On his Fox News show Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson managed to do the seemingly impossible and hit yet another moral low. In the wake of the recent mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois that left at least seven people dead and dozens more injured, Carlson has decided that he knows the root cause of America’s mass violence problem. No, it’s not a lack of basic common-sense gun laws, a culture of white supremacy, or anything you might guess. According to Tucker, the problem is women.
Showing a photo of the 21-year-old charged with murders, Carlson marveled that he was able to buy guns legally, given that he was already deemed a “clear and present danger” by authorities and, according to Carlson’s expert opinion, “seemed like a nutcase.”
“Why didn’t anyone raise an alarm?” he asked.
Of course, there were alarms raised, and law enforcement had to intervene twice in 2019 after the man made threats against himself and others. And yes, obviously, this person should not have had access to high-powered rifles! But instead of speaking about the obvious need for gun control laws, Carlson instead made a wild leap to baseless claims of over-medication and nagging women.
Maybe no “alarm” was raised, Carlson said, “because he didn’t stand out. Maybe because there are a lot of young men in America who suddenly look and act a lot like this guy. It’s not an attack. It’s just true. Like [Robert] Crimo, they inhabit a solitary fantasy world of social media, porn and video games. They’re high on government-endorsed weed.”
Just wait, things are about to get worse:
They’re numbed by the endless psychotropic drugs that are handed out in every school in the country by crackpots posing as counselors and of course, they’re angry. They know that their lives will not be better than their parents. They’ll be worse. That’s all but guaranteed. They know that. They’re not that stupid and yet, the authorities in their lives, mostly women, never stops lecturing them about their so-called privilege. “You’re male. You’re privileged.” Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that.
Tucker: The authorities in their lives, mostly women, never stop lecturing them about their so-called male privilege. A lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised? A shockingly large number have been prescribed psychotropic drugs. pic.twitter.com/bB9Nb4CHQ1
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 6, 2022
I know Fox News has had to admit in court that Carlson doesn’t actually believe a lot of the things he says, but I do genuinely believe that he is incapable of imagining anything worse—anything unhealthier or unhappier—than being asked to be aware of your own privilege. Of course the heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune, who rode a wave of nepotism right into a career in journalism, can think of nothing worse than being reminded that privilege exists. In his mind, and in this hypothetical scenario based on nothing that he’s now put forth, the worst villain in America is nagging women for berating young men to the point of somehow forcing them to commit violence.
That’s a staggering level of “look what you made me do” victim-blaming on a mass scale. In a world where an estimated one in three women worldwide have experienced intimate partner violence, and where nearly 40% of women murdered are killed by an intimate partner—with the vast majority of that violence being perpetrated by men—the last thing we need is a baseless straw-man narrative blaming a nonexistent epidemic of hypothetical shrews driving men to commit mass murder.
(featured image: screencap)
