​Increasingly, the Tucker Carlson Tonight program is the only program I can watch regularly on Fox News without thinking that I’ve made a mistake, and somehow I’ve dialed into NBC. At least, that’s the message that is coming through more and more regarding topics like race—and “racism,” and gender—and “feminism.” For Fox seems to be tagging along as a kind of red-headed stepsister to the far left media, essentially normalizing, tepidly at times, what is essentially a progressivist narrative on those hot topics.

Oh, yes, I can hear the objections to my assertion: Fox is just trying to defend the genuine “concept of equality” against those who wish to pervert it in racial and gender matters—Fox is trying to fight back against the extremists who have subverted our traditions of fairness and equal justice under the law. And then: we must admit that Fox defends religious freedom against those who wish to extinguish it. Finally, Fox has been in the forefront of exposing the Russia Hoax and defending the president. Isn’t this true? After all, what else is there?

How, then, can I be so harsh in my criticism?

These are good questions, questions that should be addressed.

I would respond by acknowledging that the network has defended President Trump and helped to expose the Russia Hoax and does generally defend religious freedom.  But I would also cite other facts included in any number of past installments in the MY CORNER series which examine how the network and many of its commenters often split hairs, and in the name of opposing the far Left, end up as no real opposition at all.

Consider the number of pundits who are involved in same sex unions who now appear regularly on the network and Fox’s apparent de facto acceptance of that assault on an essential belief of Western civilization. Or, consider Fox’s canonization of race hustler Martin Luther King Jr. and the disastrous civil rights revolution, and its eagerness to attack older traditions and figures of conservatism, in particular, of the Confederacy, as “racists,” “segregationists,” and “reactionaries”. (Remember Fox host Brian Kilmeade’s series on the “Civil War” which could have been—and maybe was—taken right out of Marxist historian Eric Foner’s textbooks?) Or, consider the network’s nearly complete support for globalism and employing American arms (and the lives of American boys) to impose “democracy” (and thus current “American values”) on every poor, benighted desert oasis or impenetrable jungle in every God-forsaken corner of the world. I would argue strenuously that this internationalism is, both historically and philosophically, a leftist position and that it stands in direct opposition to traditional American conservatism.

Such “conservative opposition” ends up through its faint, often nugatory response to the far left actually solidifying a generally progressivist advance, whether in issues regarding race and gender, and perhaps more fundamentally, in the very understanding of what America is--or should be--all about.

In a real sense, this is what the presidential election of 2016 was all over. In that election it was Donald Trump who (perhaps in spite of himself) symbolized a return to an older understanding, and that understanding stood—and stands—in stark contradiction to the view of America and what defines this country held by both the far Left AND most talking heads at Fox and in the Neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington: frenetic globalism abroad and acceptance of an essentially progressivist template on issues of race and gender at home, even when protesting otherwise.

Tucker Carlson seems to understand this better than anyone else at Fox. His nightly comments usually at the beginning of his programs offer insight into his thinking. Of course, he is part of the Fox, and he cannot be expected to critique his own network, even if he should take positions which are at direct variance with the general drift clearly observed.

Somehow he manages to balance that with his own refreshingly free-of-cant, non-Neoconservative views on most (but not all) topics. And, certainly, it helps that his prime time program is ranked number one in its time slot. What news network is going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg?

Just as critical as he has been of the lunacy of the Democrats and the loony progressivists, he has not exempted the establishment Republicans from his withering criticism, either. And most recently he offered one of those remarkable monologues that you don’t expect to ever hear from someone who calls himself a “conservative” these days, but, down deep, you know for a fact is absolutely true.

Just as international financier and billionaire George Soros has been a kind of power behind the throne of dozens of leftist movements, foundations, and action, including major elements of the Democratic Party, so the Koch brothers have exercised a tremendous influence in GOP circles, and in shaping Republican positions on such hot button issues as immigration, feminism, and the future of the Internet. And that influence, Carlson declared forcefully, is the antithesis of what voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 wanted or desired.

​Below are his comments from Wednesday, June 19; they should be nailed to the walls of Congress and sent to every Republican candidate running for office in 2020: where do YOU stand—with the Koch brothers, or with the grass roots Americans who made their choice known in 2016? 

Time to ‘fess up.

​The news broke (in England) at the beginning of last week that Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of the late Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. David Garrow, had unearthed a cache of new documents, many supposedly under strict lock-and-key at least until 2027, detailing some horrific cases of sexual activity by King, as many as forty such incidents, and one in which King stood by and watched and egged on a fellow black Baptist minister.

Here is the background of what happened: On January 31, 1977, Federal District Judge John Lewis Smith signed a court order that instructed the FBI to deposit all of its extensive electronic surveillance material—audio tapes, notes accompanying, etc.—with the National Archives, and sealing them for fifty years. However, as Garrow relates in a blockbuster article (nearly 8,000 words, with documentation) in the English journal, Standpoint:

In his long essay Garrow continues his explanation of how supposed-to-be secret documents and tapes became available to him:

Now, Garrow is not a conservative, no right wing fanatic out to “besmirch” the reputation of the late civil rights icon. Not at all.

