LaxPower Back-Up Stick

NattyBohChamps04 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 1:16 am Glad to support health care for kids, no matter how much they're in the minority.

Sad to see so many people want to hurt kids and kill them. Even some here on the forum. Unsurprising with how they want to kill the healthy elderly too.

They'll probably want to kill me too. Lemon and lymes and all.

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 8:25 am

NattyBohChamps04 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 1:16 am Glad to support health care for kids, no matter how much they're in the minority.

Sad to see so many people want to hurt kids and kill them. Even some here on the forum. Unsurprising with how they want to kill the healthy elderly too.

They'll probably want to kill me too. Lemon and lymes and all.

just lousy...and insane.

"they".....

depressed, soiling myself, coming here. audious, sickos

RedFromMI wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:05 pm

Kismet wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 11:45 am Word around the internet that Tucker Carlson and Fox have parted ways and he will no longer be on the air effective IMMEDIATELY.

He must have a BIG deal with somebody else or something else is going on . He is t#1 rated show on Fox.

There is a press release out already. It has happened.

Tucker will NOT be on tonight - Friday was his last show for FOX.

Kismet wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:09 am

RedFromMI wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 12:05 pm

Kismet wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 11:45 am Word around the internet that Tucker Carlson and Fox have parted ways and he will no longer be on the air effective IMMEDIATELY.

He must have a BIG deal with somebody else or something else is going on . He is t#1 rated show on Fox.

There is a press release out already. It has happened.

Tucker will NOT be on tonight - Friday was his last show for FOX.

Tucker gets his recently signed $20 million contract paid in full despite being let go. Add that to the $297 million to Dominion.
Fox shareholders must be thrilled.

wonder if he is going to return all those video clips Kevin sent him?

OCanada wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 9:05 am

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 8:25 am

NattyBohChamps04 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 1:16 am Glad to support health care for kids, no matter how much they're in the minority.

Sad to see so many people want to hurt kids and kill them. Even some here on the forum. Unsurprising with how they want to kill the healthy elderly too.

They'll probably want to kill me too. Lemon and lymes and all.

just lousy...and insane.

"they".....

depressed, soiling myself, coming here. audious, sickos

Soiling yourself is nothing new

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 12:20 pm Here is the Colorado bill/legislation.

https://www.cde.state.co.us/healthandwe ... neproducts

Program Objectives

Increase the number of gender-neutral spaces where students can access free menstrual hygiene products
Increase the number of gender-neutral spaces where students can dispose of menstrual hygiene products


What does this even mean, "increase" ? And why is the word "gender neutral" being used? Especially on applications.

a fan wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 1:25 pm

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 12:20 pm Here is the Colorado bill/legislation.

https://www.cde.state.co.us/healthandwe ... neproducts

Program Objectives

Increase the number of gender-neutral spaces where students can access free menstrual hygiene products
Increase the number of gender-neutral spaces where students can dispose of menstrual hygiene products


What does this even mean, "increase" ? And why is the word "gender neutral" being used? Especially on applications.

Oh no! Poor people in my Home State might get access to tampons!! We can't do that, because RRR-----who doesn't have kids, and doesn't live here----is upset and scared of poor people! Poor people don't deserve access to health care!

Boy, you better not visit schools here in 2023. You'll find that they provide food and water for poor kids, too. Can't have that, now can we, RRR?

Let them eat cake, right, Marie? Don't forget to hold your pinky up at the next lacrosse game, lest it touch the dirty and unwashed poor.

When did the poor become such a target for you? You know full well that the Covid death rate was twice as high in poor counties in Colorado as the rich. And now you're here telling us that giving them access to freaking sanitary napkins is the devil, because (insert weirdo TeamTinFoil reason)

Go away. Sell your contempt for the poor on the East Coast. Or better still, move to Russia, China, Iran, or N Korea. They're OVERJOYED to have you aboard, and they share all your views.

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:27 pm

a fan wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 1:25 pm

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 12:20 pm Here is the Colorado bill/legislation.

https://www.cde.state.co.us/healthandwe ... neproducts

Program Objectives

Increase the number of gender-neutral spaces where students can access free menstrual hygiene products
Increase the number of gender-neutral spaces where students can dispose of menstrual hygiene products


What does this even mean, "increase" ? And why is the word "gender neutral" being used? Especially on applications.

