The Truthiness of Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson: Even when he's telling the truth, he's lying.

Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson is an ass, and a dangerous one, at that. But there is some merit to the “enough monkeys and enough typewriters” and “stopped clock” hypotheses. We have become so accustomed to Carlson’s paranoid fantasies and his utter disregard for actual facts that our completely understandable first reaction to his recent reticence about the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines was to reject his commentary out of hand. 

But Curmie didn’t get his moniker by cheerful acquiescence to what he’s being told, and Carlson’s skepticism about the hyping of the vaccines doesn’t strike Curmie as totally out of line. 

Carlson makes some good points: no one ought to pay any particular attention to what Melinda Gates has to say about the topic, for example. The desire on the part of Twitter and Facebook to eliminate any real discussion of the legitimacy of the vaccine is disturbing to the extent that the regulations appear to extend beyond the propagation of literally false information. It is true that there has never been a successful vaccine for a similar disease. The proclamation by Ian McKellen (a.k.a. “the Gandalf actor” – is McKellen “He who must not be named” on Fox?) that he felt “euphoric” after the injection is indeed silly. 

And the rollout does in fact have something of the hype surrounding “a Hollywood blockbuster or the new iPhone.” Finally, it is legitimate to wonder if drugs that are authorized on an emergency basis have been subjected to the same level of objective scrutiny as those which go through the normal vetting process. 

So Tucker Carlson, for once in his shabby little life, isn’t—for a brief moment—completely mendacious or completely insane. Here’s one of his most controversial statements, at least according to the left-leaning press (here, for example):

How are the rest of us supposed to respond to a marketing campaign like this? Well, nervously. Even if you’re strongly supportive of vaccines—and we are—even if you recognize how many millions of lives have been saved over the past 50 years by vaccines—and we do—it all seems a bit much. It feels false, because it is. It’s too slick. Better to treat Americans like adults, explain the benefits, be honest about the risks, and let the rest of us decide.

There’s nothing particularly problematic about this paragraph except for “It feels false, because it is.” Curiously, which is to say not curiously at all, that Moment of Glib is omitted from the pseudo-transcript on the Fox News website, although the video link to what was actually said reveals the remark quite clearly. Funny how the stupidest thing he says in the open doesn’t make it to the “article.” Who’da thunk it, right? 

Still, based on that first paragraph, Curmie wondered if he’d need to defend Tucker Freaking Carlson the way he once did for the likes of Sarah Palin and Melania Trump. 

Then came the rest of the harangue. As expected, alas, the general tone of sense did not endure. After all, Carlson’s show has highlighted a steady stream of quacks, charlatans, and conspiracy theorists on COVID matters. The only people who don’t appear are the ones who actually know what they’re talking about (or are honest about it, as the case may be). Carlson has long endeavored, for example, to impugn the competence and integrity of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who, Curmie will go so far to suggest, knows a little more about dealing with pandemics than does a BA in History. He’s back at it in this piece, too, with the same predictable result of looking like an anti-intellectual junior high kid being a putz to impress an equally lazy-minded cheerleader with what he presumes passes for wit. 

So we get stuff like the claim that Fauci’s prediction of a COVID surge after Thanksgiving didn’t come true. Lots of idiots people travelled, you see, and “millions and millions” didn’t die. “Clearly, Tony Fauci and the CDC were wrong.” This would be a pretty significant indictment… if it were true. Of course, a lot of people didn’t travel—Carlson is careful to deceive while telling the truth. He says, for example, that there were more flights on the day before Thanksgiving this year than “on the same date last year.” Not the same day (relative to Thanksgiving); the same date, which would have been the Monday after Thanksgiving last year. Huh. I wonder how to account for that “increase”… 

Moreover, there was a change in the COVID statistics. Nationwide, the numbers for the week before Thanksgiving were a daily average of 171,653 new cases and 1537 deaths. The disease takes between 7-14 days to manifest. So let’s look at the period from one to two weeks after Thanksgiving weekend: daily averages of 220,169 new cases and 2431 deaths: increases of 28% in new cases and 58% in deaths over a fortnight or so. 

