There are so many things to say about Tucker Carlson, none of them good. Because even during the rare times when he says something that appears thoughtful on the surface, there's always a deep vein of anti-intellectualism and an embrace of populist, authoritarian code words. Like this conversation, where he blames the coronavirus epidemic not on Trump's criminal negligence, but on.... public health experts?
"What would've happened for example if we would’ve adopted a more conventional response to this epidemic? What if we asked the elderly and the immunocompromised and anyone else facing statistically higher rates of risk to stay inside, cloistered away," Carlson said.
"And then at the same time allowed the rest of the population to use informed common sense and continue to work? What if we’d done that a month ago? Would the death rate today be much higher than it is now? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know. But it’s clearly a conversation we should’ve had before we locked the entire country down and put ten million people out of work.
"But we didn’t have that conversation. Instead we outsourced the decision to public health officials. And that's a strange irony of the moment we’re living through. One of the main lessons of this crisis is that the public health establishment failed us badly."
Sure, Tucker. That's the lesson. Not putting a narcissistic, pathologically indifferent reality TV star in a position where the problems were so far over his swollen, self-interested head.
"We’re being asked to trust these same people without hesitation and for the most part we are doing that. In other words, the experts failed -- yet the experts now have more power than ever before. It’s bewildering. In fact, it’s reminiscent of 2008 when reckless behavior by the banks crippled the economy and crushed the middle class. But when it came time to fix it we put bankers in charge of the clean up."
Wait, what? Public health experts who warned that if we didn't do extensive testing, we'd have to lock down the country, ARE JUST LIKE THE BANKERS WHO DELIBERATELY SOLD BAD MORTGAGES SO THEY COULD MAKE MONEY BETTING AGAINST THEM? Not to mention that they're NOT in charge, the Orange Cheeto is.
"Now, this is not an argument against expertise. It's not even a populist argument. Of course bankers understand finance, epidemiologists understand coronavirus far more than most people do. So turning to experts in crisis makes sense and we should, and hopefully we always will. But we can't allow experts to make the big decisions. That's not their job. This is a democracy. It is our job."
You shameless, disingenuous shill. You damage democracy every time you open your smug little mouth. You just don't care.
