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.

Carlson's supposedly intellectualized arguments against immigrants and minorities have made him

the darling of the alt-right. The daily stormer claims

him as a poster child, and lately the declaration, Hyle Tucker, is being used without irony. And now

courtesy of the Fox-obsessed liberal media watchdog media matters comes a trove of archival Carlson

rhetoric that dispenses with

intellectual pretense altogether. It's just hate speech.

Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate primitive monkeys.

There's some overtalk there, but he's saying semi-literate primitive monkeys, referring to Iraqis. All of them, I suppose.

It's just one of many decade-old clips from Shakjok Bubba the Love Sponges radio show.

Carlson, a frequent guest there, has also heard denouncing women in the most vulgar terms, and his defense

of whiteness goes to a very creepy place.

...