Liberal Arts College on Tucker Carlson Says Schools Dont Read Enough

NorthwardEW YORK – Tucker Carlson is the hottest media personality in America. Comfortably the most watched cable news show, Tucker Carlson Tonight is a ratings bonanza, with even sometime President Donald Trump said to be a keen viewer. Part of Carlson'due south appeal is that he presents himself as a maverick outsider, someone who thinks outside the box and is not agape to launch tirades against the powerful and criticize the government and its strange policy. Certainly, he does surprise many people, covering subjects other cablevision news hosts practice non affect. Still, on closer inspection, this populist everyman persona is all a facade; Carlson himself has deep connections to the authorities and the national security state and works hard to obscure the real centers of power, channeling popular rage towards safer targets.

A blue-blooded chip off the block

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson was born into a wealthy California family unit in 1969. He attended a number of private preparatory schools in California and New England, including the sectional St. George's School in Rhode Island, where today omnipresence costs betwixt $46,000 and $67,000 per year. From there, he went on to study history at Trinity College, a private Connecticut liberal arts establishment that charges like fees.

Carlson is a blue-claret through and through. His nifty-uncle was Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, while his pace-mother, Patricia Swanson, is the heiress to the Swanson Frozen Food company fortune. In his before years, earlier his character change, Carlson openly described himself equally a trust-fund babe. "I'm extraordinarily loaded just from money I inherited from a number of trust funds," he said in 2008.

His father, Richard "Dick" Carlson is an of import journalist and high state official who was appointed by Ronald Reagan as manager of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the trunk that oversees regime-funded media, including Radio Gratis Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí and Voice of America, of which Dick was also the director. (USIA has since been replaced past the U.S. Bureau for Global Media). Together, these outlets are part of what The New York Times chosen a "worldwide propaganda network congenital by the CIA." Their goal is to bombard enemy countries with regime-change propaganda. Until the 1970s, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was directly funded by the CIA.

In his position every bit director of USIA, Dick played a considerable office in the downfall of the Soviet Union. In a 1990 event aslope media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner, he noted that "international broadcasting played a very disquisitional function, as was suggested past Mr. Murdoch, in the events that took place in the USSR and Eastern Europe in the past couple of years."

Listening to his speech, information technology is clear he saw his primary role as being to bring about regime change. In fact, he was proud of it, stating:

International broadcasters were equally of import in laying the groundwork for the democratic revolutions that we have seen. Isn't information technology incredible how Western all those Eastern Europeans sound in talking about freedom, democracy, free enterprise, environmental concerns. And they didn't become those ideas from their own media or from textbooks in their ain countries; they got them mainly from international broadcasters like Voice of America, the BBC, Radio Freedom and Radio Free Europe."

In this same task, Dick was a central component in the ultimately successful endeavor to bring down the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua through hybrid warfare. The U.South. bombarded the country with incessant propaganda, funding local media outlets that preached regime change, amplifying fake news and scare stories, and supplying enormous amounts of weapons and preparation to far-right death squads that labeled themselves "Contras" (short for counter-revolutionaries). U.South.-trained and -armed death squads would become on to carry out massacres beyond Fundamental America throughout the 1980s, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Dick would later exist appointed by President George H.W. Bush as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of seychelles and serve on a number of neoconservative think tanks. Chief amidst these is the Foundation for Defence force of Democracies (FDD), an organization widely defendant of existence little more than a front for the Israel lobby. Indeed, when asked point blank if that were the example, he refused to deny it, stating only that, "Israel is a country under siege. It's a republic in a role of the world where in that location are no democracies. And it is under abiding irregular terrorist attack and threat."

Also on the board of the FDD at that time were Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a high official at the centre of the Islamic republic of iran-Contra Affair, (the operation where the U.S. sold weapons to Iran to fund Nicaraguan death squads), and R. James Woolsey, CIA director from 1993 to 1995. Dick would later team up with Woolsey again at the Institute for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence.

A couple of preppy freedom-fighters

From his position as head of USIA, Dick's function in the U.S. dirty, hybrid war against Nicaragua tin can be reasonably surmised. But far fewer people know that a immature Tucker himself also played a part in information technology. While still in college, Tucker and his roommate, friend and Daily Caller co-founder Neil Patel went to Nicaragua at to the lowest degree two times to, in Tucker's own words, "get involved in the war and support the side that was right, which was not the Sandinista side."

