Tucker Carlson. Photo: file.
Politics unfolds through communication processes. There is no politics without the transmission of meaning, content or symbolic universes. Exercising democracy means interacting with and consulting citizens on projects, commitments and stories to be discussed and implemented in relation to public policies. The manner of conducting this debate in the face of citizenship may involve calls for consensus, antagonism, or hatred. The first two are compatible with democracy. The third presupposes the breakdown of the various constitutional webs that codify the social contracts of coexistence.
The language of contempt for certain groups has become commonplace over the past two decades: What was subsumed as prejudice and kept secret in private life erupted as neoliberalism began to falter and its dominant groups began to glimpse a crisis that is becoming evident today with the emergence of a global order in tension and strife. The cultural response of the financial model – which supports neoliberalism – enters its phase of intolerance when it perceives that it can no longer positively control the world they believed to be immutable and eternal.
The dismissal of the presenter of the American cable channel Fox, Tucker Carlson, appears as a paradigmatic case in which to analyze the extremist and threatening tendency that most of the communication platforms have adoptedin its attempt to imitate the provocative and offensive attribute that currently characterizes social networks.
On April 18, Dominion Voting Systems, a vote-counting company, accepted an out-of-court settlement with Fox Corporation, owned by Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch, who is ordered to pay US$787.5 million, about 50% of the damages claim he is bringing domination. A week later, Fox decided to fire Carlson — sort of a baby Etchecopar mixed with Viviana Canosa — to make him bear the token cost of extrajudicial surrender.
Fox is the most-watched cable network in the United States and since the early 21st century has spearheaded the sowing of irritation, sparking anger and paranoia among groups frustrated with their hopes of joining the promised American way of life. so frustrated, progressive over the financial crisis of 2008. To avoid attributing this social deterioration to the logic of the prevailing economic system – true cause of instability -, Fox and other acolyte platforms have pushed the demonization of internal enemies similar to those maliciously created in Latin America and the Caribbean.
denials
In all cases, the dominant discourse appeals to the fears caused by the situation of uncertainty and volatility characteristic of financialized markets without state and supranational regulation. These fears are the basis of organized paranoia about the malice and conspiracy of certain individual or collective social actors. Blame can be placed on Kirchneristas, immigrants, Mapuches, Islamists, Piqueteros, Chavistas, “Planeros”, Afro descendants, vaccine advocates, members of LGTB groups or groups promoting gender perspectives.
Carlson, like his Latin American colleagues – also financed by magnates or tax corporations of hegemonic neoliberalism – has devoted himself to vilifying the homosexual population, seeing them as a remnant of society’s “declining testosterone levels”. Similarly, in March, a former Fox producer, Abby Grossberg, who was responsible for providing information to the judiciary regarding the Dominion lawsuit, accused Carlson and Fox of regularly facilitating misogynist and Jew-phobic comments.
Host Carlson has used racist, xenophobic and anti-racist rhetoric on his show The Tucker Carlson Tonight for the past seven years and up to the second week of April. On several shows, he has appealed to the Great Replacement dream, which spreads a fable based on government agencies’ alleged conspiracy to replace white Americans with immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America: Democrats are “trying to replace the current electorate… with new people, more obedient Third World voters”.
Carlson’s nightly speeches, which reached three million viewers, informed about climate change denial to protect big energy companies hit by environmental disasters. In one of his most famous writings, he went so far as to say that “all theory [del clima damnificado por la especie humana] it’s absurd.” As massive wildfires raged across the western United States in 2020, he denied his connection to global warming, arguing, “To Democrats, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky. You can’t see it, but you can rest assured that it is everywhere and deadly.”
Fox’s denialism is reproduced in its extractivist and neocolonial versions in Latin America, where concentrated groups encourage the expansion of agricultural frontiers at the expense of forest and wetland destruction. The spokesmen of the financialized right also unequivocally apostrophe for the free carrying of arms and even against all forms of state institutions, such as currency.
On August 19, 2018, Trump’s legal adviser and former Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, uttered a phrase that characterizes the era of global right-wing communication: “Truth is not truth.” [la verdad no es la verdad] for – he added – “the truth is one’s version of what is true, but it is not the truth”. Carlson and the domestic epigones of misrepresentation follow the pattern imposed in 1964 by Rush Limbaugh, who – in a paranoid format – blamed the “four corners of deception” for a social change that was destroying conservative society: government, the science, academia and independent media. Limbaugh claimed – among other characterizations that racist groups still support today – that scientists look very serious in their white coats, but “they are actually funded by the left”.
Press operations to demonize popular speakers, chronic misinformation, media manipulation in the service of building internal enemies, mobilizing the will to defend against preordained dangers, demonizing fragile collective actors daubed with expressions of intolerance and vulgarity They have always been the prologues of great confrontations or massacre. In Latin America, the major communications corporations are currently operating within the configuration of a shared feeling of dislike and contempt for workers and subordinate groups. Confrontation with these hostile reports should not be confused with restricting freedom of expression as a defense mechanism against covert or explicit incitement to brute force, war of all against all and death.
(Recorded from The Rocket to the Moon)