Oh no! Poor people in my Home State might get access to tampons!! We can't do that, because RRR-----who doesn't have kids, and doesn't live here----is upset and scared of poor people! Poor people don't deserve access to health care!

Boy, you better not visit schools here in 2023. You'll find that they provide food and water for poor kids, too. Can't have that, now can we, RRR?

Let them eat cake, right, Marie? Don't forget to hold your pinky up at the next lacrosse game, lest it touch the dirty and unwashed poor.

That's your take ? This is about "free" tampons for the poor







You were , umm....joking, when you claimed that I don't have any children, correct ? Just wow.

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:27 pm That's your take ? This is about "free" tampons for the poor

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:27 pm Why not ask your daughter what she thinks of tampons in boyz rooms.........

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:27 pm
....and continue to disregard the language involved with these laws.

dude, if a child, can make the decision to take life altering measures, to morph into something, at age 14 (minor/age of consent ) needs help with "menstrual education"..........you're even crazleeurrr than we thought.

a fan wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:59 pm Kids you told me that you didn't have before, but now you do.

Great. Stand corrected. Tell us about your kids, and tell me when I get to tell them what they can and can't do.

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 3:12 pm When did I tell you I didn't have children ?

Guess , it doesn't matter. your beliefs are absolute.

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:27 pm you care about the poor so much, you are keeping your daughter from ever having to associate with them. got it.

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:27 pm dude, you can STILL ask her what she thinks about tampons in boyz bathrooms. Is she really not going to hang out with public school kids, anymore. What if Denver Country Day implements this same policy. It is, after all, state law

runrussellrun wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 2:27 pm But, your "could give a F about others" attitude, can't be any more clear. Effects you and your ecosystem. got it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/ ... erm=second

In Defense of Tucker Carlson

By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY, April 26, 2023

The worldview of Carlson has been remarkably consistent the last seven years, in public and in private.

The narrative out there is that Tucker Carlson, recently canned by Fox News, has been badly exposed by the disclosures from the lawsuits. He says one thing in private — that he hates Trump passionately — and he’s never said anything like that on-air. Charles Krauthammer used to say, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think — and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.” Tucker is a hypocrite, condescending to his audiences.

This is just fantastically wrong. Tucker’s real views on Trump have been out there in the public the whole time, dating back to January 2016 when he published them in an arresting feature, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right.”

In that article, Tucker gives you the basics of his view of Trump. He admits most of the downsides about Trump, that Trump seems proud of his corruption, that he’s faking it among Evangelical audiences, that he’s “vulgar” and “emotionally incontinent.” Tucker contends that Trump is viable only because of the failures of the governing class, especially the conservative nonprofit world, which had the keys to the kingdom under George W. Bush and produced the Iraq War, a financial meltdown, and the displacement of millions of Americans from their homes in an economic calamity. In that article, he calls out the class divide between Republican voters who care about controlling the border and slowing down the pace of immigration, and elected Republicans who value cheap immigrant labor and wanted amnesty.

The Democrats assume [Trump’s] a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more. They sense Trump is a threat to them personally, to their legitimacy and their livelihoods. Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park.

I understand it of course. And, except in those moments when the self-righteous silliness of rich people overwhelms me and I feel like moving to Maine, I can see their points, some of them anyway. Trump might not be my first choice for president. I’m not even convinced he really wants the job. He’s smart enough to know it would be tough for him to govern.

Tucker understood and implied that in some ways he sympathized with people who would treat Trump as less welcome than Idi Amin. Yeah, that in fact does sound like a guy who, in private messages, would make fun of Trump’s business acumen, or credit him with being good only at destroying things.

In that same piece, Tucker also said some perspicacious things, such as that Trump had a decent chance in the general election. And that the conventional wisdom was wrong that Trump would crater the Republican Party with racial minorities. Tucker anticipated the opposite, which turned out to be farsighted. He also saw that Republican elites would get so upset about Trump’s success that they would begin to talk about and treat their former voters as proto-fascists.

The Tucker thesis about Trump stayed the same in his 2018 book Ship of Fools: that Trump’s election was a middle finger to the existing ruling class, a sign that the people at the top had to change their ways.

Where Carlson complimented Trump, he did so with heavy qualifications: “At times, he seemed interested in what voters thought. The people in charge demonstrably weren’t.” This was rapidly followed by Carlson’s noting that nobody in the ruling class seemed to internalize the lesson that voters were trying to teach them with Donald Trump, and instead they doubled down on conspiracy theories about Russia, or simply on demonizing the voters. He warned darkly that if they continue down this path, Americans will “vote for radical populists who will make Donald Trump look restrained.”

