Listen up gay folks. It’s time to stop worrying about bathrooms and start worrying about getting killed by a Muslim immigrant! Because if you don’t, you will be! That was the message of a Fox News guest that host Tucker Carlson thanked for his hideous comments. And, no, it was not an April Fool's joke.
Christopher Barron visited Tucker Carlson Tonight Friday night. He seems to be the gay version of Fox’s African American black attackers: someone Fox can outsource bigotry to without getting their own hands dirty. Or so the network seems to think.
In this case, Barron gave the Fox viewers a twofer of Orwellian hate mongering because he blasted Muslims as well as gays - in the name of caring about gays.
“Are bathrooms a bigger threat than Islamic extremism?” and “What’s the real threat to the LGBT community” were the two “questions” FoxNews.com gave as subtitle and title (respectively) to the video.
Just like Fox loves to concern troll African Americans that they should really be upset about black crime and not police shootings, Barron was there to do the same about bathrooms and Muslims. Only this was more ridiculous and more insulting.
It’s one thing to argue about gender identity and bathroom use, it’s quite another to start lecturing people that they need to become more bigoted. Last I checked, the LGBT community was far likelier to use a public bathroom in the U.S. than to be killed by an ISIS adherent.
Barron’s “evidence” on behalf of gay Islamophobia was an anecdote about ISIS throwing a gay man off a building in Mosul.
Sorry, Christopher, but I happen to live in a community with a large LGBT population (plus some of my relatives are gay) and I have yet to hear a single one of them say, “Let’s go to Mosul! I hear they have gender-neutral bathrooms there!”
Obviously, it was a false premise: conflating Muslim immigrants with ISIS. But Carlson bought it, no pun or disrespect intended, whole hog. With his furrowed brow, Carlson said he couldn’t understand why people who advocate for gay Amerians “also advocate for the admission of immigrants who hate gays.”
Oh, and while they were at it, these two talked up European white nationalists Marine Le Pen (also a Putin fan) and Geert Wilders because they understand “the need to protect gay people from radical Islam.” Unlike that radical-Islam enabler, Hillary Clinton.
Carlson wondered why gay people aren’t more anti-Muslim and why he “never heard anything about it from that angle here in Washington from the organized gay groups” after the Orlando nightclub shooting. Granted, that tragedy was caused by a Muslim massacring a crowd at a gay nightclub but the killer was American and if that incident proves gays should start hating Muslims then African Americans should be hating whites for Charleston and God knows how many other atrocities. Yet, on Fox, that’s a no-no for blacks.
Islamophobia is also why gays should love Donald Trump, according to Barron.
BARRON: After what happened in Orlando, Donald Trump came out and gave an impassioned plea for gay votes and said, “Look, I’m not going to let this happen on my watch.” And did the human rights campaign say, "Look, we’ve got our disagreements but we applaud candidate Trump for this?" No, they attacked him for it! They attacked him for coming out and saying that!
Well, that’s one way of interpreting it. The more likely reason for the lack of props is that Trump used the incident to pat himself on the back, falsely claim the shooter was from Afghanistan, attack Muslims, blame President Obama and suggest that he sympathized with the shooter.
Carlson didn’t challenge a word.
Then came this jaw-dropper of a comment.
BARRON: Look, the gay left is making a suicide pact with the Democratic party right now. If they think that the future is that we need to have radical Islamic extremists come into this country as long as they want – Let me tell you what. That ain’t gonna end well.
Carlson laughed uproariously. “It’s just so obvious! And nobody ever says it. And thank you for saying it.”
Watch what should be an April Fool’s joke, but isn’t, from the March 31, 2017 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
I could see trying to go on O’Reilly’s show, although he has actually stated on the air that he no longer wants to interview people he considers “extremists”. For the rest of us, that means anyone who is not in his bubble – and to O’Reilly, a “left winger” looks like Juan Williams. One has to wonder how O’Reilly would handle an interview with Amy Goodman…
With Carlson and Hannity, I don’t really see a point these days. Every guest I’ve seen go on Carlson’s show who’s even remotely to the Left of him is disrespected in a manner that’s viscerally unpleasant to see. It’s hard to watch someone trying to make a point to Carlson, only to be interrupted and insulted multiple times before they can finish one sentence. If I thought Carlson was even listening to what they were saying, it might make a difference. But he’s not. His intention in having these people on is not to engage in any real way – it’s to bully the guest and have fun doing so. I’d rather see a guest in that position simply remove their earpiece and microphone and leave. If Carlson is going to behave like a five year old, clearly modeling himself on Trump, there really isn’t much of a mature conversation you can have with him.
