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The New York Slime is up in arms against Tucker Carlson, whom they accuse of foisting a false "us-them" narrative. He's waging class war!!! OMG!!! That is just soooo a priori untrue... The upper class loves the lower like a brother!
Segment 3 of Everything Wrong with Tucker (per the Slime): He says,
they want to control you √
they don't care what you think √
they want to control your mind √
they want you to kiss the ring √
they're not sentimental √
they want power √
they hate you √
they want you to know it √
they want to disarm you √
they call you a racist √
Liz Chaney wants to use the awesome power of the national security state to seize your text messages √
They deny biology because the point of the exercise is to humiliate you. X
They legalize weed because they want a passive population X
Now, no one get everything right all the time not even Carlson. He is wrong to say that THEY want to legalize weed in order to make you stupid. THEY have already done that through their 60 year debasement of public educational system. .... Plus allowing advertising on TV (which I might add, the French and the Germans used to not allow).
But just about everything else Tucker says in this segment is correct. The country is divided between the halves and the have nots. The haves really don't give a shit about the have nots. The people in power really don't care about you or about anything else but themselves.
They use the internet not to listen to you but to redirect you into a dead end and/or to tell you want to think and do.
Think: when was the last time you reached a human voice at Comcast? When was the last time you talked to your Congressman? Do you really believe that the robo-letter you got back is anything but a spit in the eye?
Listen to Erich Fromm (1964)
"Our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucracy in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog in the machinery.... The organization man may be well fed, well amused and well oiled yet he lacks a sense of identity becaues none of his feelings or his thoughts originate within himself; none is authentic. He has no convictions either in politics, religion, philosophy or in love. He lives under the illusion that the. thoughts and feelings which he has acquired by listening to the media of mass communication are his own."
Fromm wrote a half century ago. What he could not foresee is that our rulers would find ways to toss half of the cogs into the waste-bin of a global economy. That the social tools of the Fifties which were used to control *a* working class would now be used to control and debase a non-working class or a class of workers totally bereft of any sense of class identity, in place of which the ruling class perpetuate a wide spectrum of inane cultural and "identity" issues and causes.
One can hear them say: "We at the Times have long advocated the need to heal this country's racial divisions... As Matin Luther King said.... blah blah blah. Where King himself moved from racial issues to the broader issue of political-economy and economic class; the Slime moves in exactly the opposite direction. When was the last time you heard the Slime advocate rent control, single payer health care, free college education, single payer pensions, anything other than some welfare sop that does nothing to redistribute obligations within society -- that is, that will give the ordinary man some of the freedom the elites enjoy precisely because of their wealth?
The Slime is aghast that Carlson should allude to a class war. A class war most definitely exists. It is waged from the top down by the economic- political- and cultural- elites. It exists even among those in the upper ten percent who think they are not at war and who "personally" don't want to be at war... but who cannot but be at war due to their "investment" in the system of which they are but loyal vassals. The Fromm Paradigm applies to them and to all readers of the Slime.
The problem with Tucker Carlson is not the primary social and political facts he cites, but the conclusions he draws from them. Instead of drawing correct socialist opinions, he draws just the opposite in favour of more private enterprise, more autonomy, less social obligation. It is that which IMO opinion make Carlson dangerous.
What in the U.S. are called the liberal left ignore that there is an economic class war and then proceed to distract from that reality by championing a cornucopia of cultural and identity issues. What is called the radical or populist right admit that there is an economic class war and then divert energy onto their own cultural and identity solution. Both the Slime and Carlson peddle false consciousness, althought Carlson's speaks more of the truth in doing so.
The Slime would have you deny the phenomenal reality in which you live. They want you to think that Obambi and Peelousy and Turtle Man, Bezos-the-Bald and Queen Elizabeth really care about you. Absolutely not. Think about it for a second: they do not actually know that you exist. "You" are simply part of a sea of faces they play to, tease, and (mis)lead. Does an actor really care about "his" audience? Of course not; only their adulation and the front door ticket sales.
The Slime's glossy audio-graphic against Carlson is the opening salvo of what they claim is going to be fight against mis-information, extremism and hate on line. The Slime promises that it is going to show us how all these evils lurk and work. They will claim to be defending democracy and the "principles" of free speech on which democracy depends.
Whenever anyone talks about "underlying principles" they are avoiding the thing itself. As Justice Black never tired of pointing out: The way to defend free speech is to abide no abrogation of free speech. Period.
Bear in mind when you read these “analyses” that what you are really seeing is how and in what name the Slime proposes to “moderate” the First Amendment. Howsoever, sophisticated and elaborate this editorial exercise manages to be, in the end it all boils down to a very simple thing: any claim to “control the effects” of free speech (as James Madison put it) -- to combat un-truths, to prevent “extremism,” to ward off foreign interference, to protect the safety of a child or of the nation, to insulate against disturbances against public tranquility or against productive discourse -- any of these things is the age old, tiresome tyrant's attempt to control you and the effect you might have, small though it may, on the course of your society.