Hundreds of people have written nigh the Trick News star, but none have unearthed this connexion. Carlson has rarely talked publicly nearly his time in Nicaragua, and never at any length. All the same, in a 2017 podcast interview with The Jamie Weinstein Show, he was asked about information technology directly. "I don't think many people know that you were actually a freedom-fighter who traveled to Central America to fight with the Contras. Could you fill [our listeners] in on that story?" Weinstein asks. "No," he replied, laughing, before coyly stating that his supposedly "liberal" father "let" him go because he and Patel "wanted to go see the war in Nicaragua." "All kinds of hilarity ensued," he added, laughing nervously before changing the subject.

Both Carlson and Patel would return in 1990 at the fourth dimension of the presidential election, which pitted Sandinista Daniel Ortega against U.Due south.-backed, Contra-supporting candidate Violeta Chamorro. Thank you to years of U.S.-sponsored terror and a huge political war breast, Chamorro was able to win, becoming the sixth person in her family to concord the part. According to a 1990 edition of his higher's newsletter, The Trinity Tripod, Carlson and Patel attended "many [Chamorro] rallies." Indeed, in the National Review podcast, Carlson said that he was literally "continuing next to her when she won."

The younger Carlson presents his fourth dimension in Nicaragua as purely innocent. "Nosotros did non take a place to stay or whatsoever set plans. It was very spontaneous. We are both extremely political and we felt that getting to know the country and some of its citizens would give united states a better perspective on the situation," the Tripod quotes him as saying. Speaking to sources who were in Nicaragua at the time, MintPress understands that it was not uncommon for Americans of both socialist and bourgeois political dispositions to travel in that location as a kind of political gap year.

Thus, it is quite possible that these preppy conservatives were but rich kids inspired by the attempts to unseat an anti-imperialist government. However, the fact that the son of a man in charge of a CIA front organization tasked with aiding the Contras and overthrowing the regime went there on more than 1 occasion remains suspect. How was a random foreign college student able to be right at Chamorro'southward side equally she won, given the intense security precautions later years of bloody civil war? What sort of "support" did Carlson give the Contras, and how should we interpret the word "freedom-fighter?" MintPress asked Fob News and Patel for comment on these problems just has not yet received a response.

Even more questions are raised when 1 remembers that it was not long later on his 2nd trip to Nicaragua that he formally applied to become a member of the CIA. Little well-nigh this event is known, but it was reported that, after his apparent rejection, Dick suggested he take up journalism. "They'll have anybody," he said.

Today, the Sandinistas are dorsum in power and the U.S. continues to support the Chamorro family, with CIA cutout organizations like the National Endowment for Commonwealth sending the Chamorro Foundation millions of dollars in an attempt to help Violeta's daughter Cristina'southward presidential bid.

A fan of Dan?

While Carlson has had multiple public spats with so-called neocons, he has also consistently defended the ones involved in operations against Nicaragua. When Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) grilled Elliott Abrams for his role in aiding Central American massacres, Carlson brushed it off, stating that the events were "over xxx years agone," implying that they were irrelevant. In 1991, a U.South. court convicted Abrams of withholding data from Congress almost his role in supplying weapons to the Contras.

Abrams'south partner in crime in this was Oliver North, who direct sold the Iranian government weapons, using the illegal proceeds to fund the Conta expiry squads, which carried out countless massacres against peasants, women, schoolchildren and other "soft targets." North was also (initially) convicted of his cardinal office in this and so-called Iran-Contra Thing. Carlson, withal, has merely positive things to say about him. "He is a corking man, Ollie North," he said. North has besides appeared every bit a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight on multiple occasions.

In his 1991 college yearbook, Carlson listed himself every bit a member of the Jesse Helms Foundation. Helms is remembered as one of the last openly racist politicians, and is infamous for opposing the civil rights acts and voting rights for racial minorities, and for staging a 16-day Senate filibuster to cake the approval of a federal holiday in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Still, Helms also worked closely with the CIA in Fundamental America to prop up far-right dictatorships and overthrow the Sandinistas.

A bowtie-clad  Carlson pictured in his 1991 college yearbook with membership listed in the Jesse Helms Foundation and Dan White society

The North Carolina senator was crucial in pushing through the Helms-Burton Act – the blockade of Cuba that continues to this day. He too wrote the legislation that established Radio Martí, of which Tucker'south father, Dick, became caput.