While everyone else was making a splash by selling similar-looking books about Donald Trump as the main character of our politics, Carlson took the exact opposite view. He maintained on his show, night after night, that America’s “Ship of Fools,” its ruling class, was still the most important player.

And he demonstrated that attitude constantly with what might be the most often-used verbal transition in Carlson’s opening monologues. “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, millions of Americans supported him. You think the ruling class would ask themselves why, but instead they want to” — take your pick: blame it on Putin/try to silence their critics/sic their red guards after you.

And Carlson has stuck to that thesis — this isn’t about Trump; it’s about our ruling class — through nearly every spin of the news cycle. It’s the theory that shaped even his coverage of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, including his focus on law enforcement’s actions, or how the narrative of January 6 is being used to justify deploying the security state against ordinary citizens.

You can argue that he’s wrong, that some of the stories of the Trump years really were primarily about the faults and foibles of Donald Trump. And I have. While I’m curious and open to theories about the placed and removed pipe bombs on January 6, or question the lack of Capitol police assigned to work on that day, I still think the main story of that day was that Donald Trump lied about the election and lied about what Pence could do about it, misleading his assembled followers into a mob that he refused to call off. And I’ve said as much by text to Tucker, and presumably to the CIA handler who reads our private communications. But he still thinks the main legacy of January 6 is that law enforcement can now treat the domestic Right with the tools developed to combat foreign jihadists. I can’t knock him for inconsistency there.

And on the matter of private texts revealing the whole truth — I’m sorry, they don’t. Carlson has his own explanations for some of the most extreme things he said about Trump privately — mostly having to do with being jawboned by campaign people in the days after the campaign. But the private communications of my friends in political journalism bear roughly the same divergence from their public work as Carlson’s. In private conversation, people blow off steam, they speak emotively, they grab each other’s attention with gossip and slander and shock value. That they don’t print this stuff to their audience is not a sign of their dishonesty or cravenness, it’s a sign of their considered judgment, almost always for the better.

Some of the other matters in the texts have been blown out of proportion. For instance, Tucker’s called for the firing of reporter Jacqui Heinrich for fact-checking a Donald Trump claim about Dominion. Among the prime-time hosts, Carlson had actually been the most vocally skeptical on-air of the Trump camp’s theories about Dominion. He humiliated Trump’s conspiracy-theory-peddling lawyer Sidney Powell repeatedly. But Heinrich’s fact-check did collateral damage to Sean Hannity’s show. You may care only for the truth, egos be damned. But it was a breach of a rule at Fox News that the news and opinion side don’t fire on each other in public. The same rules would apply to me. My colleagues are free to disagree with me and even show that I’m wrong on the facts. But I’m not allowed to offer what purports to be an impartial fact-check of my colleagues’ articles, as that would call into question the integrity of National Review as an organization for having published them in the first place. The text chain from which it was taken was one that included the prime-time opinion hosts, who were operating under a constraint from criticizing the Fox News Decision Desk for its unjustifiably early call on Arizona — a call that turned out to be correct, but which was questioned even by liberal media outlets.

As Ross Douthat pointed out in the New York Times, Tucker’s radical suspicion of accepted institutional authority now extends far beyond Trump, and far beyond what could plausibly be construed as the narrow commercial interests of a Fox News host. Is there a giant Fox audience demanding to be served and catered to with content about how JFK may have been killed over a dispute with the U.S. intelligence agencies over the Israeli nuclear power plant at Dimona? The same suspicion of institutional authority makes Tucker curious to hear and air Kanye West — a man evidently going through a psychological break — talking about the phalanx of political and entertainment figures who wanted to control what he said and represented in the culture.

The most prominent populist voice in media has been temporarily silenced. A lot of people are going to take the relative moment of silence to convince themselves that America’s institutions are doing just fine again.

old salt wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 9:38 pm

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/ ... erm=second

In Defense of Tucker Carlson

By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY, April 26, 2023

The worldview of Carlson has been remarkably consistent the last seven years, in public and in private.

The narrative out there is that Tucker Carlson, recently canned by Fox News, has been badly exposed by the disclosures from the lawsuits. He says one thing in private — that he hates Trump passionately — and he’s never said anything like that on-air. Charles Krauthammer used to say, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think — and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.” Tucker is a hypocrite, condescending to his audiences.

