A 3 million person Nuremberg rally every day

With American democracy on the line and getting a lot of points in 2024, it’s can’t be emphasized enough what a major role Rupert Murdoch’s most successful propaganda operation is playing in all this:

My original plan in considering Tucker Carlson’s monologue from his Fox News program on Tuesday night was to contrast his framing of the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his prior, multipart effort to cast the events of that day as part of a concerted federal plot. But listening to his program reminded me that this one particular dishonest hypocrisy is simply part of a pattern, even within the constraints of one show, of misrepresenting reality with the goal of accelerating his audience’s anger.

Every night, Carlson is given an hour of airtime by his employer to say whatever he wants. They give him more opportunities than that, of course, including time on their streaming platform. But it’s his nightly show that reaches the most people — more than 3.2 million on Tuesday of last week. He uses that platform to thread together surreal allegations and add more bricks to his narrative of a government hellbent on destroying God-fearing American patriots, knowing full well that there’s no counterweight to his doing so. Other outlets, including this one, will dismantle his claims, assertions that even Fox’s attorneys admit are not defensible as facts. But the pipeline from Carlson to his viewers is almost entirely unmitigated by third-party analyses or skepticism. He makes claims and they permeate.

So I decided to do something different. I took a bit over 10 minutes of his monologue and transcribed it. It is presented below — admittedly lacking the intonations and accompanying graphic that heighten the sentiments — with notes and corrections so that those who don’t watch his program regularly can see how it is constructed.

I used to think that Fox wasn’t that big a deal because it spoke to the already-converted. This was really, really dumb.