While there is and was such an organization every bit the Jesse Helms Foundation, it is probable that its inclusion in Carlson'due south profile was meant as a joke, as it appears next to a claim that he was also role of the "Dan White Society." Dan White was the man who killed Harvey Milk, California's first openly-gay elected politician. In this light, so, it is likely that Carlson was but signaling in a creative way that he supported racism and homophobia.

Defending the CIA – firing back at Gary Webb

The CIA funded its muddied war against Nicaragua by helping the Contras to alluvion America's Black urban centers with crack cocaine. That is the argument put forward by investigative journalist Gary Webb in his "night alliance" serial for The San Jose Mercury News and later in his book of the same name. The articles were widely republished and caused a storm of indignation across the land, with massive public anger being directed towards the agency.

Fortunately, the CIA could count on the loyalty of many friendly journalists, among them Tucker Carlson, who by 1996 was working for neocon publication The Weekly Standard. In an article titled "A Disgraceful Paper Exposé and Its Fans," Carlson launched a wall-to-wall defense force of the organization he had recently applied to join.

Framing it all as a ludicrous accusation, he claimed that in that location was "no evidence" for Webb's claims, and presented the CIA as a noble institution under unfair scrutiny and constant attack from forces inside the U.S. that wanted to bring it down. Far from engaging in the drug trade, he claimed that there is "ample show" that CIA officials had "moved to remove drug traffickers" from the "Nicaraguan resistance" – an interesting choice of words to describe the Contras.

He likewise wrote off the Blackness journalists showing interest in Webb'due south findings equally conspiracy theorists, stating that "few major media outlets accept validated the series past reporting on its charges in any particular," as if to say that this proved its erroneousness. In his book, "Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News," he would later on draw the idea as "ridiculous."

The CIA was very thankful to Carlson for helping muddy the waters and shooting the messenger. A declassified CIA document cites his Weekly Standard article, among others, as aiding them in "managing a nightmare."

Webb was subject to a huge entrada to sully his proper noun and hound him out of journalism. He faced intense scrutiny and criticism from the national security land. In 2004, he was institute in his home in California with two bullets in his caput. His death was officially ruled a suicide. Others believe the messenger was killed.

Spears, Libby, and "semiliterate primitive monkeys"

As the millennium approached, Carlson had begun to establish himself every bit a neoconservative author, reportedly "begging" arch neocon and future Republic of iraq War architect Pecker Kristol to hire him at The Weekly Standard.

After The Weekly Standard, Carlson jumped to CNN, hosting the testify Crossfire. Like Kristol, he supported the invasion of Iraq, even going there to mingle with individual U.South. mercenaries. An image from 2004 shows Carlson posing with two armed employees of DynCorp International, holding a Kalshnikoff rifle himself. Carlson's article presents them as a relatively laudable forcefulness conducting vital operations, rather than an occupying ground forces carrying out war crimes.

Tucker, far right, holds an AK47 as he poses with 2 DynCorp employees in Iraq in 2004

Apart from this soldier cosplaying, Carlson was also involved in one of the well-nigh iconic and bizarre pieces of pro-war propaganda from the time. In a 2003 interview with Britney Spears, Carlson asks the pop superstar what she thought near Iraq and what followers should practise. "Honestly, I recollect we should but trust our president in every decision he makes and should but back up that, you know, and exist true-blue in what happens," she replies. "​​Do you lot trust this president?" Carlson asks. "Yes, I do," she responds. "Splendid!" he exclaims. The clip was replayed endless times and is featured in a number of documentaries virtually the state of war, coming to ascertain an era of pro-war media reporting.

Another top neocon close to the Carlson family is the former primary of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby. Forth with Kristol, Libby was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century, the controversial think tank that pushed for the United states to become a global empire and have out any and all governments that did not comply with its dictates. In 2007, Libby was famously sentenced to 30 months in prison for his role in a CIA scandal, although he was afterwards pardoned by Trump.

By the time of Libby's arraignment earlier a federal estimate, Carlson had his own testify on MSNBC, where he defended Libby, stating "This is a guy who devoted his whole life to the vice president. He'south got little kids. He worked 18 hours every day for 5 years." What Carlson did non note were his own connections to Libby. His begetter Dick had employed Libby equally his lawyer for some time and was even on the Libby Legal Defense Fund. "I'm a expert friend of Scooter Libby," Dick said in a 2006 interview on C-Span; "I've been a friend of Scooter's for years. Scooter Libby is, in my view, a person of great integrity and graphic symbol," he added. Libby and the elderberry Carlson as well worked together to represent Monica Lewinski and help fund her legal fees. Furthermore, Neil Patel had worked for Libby for a number of years, ascension to become his deputy chief policy advisor.