Is that a “surge”? Well, that may be debatable, but where Curmie comes from, those are significant increases for that short a period of time and with a sample size this large. And, of course, all those newly infected people were also contagious: the four days with the highest death and new diagnosis rates since the pandemic began came on consecutive days this week. 

As mentioned above, Carlson’s forte is to actively deceive while technically telling the truth. (Insert famous Inspector Clouseau “does your dog bite” clip here). Here’s another example: “One county in Colorado just noticed that 40% of the Coronavirus deaths they were reporting also has gunshot wounds. Two out of five.” Sounds pretty convincing, right? I mean, wow, if nearly half of the reported COVID deaths aren’t really COVID deaths… 

Thing is, Carlson implies without saying that the “two out of five” figure relates to a significant number of cases. Nope. When he says “two out of five,” he means literally two out of literally five: the cases in one county, population less than 15,000, in a week. So we now have documentation that of the 4323 reported COVID deaths in Colorado, .04% might have been unrelated. Shocking! Again, to be fair, there is more than a little legitimacy to the argument that people who are COVID-positive and die of non-health-related causes (murder, or automobile accident, or whatever), ought not to be counted as COVID deaths, but Curmie’s natural reaction is to reject Carlson’s smarmy manipulation even more than the perhaps not entirely trustworthy official data. 

Then there’s this:

States like Texas and Florida… allow people to eat in restaurants and see their families, and they still have fewer coronavirus deaths than New York State, a place where it’s a crime to live a normal life. Texas and Florida have more people than New York does and a whole lot more freedom, yet New York has seen more people die from COVID-19. Explain that one.

Curmie, ever the gentleman, is happy to provide such an explanation. This is yet another example of conscious and intentional deceit through manipulation of statistics. The totals since the beginning of the pandemic hardly tell the current story. 

After the initial outbreak which clobbered New York in April, and after the imposition of those allegedly freedom-depriving policies designed to limit the spread of the disease, things have been different. In the last month, for example, both Texas and Florida, where there is “freedom,” have had more new cases and more deaths than New York. Texas, for example, has had well more than twice as many deaths, and over 76% more new cases than New York in the last month. True, Texas and Florida have larger populations, but not by that margin: on a per capita basis, both the infection rate and the death rate for the last month are higher, in the latter case over 1/3 higher, in those “free” states. 

But if you want to compare states on a per capita basis, let’s look, for instance, at the super-spreader sanctuary of North Dakota, where despite a population density less than 2.5% that of New York, the last month’s per capita infection rate is more than double the Empire State’s, and the COVID death rate is over five (!) times greater. (You will recall, Gentle Reader, that low population density, not intelligent leadership, was the right’s argument for the success of New Zealand in controlling the virus.) So the palaver about (recklessly employed) “freedom” being safer than prudence is, well, just more fecal matter from a Fox host who cherry-picks numbers to fit his considerably less than honest purposes. Imagine Curmie’s surprise. 

Finally, there’s the irony, not to say hypocrisy, of whining about the lack of a reliable and trustworthy vaccine for a pandemic that Fox in general and Carlson in particular have been telling us for months doesn’t really exist. But some doctors are saying the inoculation might not be completely effective until virtually everyone gets it (Carlson distorts these quotes, too, but you already get the point)… so let’s instill a little doubt in the population about its safety and/or effectiveness, using whatever means necessary to create precisely that fear. Yeah, that’s the ticket! The fact that a little reticence about the vaccine’s efficacy might be appropriate ultimately comes across as little more than coincidental to a rant that’s ultimately about Tucker Carlson wanting to feel important. There is no difference between truth and falsehood for him; both are merely rhetoric. 

So this is a complex situation not unlike the proverbial little boy who cried wolf. It’s yet another case where simply telling the truth—what Carlson repeatedly accuses “our current leadership” (carefully avoiding mentioning by name the incompetent and uncaring POTUS) and Silicon Valley (!?) of not doing—would have made legitimate skepticism the centerpiece of Carlson’s rant. Alas, he is pathologically incapable of doing that.