party, of which Ochs was a rabid supporter, “may justly insist that the evils of negro suffrage were wantonly inflicted on them.” Which is to say, Ochs and the New York Times opposed giving black Americans the right to vote.

Six years later the New York Times:

… published a glowing profile of Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the 100th anniversary of his birth, calling him “the great Southern leader.”

Ochs reportedly made contributions to rebel memorials, including $1,000 to the enormous Stone Mountain Memorial in Georgia that celebrates Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He made the donation in 1924 so his mother, who died 16 years earlier, could be on the founders’ roll, adding in a letter that “Robert E. Lee was her idol.”

On and on and on goes this ocean of racism at the New York Times, staying current with an American left and Democratic Party that has successively supported judging Americans not, as Dr. King and Tucker Carlson have advocated — “by the content of their character” — but rather, explicitly and deliberately, by the color of their skin.

From support of slavery to segregation to the son of segregation now known as “identity politics” — the latter the Times pushes with its “1619 Project,” which tries and fails to connect the founding of America to, of course, skin color — the American left, its favorite political party, and its favorite newspaper have always been into judging by skin color. The Times‘ favorite political party, recall, itself had been a staunch supporter of slavery, writing six political platforms supporting it.

Indeed, the Times‘ racist obsessions are such that in the Tucker hit piece they cannot bring the paper to identify his targets by the offices they hold. No, instead the Times identifies two members of Congress and the vice president of the United States as “Black politicians,” with a mention of “Black women” to boot.

Then there’s the Times’ laughable criticism that one Tucker topic — that the left pushing illegal immigration is about “replacing” a white population with a non-white population — is racist and about white supremacy.

Let’s get right to the baseline: The Democratic Party, as mentioned the party formed by slaveowners and seriously on the record supporting not just slavery but segregation and now identity politics — is decidedly “the party of race.” They use race and racism to win elections and to get power — and they always have. That’s their political formula, and to doubt that they would use illegal immigration to continue this 200-plus-year political formula beggars the mind. The racism at hand in this issue belongs, yet again, to the Times.

Let’s cut to the chase.

This three-part major attack on Tucker Carlson is nothing more than the latest ruling-class elites attacking, in reality, not just Tucker but his audience.

Back in 2010, right here in the pages of The American Spectator, the late Boston University professor emeritus Angelo Codevilla wrote a lengthy piece that became a bestselling book — The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.

In it, Professor Codevilla noted that:

From Atlanta to Seattle, today’s Ruling Class was exposed to a narrow, uniform set of ideas, and adopted a set of habits and tastes, as well as a secular canon of sacred myths, saints, sins and ritual language. The class’ chief pretension is its intellectual superiority: its members claim to know things that the common herd cannot.

And right there is exactly why the New York Times ran this three-part hit piece on Tucker Carlson. This is nothing more than an expression of the unbridled contempt the elites who run the paper have for average Americans — in this case, the millions of average Americans who are in Tucker’s audience. And one of the tools they use is to project their own systemic racism onto those they disdain.

And oh yes, someone else wrote a book in which he noted the Ruling Class of American elites and why they hate Donald Trump. It was because they…

… understood Trump’s election as a direct challenge to their power. They’ve been fretting about his authoritarian tendencies ever since. Because they lack self-awareness, they don’t perceive this as projection. They can’t see that they’re actually talking about themselves.

Bingo. Oh, and the author of that book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, is … Tucker Carlson.

Attacks like this one by the New York Times didn’t work with Donald Trump. They didn’t work with Ronald Reagan.

And this one won’t work with Tucker Carlson.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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