Tucker Carlson's Manufactured America

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Max Boot
@MaxBoot
I had missed Tucker musing in his odious book about suspending democracy: “You don’t give suffrage to irrational populations, for the same reason you wouldn’t give firearms to toddlers: they’re not ready for the responsibility.”

Tucker Carlson’s Manufactured America
The Fox host has a new daytime show, and he’s using it to poison the meaning of patriotism.
theatlantic.com
3:51 PM · Jul 12, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/tucker-carlson-today-americana-fake-log-cabin/619411/

First comes the piece of timber. Then the strip of leather. Then the fence, the mountain, the trees, the river. The pictures whirl, like icons in a Western-themed slot machine, until they land on their final image: the smiling face of Tucker Carlson.

This spring, Carlson began hosting a new show on Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service. Tucker Carlson Today features interviews, one-on-one and in-depth, with Carlson’s preferred guests—skeptics of multiculturalism, skeptics of science, skeptics of “the system” as it currently operates. The show is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, save for one thing: It takes place in a Foxified version of Frontierland.

It begins, episode after episode, with that reel of images. And Carlson hosts it from a gaudy facsimile of a log cabin. The set is constructed almost entirely of wood, or a wood-like substance. Just behind Carlson’s chair is a backlit American flag. The space is otherwise spare: a shelf with a display of tattered books, a sepia-toned globe, a rug, a large desk (made of thick glass, the set’s one concession to cable). A screen mounted on the wall sometimes serves as a portal for the guests who do not come to Carlson’s cabin in person. Its default image, however, offers a window into the cabin’s imagined environs: a farmhouse and a field, overlaid with the words—rendered in lowercase, because all things are casual in the daytime—tucker carlson today.

Log cabins, those mainstays of American iconography, typically suggest hardiness, homeyness, humility. Carlson’s version, though, is a show of force. Tucker Carlson Today, a homestead on a manufactured frontier, is one of the spoils of Fox’s deep investment in its star, evidence of the trust the network has placed in him to continue its basest and most basic project: insisting that some Americans are more American than others. Fox has long reinterpreted manifest destiny as a media product, treating the American mind as a vacant space upon which any dream, or any delusion, might be constructed. The network’s webward expansion continues that effort. Tucker Carlson, spewer of marketable mistrust, has conquered prime time. Now he is coming for the rest of the day.

*snip*

[PSPS]

1. The set sounds like it was fashioned after that of Lonesome Rhodes

The set sounds like it was fashioned after that of Lonesome Rhodes

[Midnight Writer]

2. The surprise here is that Tucker would criticize guns for toddlers.