By David Futrelle
In recent days, Tucker Carlson — the whitest of Fox News’ many white supremacists — has taken a break from calling immigrants “dirty” to focus again on one of his other favorite topics: How gosh darn unfair the world is to men, especially white ones like him.
Here are few, er, recent highlights from his show.
In this clip, he suggests that when women earn more than men, society falls apart.
Tucker Carlson says women making more money than men leads to "more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed for the next generation" pic.twitter.com/gpAKgy0snV
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) January 3, 2019
And here he is the next night doubling down on his comments — then providing “evidence” for them in the form of studies that don’t actually examine the issue of which gender earns more.
Tucker Carlson is lying about what he said last night
Last night he said that women making more money than men leads to higher incarceration, drug abuse and fewer families. Tonight he cited studies showing lower wages for men are the cause but no mention of women making more pic.twitter.com/hp9FYmj5JP
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) January 4, 2019
He continued with some nonsense about how criticizing the sort of bullshit he regularly says is leading to the “death of creativity,” the end of serious science, and a “new dark age.” I guess he’s feeling the sting now that advertisers are dropping him over his ever-more-blatant racism.
Then he spoke with a right-wing ideologue who, among other things, suggested that war was a male virtue.
"Males are being constantly disparaged"
"We need to valorize males"
"Masculinity is not toxic"
"Valor, courage, chivalry, heroism and war [are] uniquely male"
"There's a lot of females that are angry for no reason"
"It's almost impossible to find [sexism] today" pic.twitter.com/KGhdsO6YW7
— jordan (@JordanUhl) January 4, 2019
Of course, Tucker has been spouting these MRA talking points for a while now.
Here’s a handy — yet mercifully brief — compilation from Media Matter for America.
https://twitter.com/mnfineman/status/1080935888811712512
Here he is complaining that while people talk about female empowerment all the time, we never hear how men are doing. Which I have to admit is a pretty bold claim, given that men never fucking stop talking about themselves and how their feelings are hurt by everything up to and including animated shows for girls that make their main characters’ titties smaller than they used to be.
.@TuckerCarlson announces new recurring segment on "Men in America"
"We hear a lot about female empowerment in this country" pic.twitter.com/4u5kMqA2Ea
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) March 7, 2018
Here he is complaining that Democrats are destroying society by refusing to acknowledge that men and women are different, dammit!
Tucker Carlson wants the GOP's 2018 message to be "men and women are different" "and when you pretend otherwise you destroy society" pic.twitter.com/beeREVgkVX
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) April 25, 2018
And here he is claiming that Democrats think all men are automatically guilty.
Tucker Carlson: Democrats have already reached a conclusion. "How do they know for certain what happened 36 years ago? Well because Brett Kavanaugh is a man, therefore he is guilty. All men are guilty. It's the Y chromosome" pic.twitter.com/bd5prm6iEA
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) September 19, 2018
Well, that’s probably more Tucker Carlson than anyone needs to watch in a day.
If you want to know what’s going on over on Fox News without having to sit through that shit on a nightly basis, I’d strongly recommend following both @ndrew_lawrence and @peltzmadeline, both of whom monitor Fox News for Media Matters for America, and who regularly post clips and screencaps of Fox nonsense.
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@Professor Fate
It’s been a while since I read Morte de Arthur but my memory of the chivalrous behaviour of the knights was: come upon another knight, challenge knight to duel, one knight wins but the other asks if they can remove their helmets to see the face of the brave foe who bested them, remove helmet and discover their opponent was their long lost brother/cousin/neighbour etc, then proclaim while dying that it is a tragedy to die but at least I’ve been killed by a friend. In other words, chivalry was stab first, ask questions later, and accidentally kill those you love. So not exactly a great model for society.
@Goddess Asherah
I say trust some white men– just not the reactionary, constipated ones who think they’re owed everything by everyone else on account of being well… white men.
I may be biased. I’m married to a white dude.