The future Fox News anchor claims that he speedily turned confronting the state of war. However, many of his earliest known anti-war statements do not present him in the best low-cal. "It's across our command. I mean if, somehow, the Iraqis decided to behave like human beings or something. It'south beyond that. Nosotros can't – I don't think nosotros can control. I think that's the whole lesson of Iraq is that information technology is very hard to control other people'southward countries," he said in 2008, calculation a few months later that, "Republic of iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys – that's why information technology wasn't worth invading."

Thus, his objection to the state of war was not that information technology was immoral, only that it was too much of a burden on the U.Due south. On Iraqis, he was explicit, stating in 2006: "They tin can just close the fuck upwards and obey, is my view. And, you know, the second we go out, they're going to be calling for u.s. to return considering they can't govern themselves."

The pot calls O'Reilly blackness

Throughout the 2000s, Carlson's on-air persona was very different to the one he projects today. Sporting a bowtie and a suit, he reveled in his position among the upper-classes. "I'k an out-of-the-closet-elitist… I don't run effectually pretending to be a homo of the people; I'm absolutely non a man of the people, at all." he said in a 2008 radio interview. Even after he joined Fox News as an annotator in 2009, he was still very frank virtually his function in the media. "I am 100% his bitch. Whatsoever Mr. Murdoch says, I do," he said, referring to the bourgeois printing baron who owns Play a joke on News, The Wall Street Journal and a host of other outlets.

He likewise had fiddling time for right-wingers and their faux populism, which he regarded as attempting to appeal to working-course people by offering them faux consciousness. In a 2003 interview, he criticized Fox News ballast Bill O'Reilly, stating:

I retrieve there's a deep phoniness at the centre of his schtick. It's built on the perception that he is the character he plays; he is everyman. He'due south not right-wing, he'due south a populist fighting for y'all against the powers that be… And that's slap-up as a schtick. But I'm just maxim that the moment it is revealed not to be truthful, it's over!.. Because the whole affair is predicated on the fact that he is who he says he is. And nobody is that person. Especially non somebody who makes many millions a yr."

And nonetheless, when Carlson replaced O'Reilly in his 8 p.grand. slot on Fob News, he adopted near the same persona, every bit a fiery, unpredictable outsider standing up for working people and saying what so many are thinking. He has certainly taken a number of positions against the institution consensus. He was the merely mainstream pundit to encompass the Syria-OPCW coverup in 2019 and has generally supported calls to free Australian publisher Julian Assange.

Moreover, his rhetoric about elites in Washington is sometimes eerily reminiscent of Senator Bernie Sanders. For instance, in 2019 he said:

Working-class people of all colors have a lot more in mutual, infinitely more than in mutual with each other than they do with some overpaid MSNBC anchor. And if you were allowed to call back nearly that for long plenty, you might start to go unauthorized ideas about economic science, and that would be disruptive to a very lucrative status quo."

Talk like this has built his brownie in conservative circles and even among portions of the political left. Carlson regularly invites on leftist commentators who are rarely seen on the other networks. Announcer Glenn Greenwald even went so far as to say that he would "consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist."

Yet closer inspection of his position finds that Carlson largely identifies Democrats rather than Republicans as the real problem. "Democrats have get the political party of the elite, professional class," he tells viewers, with the phrases "aristocracy" and "liberal elites" oft used interchangeably. Fifty-fifty in the quote above, he identifies "overpaid MSNBC anchor[s]" as the problem, rather than the upper class more generally.

Tucker's real purpose

Thus, the Fox News host also attempts to aqueduct popular frustrations away from the real causes of economic grief and into a pointless and endless scarlet vs. blue culture war. Carlson has attempted to become his viewers angry nearly how liberals are supposedly claiming that the number "8" and copse are racist, or trying to get you to eat bugs. As media critic Carlos Maza noted:

The goal of Tucker's prove isn't to challenge the aristocracy; it is to make certain that you never realize who they are. To become you lot so mad at atheists, feminists, immigrants, millennials, trans people, pot smokers, college students, vegans, the NFL, Brooklyn witches and Lena fucking Dunham, that you don't get mad at the people who are actually in accuse."

