So what?
The Media Matters article in question can be summed up nicely by its headline and subhead:
“In unearthed audio, Tucker Carlson… said he "love[s]" the idea of young girls sexually experimenting, used sexist terms to refer to a number of women, and defended statutory rape.”
Carlson went further than that, unironically defending comics featuring child porn (“Hey, a drawing can’t be underage”) and generally showing himself to be a borderline-dangerous private citizen.
So he’s been publicly called on the carpet and ridiculed around the internet, typically with the LOL-faced assumption that boom! his career ends now.
Except it hasn’t; except he delivered an angry non-apology, and employer Fox said nothing at all. The career-ending objection is reduced to performative powerlessness: a child could have the same effect on Carlson that public objection does.
Why does this matter? Because while repugnant, it’s also an important bellwether.
Carlson is showing a post-Kavanaugh conviction that he can openly blow off evil behavior and threaten his exposers into silence with impunity. Kavanaugh, in effect, strikes me as having been a culture shift for middle-aged male Republican politicians and pundits. This is where they are now: Trumps all the way down.
It doesn't matter, of course, that these men’s demonstrations of their power gives the lie to their claims of victimization, “white genocide” and so forth. The new answer to having your double standard exposed is, once again, to openly threaten your exposers.
It’s tempting to say “they’ve always been this awful.” While on some level that may be true, the maxim has the effect of normalizing disintegration in our national discourse. Many may always have been this awful, but after Trump, they admitted it happily; after Kavanaugh, the admission becomes a naked threat. Carlson’s own disintegration over time is a case in point: when the Daily Stormer praises him without Fox pushback, this is new.
Rather than laugh at each Republican embarrassment and expect it—wrongly—to end them, we need to see that these people are beyond shame and have the Party and the mob at their backs. The conditions in Greece, similar to ours, suggest that this will outlast Trump, with the likes of Carlson, Steve King, and Gianforte as possible future Presidential candidates.
Boycotts of entertainment personalities, as some have suggested as a solution for Carlson, feel like a moral victory to us but appear to have no effect on whether these people come or go; far-right TV will find its funding regardless of ads and ratings.
Laughing at them only feels good until they cause more innocents to be attacked, again with impunity.
We need a new strategy—and we need it now.