This is just fantastically wrong. Tucker’s real views on Trump have been out there in the public the whole time, dating back to January 2016 when he published them in an arresting feature, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right.”

In that article, Tucker gives you the basics of his view of Trump. He admits most of the downsides about Trump, that Trump seems proud of his corruption, that he’s faking it among Evangelical audiences, that he’s “vulgar” and “emotionally incontinent.” Tucker contends that Trump is viable only because of the failures of the governing class, especially the conservative nonprofit world, which had the keys to the kingdom under George W. Bush and produced the Iraq War, a financial meltdown, and the displacement of millions of Americans from their homes in an economic calamity. In that article, he calls out the class divide between Republican voters who care about controlling the border and slowing down the pace of immigration, and elected Republicans who value cheap immigrant labor and wanted amnesty.

The Democrats assume [Trump’s] a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more. They sense Trump is a threat to them personally, to their legitimacy and their livelihoods. Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park.

I understand it of course. And, except in those moments when the self-righteous silliness of rich people overwhelms me and I feel like moving to Maine, I can see their points, some of them anyway. Trump might not be my first choice for president. I’m not even convinced he really wants the job. He’s smart enough to know it would be tough for him to govern.

Tucker understood and implied that in some ways he sympathized with people who would treat Trump as less welcome than Idi Amin. Yeah, that in fact does sound like a guy who, in private messages, would make fun of Trump’s business acumen, or credit him with being good only at destroying things.

In that same piece, Tucker also said some perspicacious things, such as that Trump had a decent chance in the general election. And that the conventional wisdom was wrong that Trump would crater the Republican Party with racial minorities. Tucker anticipated the opposite, which turned out to be farsighted. He also saw that Republican elites would get so upset about Trump’s success that they would begin to talk about and treat their former voters as proto-fascists.

The Tucker thesis about Trump stayed the same in his 2018 book Ship of Fools: that Trump’s election was a middle finger to the existing ruling class, a sign that the people at the top had to change their ways.

Where Carlson complimented Trump, he did so with heavy qualifications: “At times, he seemed interested in what voters thought. The people in charge demonstrably weren’t.” This was rapidly followed by Carlson’s noting that nobody in the ruling class seemed to internalize the lesson that voters were trying to teach them with Donald Trump, and instead they doubled down on conspiracy theories about Russia, or simply on demonizing the voters. He warned darkly that if they continue down this path, Americans will “vote for radical populists who will make Donald Trump look restrained.”

While everyone else was making a splash by selling similar-looking books about Donald Trump as the main character of our politics, Carlson took the exact opposite view. He maintained on his show, night after night, that America’s “Ship of Fools,” its ruling class, was still the most important player.

And he demonstrated that attitude constantly with what might be the most often-used verbal transition in Carlson’s opening monologues. “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, millions of Americans supported him. You think the ruling class would ask themselves why, but instead they want to” — take your pick: blame it on Putin/try to silence their critics/sic their red guards after you.

And Carlson has stuck to that thesis — this isn’t about Trump; it’s about our ruling class — through nearly every spin of the news cycle. It’s the theory that shaped even his coverage of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, including his focus on law enforcement’s actions, or how the narrative of January 6 is being used to justify deploying the security state against ordinary citizens.

You can argue that he’s wrong, that some of the stories of the Trump years really were primarily about the faults and foibles of Donald Trump. And I have. While I’m curious and open to theories about the placed and removed pipe bombs on January 6, or question the lack of Capitol police assigned to work on that day, I still think the main story of that day was that Donald Trump lied about the election and lied about what Pence could do about it, misleading his assembled followers into a mob that he refused to call off. And I’ve said as much by text to Tucker, and presumably to the CIA handler who reads our private communications. But he still thinks the main legacy of January 6 is that law enforcement can now treat the domestic Right with the tools developed to combat foreign jihadists. I can’t knock him for inconsistency there.

And on the matter of private texts revealing the whole truth — I’m sorry, they don’t. Carlson has his own explanations for some of the most extreme things he said about Trump privately — mostly having to do with being jawboned by campaign people in the days after the campaign. But the private communications of my friends in political journalism bear roughly the same divergence from their public work as Carlson’s. In private conversation, people blow off steam, they speak emotively, they grab each other’s attention with gossip and slander and shock value. That they don’t print this stuff to their audience is not a sign of their dishonesty or cravenness, it’s a sign of their considered judgment, almost always for the better.