With Hannity, his level of anger and hatred is actually spiking toward Jeanine Pirro levels. Given the fact that we now know about his issues with handguns, I really would not recommend people to appear there. The last thing I would want to see is Hannity losing his temper after having his talking points refuted and then pulling a weapon, as he did with Williams.
After the inevitable collapse of this corrupt group in the White House, it may be possible once again to try to engage with more of these hosts, but I don’t know that much gets accomplished while they’re in full-on bullying mode.
I thought the Massachusetts mayor did OK, though.
I actually strongly believe in liberals going on Fox but they MUST understand the tactics of the host, be prepared and if going on with a guy like Tucker, confront him on his double standards for interviewing and call out his hitting below the belt. Because that’s what he always does. He seizes on something he thinks will make the subject look bad, then deflects the argument.
Progressives MUST LEARN HOW TO EFFECTIVELY RESPOND TO THIS whether they go on Fox or not.
Putting all that aside, this was the worst Tucker Carlson interview I ever saw and that’s saying a lot.
With a guest like this, Carlson will make a show of deference, nodding intently at the obviously sage thoughts being presented, and he’ll generally agree with the guest and support his opinions – particularly if they are vicious toward anyone to Carlson’s left.
On the other hand, with a guest like Mayor Joseph Curtatone, who was also interviewed on the same show regarding sanctuary cities, Carlson will be openly hostile. His discussion with Curtatone was memorable in its nastiness and smugness, in that he repeatedly talked over Curtatone, interrupted him, made snide comments, took cheap shots and attempted to knock Curtatone off balance by peppering him with irrelevant questions. When all these approaches fail, Carlson’s last resort is usually to go to the laugh of ridicule. And he does like that move. Carlson’s discussion with the mayor included one massive whopper that Carlson snuck in at the end. Carlson was attempting to get the mayor to accept the false premise that all undocumented immigrants should be removed from public schools, hospitals, churches, etc, since he didn’t want his tax dollars being used to support “illegal aliens who shouldn’t be here anyway”. When he got no headway there, Carlson went to the false comparison of saying that schools, hospitals, churches should be sanctuary spaces for people who have unregistered guns or who haven’t paid their taxes. When the mayor didn’t fall for that nonsense, Carlson then tried pulling his last card – since he grew up in California, Carlson dropped the line about California’s school system being overrun with kids who don’t speak English and thus now “falling apart”.
The problem with Carlson’s California line is that it’s an outright lie. I’ve spent most of my life in California, both in Los Angeles and in Berkeley. California’s schools are not suffering because there is an immigrant population in the state. California’s schools have suffered since 1978 because Howard Jarvis got enough state residents to approve Proposition 13, which stripped much of the schools’ funding by slashing property taxes. As a student in California K-12 public schools from 1974 to 1987, I can attest that the funding drops were quite noticeable and sometimes nasty. I went to multiple schools that once had drama programs for the students, and each time I’d get to the school, the funding for that program was cut – so no plays and no theater. The problems were exacerbated by continuous white flight, as the more affluent residents would pull their kids out of the public schools and put them in private schools to avoid having to mingle with people who were black or Chicano or whatever. And as the attendance levels dropped in schools like mine, more and more programs would be cut. I remember my drama teacher having his salary slashed in 1986 between my junior and senior years. He actually made up the difference by going on Jeopardy for a couple of days at one point. None of this was caused by undocumented workers coming to Los Angeles and either having or bringing their kids there. It was caused by wealthier people wanting to pay as little tax as possible, using the old libertarian motto of IGMFU.
I would normally think that there would be a point to having a tough left-winger go on a show like Carlson’s, just to stand up to him and to show that Carlson’s entire approach is a snide deception. But it really looks these days as if that approach would be pointless. Sure, someone could go on Carlson’s show and refuse to back down – Carlson will just talk over them and finally cut them off. It may be that the better course of action with Carlson is to give him the attention he merits – none.
This is gonna be fun.