He was—at least until this article and its implications—a highly respected, liberal author and academic, whose biography of King, Bearing the Cross (1986), won him praise and a Pulitzer, and has been used as the basis of film and screen adaptations.

But after his Standpoint essay, The Washington Post dropped the guillotine’s blade on him: he had said and written too much, he was no longer a “respectable” (that is, establishment liberal) historian, his findings were pronounced to be “dubious” and “of little value.” Indeed, the Post found a whole slew of its favored leftwing “historians” to literally denounce Garrow for his transgressions, even though he had written that he believed these new revelations would not damage King’s reputation [“No. Not at all. I don’t think that’s possible”].

The FBI recordings and notes document as many as forty “sexual episodes” involving King, a married man, with women, many of them “rough” and unnatural sex.  But perhaps the most revolting occurred when King and a fellow black pastor, Logan Kearse, were staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C., in early January 1964.

Garrow continues:

Professor David Greenberg of Rutgers University, writing in the highly-respected Politico, June 4, raises a number of serious questions about these new revelations and what they may portend not just for the “King legacy” and its meaning, but also for how Americans view their history. Unlike The Washington Post and other zealously leftist media outlets who either attempted to ignore the story, or else downplayed it as meaningless “speculation,” not based of substantiated or confirmed fact, Greenberg—no conservative himself—understands that this new documentation and its significance should be confronted. It could not simply be explained away or swept under the carpet and ignored.

Certainly, as Greenberg admits, many of our American heroes, despite their many virtues, have had “feet of clay,” have had their faults.  Nevertheless, we have continued to admire them…at least, that has been the case until fairly recently, when, it seems the fanatical Neo-Marxist social justice warriors have sought to totally cleanse our culture and our country of practically all figures of historical significance, specifically if they were white and male. Now no one is safe from the howling and frenzied mob of brainwashed students and professional race-and-sex warriors.

And it is not just the statues to Confederate volunteers who went off to war and died for their states, such as the “Silent Sam” monument that was violently toppled by a crazed mob on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on August 20, 2018, or the equestrian monument to Robert E. Lee at Charlottesville, Virginia. Now literally the existence or names of hundreds of statues, plaques, schools, highways, and other symbols of historic figures, including of Founders such as Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, are severely threatened with disposal in the waste bin of history…and memory.

Will these new revelations affect King’s contemporary position in America, a position and symbolism revered not only by the political and cultural Left, but also by the pseudo-conservative establishment, who also claim his legacy?

Not likely. The King case is unique. As demonstrated by The Washington Post’s strenuous attempt to discredit Garrow and defend King as a kind of plaster saint, largely untouchable, but also illustrated by the reaction of the dominant Neoconservatives (on Fox News), King’s status will remain sacrosanct in the increasingly authoritarian culture and society where the new dogmas on race and sex reign supreme, and woe be to anyone who dares transgress or come close to denying them.

Witness an episode on the Laura Ingraham Show (May 29, 2019), after both the [London] Sunday Times and Daily Mail had first reported the revelations. Dinesh D’Souza, who fancies himself an historian of merit, but whose level of historical knowledge and comprehension is far less than that of my intelligent cocker spaniel Jasper, attempted to explain that all America’s black leaders historically were conservatives and Republicans: “[When I think of] The great black Americans of our history I think of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington," he said during an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News. “All of these were Republicans, they were conservatives….” And Martin Luther King was just the latest in that line: he had his faults, yes, but his “message of equality” was far greater and simply must be celebrated by all, including conservatives. He was, in short, an epochal giant who ushered in the final stage of completing that revolutionary message.

And in this sense, D’Souza like the dominant Neoconservative narrative, echoed another vaunted exponent of the King mythology, Jonah Goldberg (August 28, 2013):

Which is a complete inversion of the American Founding and a more-or-less misreading, purposeful or not, of American history.

The symbolic canonization of Martin Luther King and the obligatory imposition of his cult on the nation was and is an action, collaborated in by both the zealous progressivist Left and the slightly less-Leftist Establishment conservative movement, with more dogmatic power and enforcement than any hierarch in Rome or any despot in Soviet Russia ever dreamed of, because it is more pervasive, far more than skin deep or simply a prophylactic, as the old Soviet power over Eastern Europe was for forty-five years. It is emblematic of not only the insistence on external assent in actions and words, but of a steady internalization which is equally monitored, the slightest variance from which brings excommunication, denunciation, loss of reputation and position, shunning, shaming, and even imprisonment.

This, then, is the legacy of King and those like him, those who protected him and glorified him, and the so-called civil rights transformation which opened the door wide for the aberrations and hideous results in racial and sexual questions we see and experience around us today.

No. Would that the Garrow revelations meant a serious re-examination of King, but they probably won’t. For there is literally no one of stature willing, no one fearless enough, to risk the obloquy and defamation to follow. We must, hopefully, wait for some future generation to do that.

This piece was previously posted on My Corner on June 8, 2019.