Carlson is mostly quite respectful of his interviewees, his affable personality and charm disarming many. Yet when a invitee actually brought up systemic failures of capitalism and highlighted his network's own part in information technology, Carlson shut information technology downwardly. In 2019, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman was brought on to criticize the World Economical Forum at Davos, only it did not get every bit planned after Bregman went off-script, highlighting the phony nature of Carlson's critique. "You are a millionaire funded past billionaires… And that'south the reason you're non talking nigh these issues… You are non part of the solution, you're part of the problem," he told Carlson. "You're all like 'I'm confronting the globalist aristocracy, blah, blah blah.' Information technology's not very convincing," he added, to which Carlson replied, "Why don't you go fuck yourself!" The interview was terminated and never broadcast.

"The goal of Tucker's show isn't to claiming the elite; it is to make certain that you never realize who they are"

Throughout his career, he has also consistently opposed labor unions – historically, the principal method through which working-class people build consciousness and organize for better wages and weather. Why is this? In a 2009 radio segment, when he was yet to don his O'Reilly-borrowed everyman persona, he laid it out. Referencing his own privileged upbringing, he explained, "I thing you learn when y'all grow up in a castle and look out across the moat every day at the hungry peasants in the hamlet is you don't want to stoke envy among the proletariat."

"Tucker Carlson isn't a populist," Maza said; "he'southward a condom valve; a way to make sure that when the peasants in the village get angry, they don't take it out on the political party giving taxation cuts to him or [Rupert Murdoch], his multi-billionaire boss." Maza noted that Carlson spent twice equally long discussing how liberals call back trees are racist as he did roofing Trump'due south 2017 tax cuts, which were, at the fourth dimension, the biggest giveaway from the poor to the super-wealthy in American history. That Carlson is still an elitist at eye and not some kind of radical, anti-neocon outsider tin can be gauged by the fact that last year he was spotted eating dinner together with President George West. Bush-league at a private residence in Florida.

Carlson has too stoked racial resentment on his bear witness, platforming far-right guests and scaremongering nearly gypsies coming to America and suggesting they would defecate in public. He also claimed that immigrants make the land "poorer and dirtier" and repeated the "not bad replacement" conspiracy theory – an idea that the Democrats are intentionally inviting people of color to the U.Due south. in an attempt to replace the white race.

A vivid disguise

While Carlson has generally opposed increasing tensions with Russian federation, this should not be mistaken as a principled, anti-war stance. Rather, Carlson wants the U.S.' attention to be firmly on what he calls "the Mainland china threat." In a segment entitled "America is existence sold to China," he frames the opioid crunch as a possibly deliberate Chinese set on on the U.S. He has also claimed that Biden has "accelerated America'southward bend to china" and that Beijing is engaged in "wholesale theft" and "relentless espionage" against the United States, in what, for him, amounts to "the biggest story of the decade."

In this position, Carlson is mirroring that of the Pentagon, which long ago began its and then-called "Pivot to Asia." For years, the U.S. armed forces has been edifice upwardly its forces for what the caput of Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, described as the "real possibility" of a nuclear war with Cathay.

In Dec, Carlson attempted to fuse his crusade against woke liberals with an ambitious pro-confrontation message. He and media personality Jesse Kelly agreed that wokeness will lead to hundreds of thousands of Americans dying in battle, presumably because the military has become likewise sissified to win in a coming war against Communist china, a power Carlson described equally a "massive, existent threat." Kelly added:

We don't need a military that's women-friendly. We don't need a war machine that's gay-friendly, with all due respect to the Air Force. We need a military that is apartment-out hostile. Nosotros need a military full of type-A men that desire to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls. Just we don't accept that at present. We can't even get women off of naval vessels. That should be step one. Simply most of them are already meaning anyway."

Carlson nodded along, even as Kelly hinted at genocide confronting Chinese people.

Ultimately, while Carlson – like others – has establish a massive audience for his populist sentiment, careful scrutiny of his background and past statements prove that this is little more than than an act. In the aforementioned mode as Bill O'Reilly, this elitist trust-fund kid has managed to brand his audience believe that he is a radical outsider working on behalf of ordinary people like him, despite the fact that the billionaire-owned Play tricks News has given him a platform and a multimillion-dollar contract.

Despite his family's wealth and close connections with state power, he has convinced millions that he is on their side. Yet Tucker Carlson is no threat to the establishment; in fact, he is 1 of their greatest assets.

Characteristic photo | Graphic by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Historic period: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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