Media Matters trying to silence Tucker Carlson, but he fights back with epic response

Because the Left knows that it loses the argument anytime the merits of its policies are discussed, it has weaponized selective outrage in order to silence the most effective voices against it. Sunday night, timed to make headlines and generate Twitter storms as the new week began, Media Matters, the Soros-funded nonprofit whose donors receive tax deductions, launched an attack intended to drive advertisers away from Tucker Carlson’s prime time show on Fox News Channel. Their purported evidence:

Between 2006 and 2011, Tucker Carlson spent approximately an hour a week calling in to Bubba the Love Sponge, a popular shock jock radio program where he spoke with the hosts about a variety of cultural and political topics in sometimes-vulgar terms. During those conversations, Carlson diminished the actions of Warren Jeffs, then on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list for his involvement in arranging illegal marriages between adults and underage girls, talked about sex and young girls, and defended statutory rape.
Carlson, who was hired by Fox News in 2009, also used sexist language to talk about women, including then-co-workers at NBC and public figures. He referred to Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis Stewart as “cunty,” called journalist Arianna Huffington a “pig,” and labeled Britney Spears and Paris Hilton “the biggest white whores in America.” He also said that women enjoy being told to “be quiet and kind of do what you’re told” and that they are “extremely primitive.” (Italics in original)

Last night, Tucker responded in the opening segment of his show, well-worth almost 7 minutes of your time, refusing to play the outrage game, and calling out the effort to silence voices that the Left cannot defeat with fact and reason:

Rush transcript via Grabien:

Good evening and welcome to “Tucker Carlson tonight” anybody who’s ever been caught in its gears can tell you, the great American outrage machine is a remarkable thing. One day you’re having dinner with your family, imagine everything is fine. Next, your phone exploding with calls from reporters who read you snippets from a press release written by democratic Party operatives that the man to know how you could possibly could have said something so awful and
— it’s a bewildering moment, especially when the quotes in question are more than a decade old. If not what you can do to respond, it’s pointless to try to talk about word spoken in jest or taken out of context, or no resemblance to what you think or want for the country. None of that matters, none of that cares. You know the role you’re required to play. You are a sinner that needs the forgiveness of Twitter. So you show a statement of deep contrition, apologize for the profusely, promise to be a better person going forward with the guidance of your patrician consultant companies and money to whatever organization claims that represents the people you supposedly affected. You sit back and brace for a wave and stories about your apology, all of which simply pretext for attacking you again. In the end, you get fired, lose your job. Nobody defends you. Your neighbors opened their Gates as you pull into the driveway. You are ruined. No matter how bad it gets, the matter how despised and humiliated you may be, there is one thing you could never do, one thing that is absolutely not allowed: You can never acknowledge the comic observer the absurdity of the whole thing for you can never live in the face of the mob. You have to pretend the people yelling at you are somehow your moral superiors. You have to assume what they say they are mad about is what they are actually mad about. You have to take them at face value. You must pretend this is a debate about virtue and not about power. Your critics are arguing from principal and not for partisanship. No matter what they take from you in the end, you must continue to pretend that these things are true. You are bad, they are good, the system is on the level. But what if we stop pretending for a minute? What if we acknowledge what’s actually going on in? One side is deadly serious. They believe that politics is war. They are not interested in abstractions or principles, rules or traditions. They seek power and they claim to win it with whatever it takes. If that includes getting you fired or silencing you, threatening your family at home, throwing you in prison, okay. They know what their goal is. If you are in way, they will crush you but what’s interesting is how reliably the other side pretends that none of this is happening. Republicans in Washington do a fairly credible imitation of an opposition party. They still give speeches, they tweaked quite a bit, they make certain noises about how liberals are bad. On the deepest level, it’s all a pose. In their minds, where it matters, Republican leaders are controlled by the left. They know exactly what they are allowed to say and believe it or they know what the rules are. They may understand that those rules are written by the very people who seek their destruction, they ruthlessly enforce them anyway. Republicans in Washington police their own with a never ending enthusiasm. Like trustees in a prison that dutifully report back to the ward and hoping for perks, nobody wants to be called names, nobody wants — how many times have you seen it happen? Some conservative leader will say something stupid or too far outside the bounds of received wisdom’s for the moral guardians of cable news? Twitter goes bonkers by the mob demands response. The first people calling for the destruction of that people are the public end. You saw with the covington catholic high school kids, you saw it all the time. Paul Ryan did the same before him. A couple of years ago, the entire Democratic Party decided to deny the biological reality of sex differences, an idea that is insane and dangerous. Republican leaders decided to not criticize them for it. This is a system built on on the seat and forced silence but hypocrisy is its hallmark. In Washington, it’s considered rude to ask how exactly it works but why are the people who considered Bill Clinton a hero lecturing me about sexism? How can the party demanding racial quotas to meet other people as racist. Beginning to think that may be their criticisms aren’t sincere. May be the moral puffery is a costume. May be the whole conversation is an absurd joke. Maybe we are falling for it. You hear modern Progressive described as new per tens purity and spirit whatever there, puritans cared about the faith of the soul and Progressive’s too busy pushing late-term abortions and cross-dressing on fifth graders. These are the people writing movies and sitcoms, they are not shocked by naughty words. They pretend to be when it’s useful. It’s been very useful lately. The left’s main goal, in case you haven’t noticed, is controlling what to think of it in order to do that, they have to control the information you receive your Google, Facebook, Twitter are fully on board with that. They are happy to ban unapproved thoughts and they don’t apologize for it. They often do. Cable channels in every news outfit in this country, one of the only places left in the United States were independent thoughts are allowed is right here, the opinion hours on this network, a few hours on a sea of television programming, not much relatively speaking. For the left, it’s unacceptable. It demands total conformity. Since the day we went on the air they’ve been working hard to kill this show. They’ve said much about it in public, it’s seeming to referential. But now it’s obvious to everybody appeared no pretending it’s not happening. It is happening to going forward, we’ll be covering their effort to make us be quiet but for now, two points to leave you with. First, Fox News is behind us as they have been since the very first day. Toughness is a rare quality in a TV network and we are grateful for that. Second, we’ve always apologize when we are wrong and will continue to do that or that’s what these and people do pure they. But we will never bow to the mob. Ever. 

