by Naomi Wolf, Outspoken with Naomi Wolf:
The whole world is commenting on and speculating about the abrupt departure of former Fox commentator Tucker Carlson from that network.
Addressing the current moment is not my intent. I have no idea what the “inside story” is on the events related to Fox’s or Carlson’s decisions. Mr Carlson is wisely being deliberative regarding his physical presence and his messaging, and by next week the news cycle will have no doubt shifted in relation to this sudden exile, or self-exile; so there is little point in adding my own theories to the events of the present.
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(Though I suspect that the stern, mafioso-like public warnings of Sen. Charles Schumer [D-NY] and others to the Murdochs, that they were making a mistake in tolerating Carlson’s airing of the first set of previously unseen January 6 videos, and that those who passed on the footage were playing a “treacherous game”, was a factor in at least some upheaval on the part of Fox’s leadership. I recognize a political threat of retribution when I hear one):
What I want to do now is note, for the record, almost elegiacally, how important Mr Carlson’s voice has been, in the evaluation of at least this dyed-in-the-wool old-school capital “L” Liberal.
Mr Carlson and I spent most of our careers not in alignment on anything; for decades, our places were adversarial on the public chess board. He had assumed that I was the caricature of a shrieking, irrational left-wing feminist —a view for which he has had the good grace publicly to apologize — and I, for my part, was ready to accept that he must be the boorish, sexist, racist, homophobic frat boy that the progressive news outlets I read, relentlessly insisted that he was. I almost never watched his show, so my preconceptions could flourish uncorrected.
That said, I did find it odd that everyone around me in the “liberal elite” media hated him so violently — the way they hated President Trump; but that when I pressed for concrete reasons why, they could not provide them. When my liberal friends and loved ones would roll their eyes and spit out “Tucker Carlson,” as if that name itself was epithet enough, I would often pester: “What? Why? What did he actually say?” I never got a good answer. So even in the depth of the Left’s vilification of him – even as I was still on the Left myself — I was keeping, faintly, an open mind.
Maybe this is because, in a limited way, I recognize where he comes from. We both come from some similar places. We both were raised in California in the 1970s (though I am six years older), a California that was very diverse and yet largely peaceful and hopeful, compared to the present; with reasonable newspapers and decent public education. It was a state drenched with sunshine and optimism; bright with discussion and with sensible plans for the future. California was the most meritocratic state in the Union, at that time. In spite of specific upheavals — the LGBTQ movement gaining force in the Bay Area, the women’s movement was fighting for access to reproductive rights, immigrant workers agitating for better conditions — we had no reason to believe that people of different races or political viewpoints or genders could not get along, or at least discuss their differences; we certainly would have found it racist to assume that immigrants or people of color could not succeed entirely on their own merits.
The University of California system, unbroken at that time, an excellent nearly-free education, was almost majority nonwhite — selective, prestigious public high schools like the one I attended were majority nonwhite — so it was ridiculous to presume that people of color or immigrants could not thrive in our existing, even if imperfect, meritocracies. They were succeeding all around us.
We both were sent from this early relaxed, hopeful formative background to the hothouses of rigorous, rigid, East Coast privilege — he to a prep school and then to Trinity College, I to Yale (and then Oxford). Maybe we both brought our West Coast skepticism of East Coast (and European) global elites’ nonsense and pretentiousness along with us.
I was also never completely persuaded of his being the purported embodiment of pure evil, because I still had an impressionistic memory of him being around in the DC of the 1990s, in a time before such extreme caricatures as today’s keep both “sides” at daggers drawn.
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