Preview

Tucker Carlson, easily the most popular host on cable news, has adopted a public persona that is simultaneously evil and insane. In addition to his naked racism and deliberate attempts to enable COVID to infect and kill as many people as possible, there’s his three-part documentary suggesting that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation. Not stopping there, he also has recently taken to defending Alex Jones. He said, for instance that “the truth is he [Jones] has been a far better guide to reality in recent years—in other words, a far better journalist—than, say, NBC News national-security correspondent Ken Dilanian or Margaret Brennan of CBS.” As Peter Wehner notes in The Atlantic, “Jones, the host of InfoWars, was found liable for damages in a defamation lawsuit brought by parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, whose victims included 20 young children. Jones claimed that the shooting was a ‘false flag’ operation carried out by ‘crisis actors.’ He mocked grieving parents, saying, ‘I’ve looked at it, and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying, and they were preplanning before it and rolled out with it.’”

Aaron Blake of The Washington Post has also provided some examples of just a few of Jones’s greatest hits (from which I borrow). For instance, Jones has:
Claimed the federal government has turned “weather weapons” on its citizens.
Claimed the government has used chemicals to turn frogs (and people) gay.
Said people would “let [Robert] Mueller rape kids in front of people, which he did.”
Promoted the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and top aides were running a satanic sex-trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizza restaurant.
Suggested the following were inside jobs and/or false-flag operations: 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, Charlottesville, the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), the Brussels terrorist attack, and the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Falsely connected the Chobani yogurt company and its employment of refugees to child sexual assault and a rise in tuberculosis.

I am repeating and paraphrasing things here, both from Wehner and Blake, and also from myself, though I’ve focused on the snake-oil salesman aspect of his oeuvre. Like them, I have also noted, as does Blake, that “[d]uring divorce proceedings a few years ago, Jones’s own lawyers said the man people saw on Infowars was ‘playing a character.’ ‘He is a performance artist,’ one lawyer said.”

So I have a few questions.
(1) What the hell is up with a country where the leading voice in what we still call “news” would praise this kind of thing?

(2) How is it possible that we elected a president of the United States—the most powerful job in the entire world—who in 2015 appeared on Jones’s show and told him: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”?

(3) What is wrong with a country, where in one of its two main political parties, a candidate (J.D. Vance) thinks the best way to get elected to the Senate in Ohio is by claiming that Jones was “a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow”? (The latter, by the way, received her doctorate at Oxford University.)

(4) How can what we call “polite society” continue to treat Carlson’s employers, Rupert and James Murdoch, and their top lieutenants, and the others who enable them, as solid, respectable citizens, much less as owners of a legitimate news service that is rather more conservative than most, when instead they are destroying our democracy and promoting the destruction of the planet and mass death via purposeful lies and misinformation?

(5) Finally: What, ultimately, is Tucker up to? He can’t possibly believe the things he says. He’s not that stupid or that crazy. He is, however, pretty damn cynical. So my real question is: Where is he going with all this? Carlson is already number one among his competitors and makes more money than anyone can sensibly spend. I understand that it’s nice to be the most popular anything—but the most popular pro-fascist racist hate-monger and virus spreader? King of the goons? Is this what makes a parent proud these days?

The only thing that makes sense to me is that Tucker wants to run for president and he’s figured out—long before most of the rest of us—just how stupid, selfish, malevolent, and easy to manipulate the potential Republican constituency is. He’s going to be the “clubbable” version of Trump; the one who doesn’t rape women, steal from cancer charities, and appoint his idiot children (and their spouses) to run the country. Tucker may be evil but he looks … nice. After Trump, who’s to say it can’t work? But again, what a sad (and crazy) state of affairs that this is the way to do it.

