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Tucker Carlson Blames Women’s Empowerment for Men’s Alcohol Abuse, Incarceration Rates, the Entire Fall of Mankind

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On his Fox News show Wednesday, Tucker Carlson was back on one of his favorite subjects: how the world is conspiring against men. With a chyron under him reading “Men in decline as ruling class looks away,” he explains how it all went wrong. Spoiler: It’s women’s fault.

Over the last few years, he says, “Male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals, and both of them are traditional employers of women. In many areas, women suddenly made more than men.”

He says not to “applaud that as a victory for feminism,” even though what he’s describing has nothing to do with progress for women, but a detriment to men, which, despite what men like Carlson believe, are not the same thing.

Instead, he asks us to “consider some of the effects.” He then explains what “study after study has shown,” though he doesn’t actually cite any existing studies, “when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them.”

“Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t,” he continues, apparently seeing himself as qualified to tell women what we should want in our personal relationships. Carlson seems to think that if we listened to him and his advice on romance and careers, all the world’s problems would disappear. He’s like a misogynistic Cassandra.

He continues, “Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow. More drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation. This is not speculation, it’s not propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s social science. We know it’s true. Rich people know it best of all, that’s why they get married before they have kids. That model works.”

Instead of following the model of “rich people,” though, “rural America now looks a lot like Detroit,” where “decades of badly designed social programs had driven fathers from the home.”

Carlson’s entire argument seems to be that immigrants and “foreign workers” are taking jobs from “native-born Americans,” and women are keeping their jobs and choosing them over men, meaning women and POC are responsible for white men’s unemployment, substance abuse, incarceration, and basically every other problem in their lives. Rather than ask how any of these things, including fathers being “driven … from the home” also affect women, he blames women, as well as society at large for these problems.

For someone that has accused women of “playing the victim,” he sure doesn’t seem to think men have a lot of agency in making their own decisions.

Of course, we’d expect nothing less from a man who has previously called belief in a patriarchy “a sign of mental illness,” agreed heartily with a guest who accused feminists of “trying to disappear males,”  and once encouraged male victims of domestic violence in straight relationships not to come forward because getting abused by a woman is “embarrassing.”

What I’m saying is the man’s opinions, they’re garbage.

(via Media Matters, image: screencap)

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Author
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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