Just minutes after Tucker Carlson used the Uvalde, Texas shooting to viciously attack President Joe Biden, “independent journalist” Glenn Greenwald piled on and joined in the hypocritical cries against politicizing tragedy.
At 8:48 ET, “sworn enemy of lying” Carlson said this:
TUCKER CARLSON: The president of the United States, frail, confused, bitterly partisan, desecrating the memory of recently murdered children with tired talking points of the Democratic Party, dividing the country in a moment of deep pain rather than uniting. His voice rising, amplified only as he repeats the talking points he repeated for over 35 years in the United States Senate, partisan politics being the only thing that animates him. Unfit for leadership of this country.
Putting aside the fact that Carlson had just blatantly used “a moment of deep pain” to divide the country – while pretending that he wasn’t – Carlson is the very last person who should be complaining about divisiveness. In fact, divisive hate mongering is his specialty. That includes his promotion of white supremacy, his deliberate endangerment of journalists, his celebration of (racist) vigilantism, his attacks on the military and a military hero and his open hatred for America, in general, most recently exemplified in his remarks to a CPAC crowd in Hungary in which he explicitly stated his preference for that country over the U.S.
Yet it never ceases to amaze me how Greenwald, whose brand is “independence,” never seems to notice, much less call out Carlson’s chicanery.
Six minutes after Carlson's vicious remarks about Biden, Greenwald, a regular Carlson guest, helped validate his bogus claim that Biden was doing all the politicizing.
GREENWALD: I was watching Joe Biden and I empathize so much with what was said at the beginning of his speech, I was really hoping that he would strike exactly the note of somebody who has twice had to bury a child and could really empathize with a unique way with how uniquely heinous it is, and could talk about the spirituality of our society and the need to unite on what obviously, everyone, no matter what your partisan perspective is, reacting the same way when seeing this thing and spent about six seconds doing that and then immediately did a detour to figure out how he could squeeze and exploit the situation for partisan advantage. It was so grotesque and, I mean, unsurprising, but also really disappointing to watch.
Carlson went on to dubiously claim he “would’ve praised Joe Biden if he kept to the first part of that speech,” in which he had talked about losing two children. Carlson “asked” why Biden didn’t just use the moment to unite the country?
Greenwald once again missed the hypocrisy in favor of commentary that he surely knew would ingratiate himself to the prime time white supremacist and lead to more TV hits.
GREENWALD: I think the obsession of people doing politics full time, seeing the world through this partisan of prism warfare is consuming, that it basically drains their entire soul so that nothing is left but this kind of immediate need to use every situation, no matter how tragic, to gain some kind of an advantage. … It is so ghoulish and grotesque to watch.
You know what’s really ghoulish and grotesque? A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist like Greenwald sanitizing, validating and promoting Carlson’s hate-for-profit schtick.
With Greenwald’s blessing, Carlson concluded by saying, “People have died and we owe them the respect of restraint. That’s how I feel about all death.” Carlson forgot to add, “unless you’re a Black Lives Matter protester.”
This is far from the first example of Greenwald engaging in this kind of self-serving suck up. A recent article by Eoin Higgins, in Salon, provided a great analysis of how Greenwald turns a blind eye to Carlson’s white supremacism, while claiming to have an ethical purpose, which just happens to result in a near-weekly slot on Carlson’s show:
Greenwald argues to critics that his appearances on Carlson's show allow him to get a pro-privacy, anti-war message out to the network's viewers. Yet more often than not, he's just on Fox News to talk about Twitter, liberals and some aspect of the culture wars.
For all of Greenwald's claims that his presence on the show might shift at least a few Fox viewers from rabid right-wing ideologues to something approaching social libertarianism, his actual appearances seem to serve mainly to support Carlson's worldview. Greenwald doesn't challenge Carlson's worldview, seldom if ever criticizes the right and generally stays in his lane — legitimizing the Fox News narrative.
Surely Greenwald knows exactly what kind of person Carlson is. The unavoidable conclusion is that, no matter the excuses, Greenwald is just fine with that.
You can watch Carlson smear Biden below, followed by Greenwald's enabling, below, from the May 25 2022 Tucker Carlson Tonight.