Some of the other matters in the texts have been blown out of proportion. For instance, Tucker’s called for the firing of reporter Jacqui Heinrich for fact-checking a Donald Trump claim about Dominion. Among the prime-time hosts, Carlson had actually been the most vocally skeptical on-air of the Trump camp’s theories about Dominion. He humiliated Trump’s conspiracy-theory-peddling lawyer Sidney Powell repeatedly. But Heinrich’s fact-check did collateral damage to Sean Hannity’s show. You may care only for the truth, egos be damned. But it was a breach of a rule at Fox News that the news and opinion side don’t fire on each other in public. The same rules would apply to me. My colleagues are free to disagree with me and even show that I’m wrong on the facts. But I’m not allowed to offer what purports to be an impartial fact-check of my colleagues’ articles, as that would call into question the integrity of National Review as an organization for having published them in the first place. The text chain from which it was taken was one that included the prime-time opinion hosts, who were operating under a constraint from criticizing the Fox News Decision Desk for its unjustifiably early call on Arizona — a call that turned out to be correct, but which was questioned even by liberal media outlets.

As Ross Douthat pointed out in the New York Times, Tucker’s radical suspicion of accepted institutional authority now extends far beyond Trump, and far beyond what could plausibly be construed as the narrow commercial interests of a Fox News host. Is there a giant Fox audience demanding to be served and catered to with content about how JFK may have been killed over a dispute with the U.S. intelligence agencies over the Israeli nuclear power plant at Dimona? The same suspicion of institutional authority makes Tucker curious to hear and air Kanye West — a man evidently going through a psychological break — talking about the phalanx of political and entertainment figures who wanted to control what he said and represented in the culture.

The most prominent populist voice in media has been temporarily silenced. A lot of people are going to take the relative moment of silence to convince themselves that America’s institutions are doing just fine again.

Typical Lax Dad wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 9:46 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 9:38 pm

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/ ... erm=second

In Defense of Tucker Carlson

By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY, April 26, 2023

The worldview of Carlson has been remarkably consistent the last seven years, in public and in private.

The narrative out there is that Tucker Carlson, recently canned by Fox News, has been badly exposed by the disclosures from the lawsuits. He says one thing in private — that he hates Trump passionately — and he’s never said anything like that on-air. Charles Krauthammer used to say, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think — and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.” Tucker is a hypocrite, condescending to his audiences.

This is just fantastically wrong. Tucker’s real views on Trump have been out there in the public the whole time, dating back to January 2016 when he published them in an arresting feature, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right.”

In that article, Tucker gives you the basics of his view of Trump. He admits most of the downsides about Trump, that Trump seems proud of his corruption, that he’s faking it among Evangelical audiences, that he’s “vulgar” and “emotionally incontinent.” Tucker contends that Trump is viable only because of the failures of the governing class, especially the conservative nonprofit world, which had the keys to the kingdom under George W. Bush and produced the Iraq War, a financial meltdown, and the displacement of millions of Americans from their homes in an economic calamity. In that article, he calls out the class divide between Republican voters who care about controlling the border and slowing down the pace of immigration, and elected Republicans who value cheap immigrant labor and wanted amnesty.

The Democrats assume [Trump’s] a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more. They sense Trump is a threat to them personally, to their legitimacy and their livelihoods. Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park.

I understand it of course. And, except in those moments when the self-righteous silliness of rich people overwhelms me and I feel like moving to Maine, I can see their points, some of them anyway. Trump might not be my first choice for president. I’m not even convinced he really wants the job. He’s smart enough to know it would be tough for him to govern.

Tucker understood and implied that in some ways he sympathized with people who would treat Trump as less welcome than Idi Amin. Yeah, that in fact does sound like a guy who, in private messages, would make fun of Trump’s business acumen, or credit him with being good only at destroying things.

In that same piece, Tucker also said some perspicacious things, such as that Trump had a decent chance in the general election. And that the conventional wisdom was wrong that Trump would crater the Republican Party with racial minorities. Tucker anticipated the opposite, which turned out to be farsighted. He also saw that Republican elites would get so upset about Trump’s success that they would begin to talk about and treat their former voters as proto-fascists.

The Tucker thesis about Trump stayed the same in his 2018 book Ship of Fools: that Trump’s election was a middle finger to the existing ruling class, a sign that the people at the top had to change their ways.