Grabien screen grab

Former NeverTrump presidential candidate David French, who does not like Tucker’si deas  very much, does an excellent job at National Review in explaining how Media Matters (and others on the Left) have weaponized selective outrage:

Here’s the way it works. If you’re a conservative or a Republican who attains any kind of prominence at all, then the hunt is on. Media Matters has its rolling list of allegedly bad or silly things I’ve said and written, for example. And the more prominent you are, the more diligent the hunt. People will listen to hundreds of hours of radio shows or podcasts. They’ll watch tapes of cable news until their eyes glaze over. They’ll scan through hundreds of thousands of written words — letting the sum total of the person’s worldview and body of work wash over them — looking for that “gotcha” moment, the word or phrase that proves “the bad man really is bad.”
And let’s be clear, Tucker’s words aren’t “hurtful” or “offensive” in the truest sense. At the time, they passed through the media ether without notice or comment. There were no outraged victims seeking redress. Nobody was crying sincere tears on camera because of the bad things a (then) MSNBC contributor said about them. And no one is really hurt today either. Instead, the atmosphere is one of vengeful glee. We got him now.

But note very carefully the process here. The person is truly rendered “bad” by his or her ideology. Pro-life? Republican? Conservative? Populist? Trumpist? Once you pass the ideological threshold that renders you an enemy, you’re fair game. The true intent is not to cleanse the public square of bad people. Otherwise, the search would be bipartisan, applying the same rules to both sides. The intent is to clear the public square of bad ideas, and if they have to destroy careers and reputations to do so, well then, that’s all the more fun.

Variety reports that media Matters has managed to scare off some advertisers:

Fox News’ broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday night featured just four ad breaks and very few big national commercials, relying instead on direct-response ads and sundry promos for other Fox News programs and properties distributed by its parent company, 21st Century Fox. (snip)
While Carlson was on the air, Media Matters released another trove of remarks he made in past years on the radio talk show, hosted by the “shock jock” known as “Bubba The Love Sponge.” Some of those conversations were discussed on “All In With Chris Hayes,” the MSNBC program that vies for ratings with Carlson’s show at 8 p.m.
Fox News has grappled for several months with efforts by advocacy organizations to erode Madison Avenue’s ties to the network’s primetime schedule. Some sponsors have pulled their advertising from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” or Laura Ingraham’s “The Ingraham Angle” after remarks made by the hosts in 2018 and amid subsequent protests. Those commercials have been moved elsewhere on the Fox News schedule, and those two programs have in recent months sported a narrower roster of national advertisers.

As with any market, less demand for a fixed supply yields lower prices. Media Matters is joined by the organization called Newsguard in signaling to advertisers which media outlets to blacklist and avoid bidding on, thereby diminishing their advertising revenues. While Newsguard, like Media Matters, poses as a disinterested, fact-based trusted source, in pratice, it has no problem with fake news that comes from ideologically-congenial sources.

Leftists still decry the McCarthy era'sblacklists, even as they recreate the same phenomenon, with even grater institutional might behind their efforts to starve their opponents.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/media_matters_trying_to_silence_tucker_carlson_but_he_fights_back_with_epic_response.html

 I,m one of the Leftist Inbreds at media matters