It’s the end of the year, a time when people make charitable donations to bring their tax bills down. The laws that enable this are themselves quite questionable, but even more so is the fact that so many people give money to places that don’t need it and allow the places where it would do the most good to go begging. I’m guessing that the biggest beneficiaries of this habit are Ivy League universities, like say (just for instance), Princeton. But if you read this fine interview by Emma Green with the president of Princeton, you’d know that the City University of New York system—CUNY—(unlike Princeton) “typically serves roughly 240,000 part-time and full-time undergraduate students, along with 30,000 graduate students. CUNY also ranks consistently higher than other universities on measures of social mobility—the ability to lift kids out of poverty and help them surpass their parents, economically speaking.” And if you also read this, you’d know that despite its relative poverty, it remains a engine of social, economic, and intellectual advancement for those who most need it. According to economist Raj Chetty, cited in the Times Magazine, “CUNY lifted almost six times as many low-income students into the middle-class and beyond than all eight Ivy League schools, as well as a handful of other elite private universities, combined. Their success is New York’s success. A city study found that CUNY graduates working in New York State earned $57 billion in 2019 and contributed to the state an estimated $4.2 billion in income taxes.”

I’m not telling you where to send your money. I am, however, saying it’s rather crazy that consumers of elite media in this country almost certainly know more about what was served at Amy Chua’s dinner parties than about the kinds of institutions that do the hard work of educating most of the people in this country who actually go to college. I note, however, that my ex-colleague at The Nation, Katha Pollitt, is telling you where to send your money—or at least making suggestions. In her annual “Holiday Giving” column, Katha recommends donating to the Brooklyn College Immigrant Student Success Office (Brooklyn College is part of the CUNY system) and writes, “College is tough for many students, but immigrant students, including DACA recipients, face special challenges. Despite budget cuts, Brooklyn College is setting up an office to help with mentoring and urgent needs. Whether you’re a current or former Brooklynite like me or just care about public education, you can make a difference by giving to the college’s Immigrant Student Emergency Fund. (Click ‘other’ and add the comment ‘ISSO Immigrant Student Emergency Fund.’)” And yeah, Brooklyn College is where I teach. I even recommended the fund to Katha. But the money will go where it is supposed to; to the students who (often desperately) need it. (I’m also pleased to see Katha recommend the Edward Said Library in Gaza.)

Altercation Gift-Giving Guide, Continued

A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) was the first album released by Pink Floyd following the noisy departure of Roger Waters. If you are buying for a Pink Floyd fanatic (including perhaps yourself) and don’t have the wonderful complete box set, “Echoes,” then you will probably want it; that is, unless you bought 2019’s incredibly expensive “The Later Years” box. Lapse was remastered by David Gilmour and Andy Jackson for that and for this (with new drum tracks by Nick Mason). So now it’s nowhere near as expensive and you get 5.1 surround sound audio, along with a 40-page booklet and lots of other stuff.

The gift-giving guide has been all music so far; time to turn to literature:

One of my favorite books of recent years just came out in paperback, if that’s the kind of gift you want to give someone or yourself. It’s called The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories, by Danielle Evans. It’s a book that, according to one review, “reflects on recent mythologies surrounding American race relations.” I loved it and learned from it. A few other Altercation-approved books I’d recommend, either for oneself or someone whose taste you think you know well enough that they will actually read them, would include:

Fiction
Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads
Amos Oz, Scenes From Village Life
Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus
John Le Carré, Silverview
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed
Gary Shteyngart, Our Country Friends
Max Gross, The Lost Shtetl

Nonfiction
Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Read all about that one here)
Devin Gordon, So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets—the Best Worst Team in Sports
Thomas Dyja, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (Read all about both of those here)
Danny Goldberg, Bloody Crossroads 2020: Art, Entertainment, and Resistance to Trump

Biography
Kai Bird, The Outlier (on Jimmy Carter)
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (paperback original)
Julian Zelizer, Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement
Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956 (just out in paperback)
Neil Gabler, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932–1975 (also in paperback)

Letters
Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence, 1939–1969