Where Carlson complimented Trump, he did so with heavy qualifications: “At times, he seemed interested in what voters thought. The people in charge demonstrably weren’t.” This was rapidly followed by Carlson’s noting that nobody in the ruling class seemed to internalize the lesson that voters were trying to teach them with Donald Trump, and instead they doubled down on conspiracy theories about Russia, or simply on demonizing the voters. He warned darkly that if they continue down this path, Americans will “vote for radical populists who will make Donald Trump look restrained.”

While everyone else was making a splash by selling similar-looking books about Donald Trump as the main character of our politics, Carlson took the exact opposite view. He maintained on his show, night after night, that America’s “Ship of Fools,” its ruling class, was still the most important player.

And he demonstrated that attitude constantly with what might be the most often-used verbal transition in Carlson’s opening monologues. “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, millions of Americans supported him. You think the ruling class would ask themselves why, but instead they want to” — take your pick: blame it on Putin/try to silence their critics/sic their red guards after you.

And Carlson has stuck to that thesis — this isn’t about Trump; it’s about our ruling class — through nearly every spin of the news cycle. It’s the theory that shaped even his coverage of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, including his focus on law enforcement’s actions, or how the narrative of January 6 is being used to justify deploying the security state against ordinary citizens.

You can argue that he’s wrong, that some of the stories of the Trump years really were primarily about the faults and foibles of Donald Trump. And I have. While I’m curious and open to theories about the placed and removed pipe bombs on January 6, or question the lack of Capitol police assigned to work on that day, I still think the main story of that day was that Donald Trump lied about the election and lied about what Pence could do about it, misleading his assembled followers into a mob that he refused to call off. And I’ve said as much by text to Tucker, and presumably to the CIA handler who reads our private communications. But he still thinks the main legacy of January 6 is that law enforcement can now treat the domestic Right with the tools developed to combat foreign jihadists. I can’t knock him for inconsistency there.

And on the matter of private texts revealing the whole truth — I’m sorry, they don’t. Carlson has his own explanations for some of the most extreme things he said about Trump privately — mostly having to do with being jawboned by campaign people in the days after the campaign. But the private communications of my friends in political journalism bear roughly the same divergence from their public work as Carlson’s. In private conversation, people blow off steam, they speak emotively, they grab each other’s attention with gossip and slander and shock value. That they don’t print this stuff to their audience is not a sign of their dishonesty or cravenness, it’s a sign of their considered judgment, almost always for the better.

Some of the other matters in the texts have been blown out of proportion. For instance, Tucker’s called for the firing of reporter Jacqui Heinrich for fact-checking a Donald Trump claim about Dominion. Among the prime-time hosts, Carlson had actually been the most vocally skeptical on-air of the Trump camp’s theories about Dominion. He humiliated Trump’s conspiracy-theory-peddling lawyer Sidney Powell repeatedly. But Heinrich’s fact-check did collateral damage to Sean Hannity’s show. You may care only for the truth, egos be damned. But it was a breach of a rule at Fox News that the news and opinion side don’t fire on each other in public. The same rules would apply to me. My colleagues are free to disagree with me and even show that I’m wrong on the facts. But I’m not allowed to offer what purports to be an impartial fact-check of my colleagues’ articles, as that would call into question the integrity of National Review as an organization for having published them in the first place. The text chain from which it was taken was one that included the prime-time opinion hosts, who were operating under a constraint from criticizing the Fox News Decision Desk for its unjustifiably early call on Arizona — a call that turned out to be correct, but which was questioned even by liberal media outlets.

As Ross Douthat pointed out in the New York Times, Tucker’s radical suspicion of accepted institutional authority now extends far beyond Trump, and far beyond what could plausibly be construed as the narrow commercial interests of a Fox News host. Is there a giant Fox audience demanding to be served and catered to with content about how JFK may have been killed over a dispute with the U.S. intelligence agencies over the Israeli nuclear power plant at Dimona? The same suspicion of institutional authority makes Tucker curious to hear and air Kanye West — a man evidently going through a psychological break — talking about the phalanx of political and entertainment figures who wanted to control what he said and represented in the culture.

The most prominent populist voice in media has been temporarily silenced. A lot of people are going to take the relative moment of silence to convince themselves that America’s institutions are doing just fine again.

Where is your In Defense Of Don Lemon Post? You can just put it out there…