@reggie, the neighbour’s cat and rare mutant
Actually chivalry was a concept mostly born out of Christian doctrine in the 12th and 13th century. Several “codes of chivalry” were written and they represent basically the first written “rules of warfare” in the western world designed to limit the extand of bloodshed and cruelty in wars. Of course, there are many codes of chivalry and they did change over time. They were also very informal, not laws, more like customs or moral philosophy to be more accurate. The only large point in common to all those codes was the idea to spare as much as possible civilians from harm (namely women and children), fighting fairly (no ambush, betrayals or assassinations) and treating prisonners with dignity (no torture and public humiliation). Chivalry also extanded to peace time by encouraging warriors to value loyalty to their word (the cornerstone of the medieval legal and political system), self sacrifice and gentleness toward women and children above all else. Arthurian legends, and other chanson de geste, did help cristalise these concepts in military and popular culture. The specifics varied tremendously and their application even more. Chivalry was also intended to be a universal concept that should and could be shared by warriors of all nation and religion despite being largely informed by Christian theology and morality. Saladin, a Kurde and a Muslim, was cited often as an example of chivalrous warrior and commander in medieval Europe. Ironically, by mentionning courage, valor, war and chivalry, Carlson display his ignorance of chivalry since it encompass the three others.
@epronovost:
Anybody surprised that Carlson is ignorant about chivalry please raise your hand… anybody? Anybody? I don’t see any hands out there…
Really, it’s unlikely Carlson’s idea of ‘chivalry’ extends much past ‘hold the door open for a lady (and consider her an ungrateful b***h if she complains about it)’. Purely the paternalistic thin-skin version of ‘benign sexism’.
@Jenora Feuer
If he actually knew what chivalry was about, he would probably dismiss as a “feminine” thing if it weren’t for the part about martial valor (and even then, the part about martial valor is overshadowed by a lot of rules to limit violence). It was a frequent mention in medieval litterature and philosophy to imply that chivalrous thoughts arised more naturally in women hence why a knight should look-up to his lady for moral strength. This isn’t that surprising when you take into account that the principles of chivalry and courtly love were spread a lot at the impulse and with the support of the powerful French and English monarch Eleanor of Aquitaine who was a patron to art and philosophy during her time. So much for it being “uniquely masculine”.
I think your assesment of Carlson’s idea of chivalry is pretty much spot on. If you show Carlson the moon, he will look at your finger.
He looks like he needs some Dulcolax, and picture books explaining basic history.
@Jenora
So, basically the revisionist Victorian concept of “chivalry” as opposed to the actual chivalry of the time where a bunch of insecure rich jerks decided they were special and slapped each other with gloves.
On a more serious note, I think Michael Brooks of the Majority Report is correct that Tucker is taking what is an obvious class critique of society (feminism can’t just be “let’s appoint women as CEOs”) and is channeling the anger in the direction of the vulnerable as opposed to his corporate masters. But on a less serious note, if I invent a time machine, I’m dropping him off in 12th Century England to deal with The Anarchy.
“Everybody’s saying how great Empress Matilda is, but have they thought about how this is affecting Stephen of Blois…?”
@eprovonost, Katamount:
There’s a quote I liked from Peter David’s book, Knight Life (in which King Arthur wakes up in the modern world and runs for Mayor of New York), where Merlin is describing to someone (I think Gwen deVere; yes, bad pun names abounded) about chivalry and Arthur’s court:
Not exactly historically accurate, of course, and elides the fact that even ‘men’ only really included ‘men with some noble standing’.
Honestly, I think part of the problem is that the modern concept of ‘chivalry’ like Carlson’s tends to draw exclusively from various interpretations of Le Morte d’Arthur (which was already fanfic on top of the older Arthurian legends). So, knock out all the background support under this deliberately romanticised version of the idea, then try to rebuild history from preferred principles to look like that ‘ideal’.
I’m hardly an expert on chivalry. But history has some fascinating texture to it, and so much is kind of applied psychology… human nature really hasn’t changed much over the last many centuries even as the context around it has.
I’m sure someone’s mentioned it, but the Russians in WW2 had women fighters, and the Germans were shit-scared of them because they were VICIOUS.
Also, Boudaccea? Amazons? Someone’s not even trying to make a valid argument.