![]() These examples may border on the absurd, but the you-can't-say-that framing resonates precisely because it's true, or at least feels ominously plausible to viewers who aren't multi-millionaire television broadcasters and worry about suffering life-altering consequences for expressing transgressive political or cultural opinions. The notion that "death is inevitable," he claimed in 2020, "may be the one thing you're not allowed to say in this country, but it's still true." ![]() You're not allowed to say so," Carlson said in 2020 about giving trans kids puberty blockers. ![]() "This is a nationwide epidemic and everyone is too embarrassed to mention it. "This is another third rail in American politics: You're not allowed to note that our buildings are grotesque and dehumanizing," Carlson stated while praising Hungary's nationalist architecture in 2021. As such, breaking free from presumed shackles is often as easy as just blurting out the allegedly verboten thing-not unlike Tucker Carlson's often interesting, often exasperating television program these past seven years.īut the populist trick and conceit, one that Carlson is already ratcheting up in his new Twitter phase, is to not merely say the forbidden truth but to do so while, improbably enough, claiming that you cannot do so. I work there.")Īs the Caller example indicates, the "rule of what you can't say" is often self-imposed, for reasons that can have more to do with narrow careerism than some broader globalist plot. (That institutional courage to solicit internal criticism was not shared by Carlson at his own The Daily Caller: Blogger Mickey Kaus resigned from the conservative publication in 2015 after a post of his critical of Fox News was deleted on the grounds that, in Carlson's words, as quoted by Kaus: "We can't trash Fox on the site. Reason may be on the tolerant extreme of the open-debate spectrum, but I was similarly untroubled by the specter of editorial no-fly zones at the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that hired me after I had written a series of " Outside the Tent" columns criticizing…the Los Angeles Times. The editorial direction (not quite a set of "limits") at an opinion magazine such as Reason, for example, tends to be tethered to a political/ideological/philosophical point of view, with content mutually understood by employer and employee alike to fit within a publicly stated organizational mission, and yet, I have for two decades felt perfectly free to explore out loud some of my least libertarian notions (including one, ironically enough, that was influenced directly by Tucker Carlson). I have worked in English language media even longer than Carlson has, and I "understand" nothing like the totalizing constraints he describes, nor would a significant percentage of the people I have worked with. Italics mine, to hone in on the most utterly disprovable section of the untruth. The rule of what you can't say defines everything. Every person who works in English language media understands that. ![]() And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it. Then Tucker Carlson told a revealing lie of his own: "The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. On Tuesday night, the man who was until last month the most popular cable news host in the country told a Twitter audience of 122 million viewers and counting that, "at the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie-a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind." ![]()
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