Fox News Channel primetime host Tucker Carlson has already had quite the July. On the plus side,

the latest ratings for his show have made him officially the most watched cable news host

in the history of the cosmos. On the other side of the ledger, advertisers are fleeing his show

on the grounds of not wishing

to be associated with lies and hate speech. Oh, also, his headwriter and primary douche whisperer,

Blake Neff, was forced out of Fox after his explicitly racist and misogynist social media

posts were unmasked online. The last time Carlson was in the headlines with the

March 2019 resurrection of his very own hate speech, we spoke to writer Liz Lenz, whose profile of the

cable news, Enfant truly, truly terrible, plumbed the depth of his soul, such that it is. We replay that for you now,

complete with the original introduction, because that's where a lot of the most damning tape is.

This is on the media. I'm Bob Garfield. Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit

the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more

divided. To say that Tucker Carlson toys with dog whistles and nakedly white supremacist

tropes on his nightly Fox News broadcast is, at this point in his long career and commentary,

cliche.

But of course, cliches don't come from nowhere.

The spectacle of illegal immigrants separated from their children at the border has ceased to be

a news story in any traditional sense of the term.

It is now an event, a kind of competition in which elites vie to see

who can reach greater heights of rhetorical,

excess, and self-righteous posturing.

He does performance art, really.

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