The Attack on Tucker Carlson (1)
Prof. Timothy Caulfield, late of the Trudeau Foundation, claims to fact-check Tucker, but the facts support Tucker, leaving Caulfield with only his anger. (1,600 words, 8 minutes)
Tucker Carlson is a lightning rod. This week, he brought lightning to Canada, speaking in Calgary and Edmonton. As always, he spoke well, and as always he employed a powerful combination of mockery, humanity, and declamation. His words are simple, his sentences direct, his conclusions arresting, his enemies enraged.
Hegemonic opinion struggles to understand Carlson, and struggles even harder to understand his appeal. The standard talking point is that he lies in order to enrage, and thus to generate views or clicks, and yesterday, like clockwork, University of Alberta Professor Timothy Caulfield appeared in The Walrus with an article entitled, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Tucker Carlson.” Running down a list of Carlson’s supposed lies, Caulfield concludes with an attempt to understand Carlson’s audience, whose size and enthusiasm so disturb elite opinion. On the facts, Caulfield is almost uniformly wrong; of Carlson’s appeal, he is simply uncomprehending.
Caulfield is a former Trudeau Foundation Fellow, a Canada Research Chair, and a member of the Order of Canada. He is the voice of the state, and wants you to know it. In another society, he would be Sir Timothy Caulfield, KCMG, OBE, Regius Professor of Something Grand. Here, the honours system of the Ottawa state has bestowed upon him such marks of favour as it has available; thus credentialized he dutifully appears as an authority in the official media.1 He’s the guy in the explainer, adjudicating the disputed facts, calling the ones he doesn’t like conspiracy theories, and telling you what the authorities want you to think.
His venue is equally august: The Walrus is a bien pensant literary magazine, overlapping at many points with The Globe and Mail and the CBC, full of CanCon stars like Margaret Atwood, and funded by governments, foundations, and corporations looking to burnish their cultural image and their nationalist credentials. These people despise Carlson, and Caulfield is their man.
Caulfield runs down a list of four italicized statements that he attributes to Carlson, claiming that each is false, and appends outside the italicized headings two more ostensible falsehoods, one about Dominion Voting Machines, the second a supposed admission of lying from Carlson himself. Caulfield does not provide references for most of these statements, but I am a frequent listener to Carlson’s shows, and they sound credible, though none come from his Calgary or Edmonton talks. Clearly, Caulfield has been preparing his invective for some time.
Six Assertions Caulfield Claims Are Lies
Carlson says “white supremacy is a ‘hoax’: The problem is one of definition: for Carlson as for most normal people, “white supremacy” names systems of explicit racism such as that in the old Jim Crow South. But for left-wing academics like Caulfield, “white supremacy” has a new meaning derived from academic Marxism, and more precisely from the Marxist feminist bell hooks (upper case is a bourgeois affectation) of which more here. In its new sense, “white supremacy” names the social system of the United States (and Canada) today. Caulfield is pleased to remind us that the U.S. has a history of white supremacy, but Carlson is obviously right that talk of “white supremacy” in its commonly understood sense is today absurd. White supremacists do exist, but don’t get out of their mother’s basement much.
Carlson says “vaccines didn’t work”: Caulfield presents a set of figures to the effect that vaccines reduce mortality rates, and that may be so. But it is also true that COVID vaccines were not as effective as advertised, and do not prevent transmission as we were told. Much would depend on context and surrounding modifiers, not provided by Caulfield: Carlson would be correct to say that COVID vaccines do not work as advertised.
Carlson says there are secret US biolabs in Ukraine: No less a source than Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland has said that there are biological laboratories in Ukraine, that the U.S. is involved with their management, and that there are concerns about their security given the current war.2 The word “secret” is here carrying too much weight. Strike it out, and Carlson is right.
Carlson says “white men created civilization”: Civilization comes from the Middle East, and for the past five hundred years the most advanced civilization on earth has been that of Europe, a fact that Carlson knows but that the left wants us to be ashamed of. Caulfield says that Carlson’s statement, “doesn’t even deserve a reality-adjusting debunk,” but again Carlson is right, with perhaps a concession to China along the way, unless Caulfield wants to suggest that Middle Eastern men are not white.
Carlson admits to lying, says Caulfield: In a discussion with the popular podcaster Dave Rubin, Carlson admitted that, like all human beings, he lies sometimes, but does his best to avoid it. Caulfield is being disingenuous: this is an admission of human frailty, not of regular, deliberate, or politically functional lying. Caulfield is cherry-picking words rather than listening to the whole minute: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tucker-carlson-fox-news-dave-rubin-b1919738.html.
Carlson disbelieved Dominion Voting Systems allegations he made publicly, says Caulfield: Caulfield cites internal Fox News documents, alleged to show that Carlson lied. But here is Carlson on-air, via Megyn Kelly, on 19 November 2020, dismissing Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s Dominion allegations, the ones Caulfield alleges he pushed on Fox (start at 08:10):
Carlson’s on-air views agreed entirely with those in Fox documents, except for being a bit more polite. Caulfield is one of many to get this one wrong. What with Fox News, a lawsuit, a big settlement, and Carlson fired by Fox, the congenial conclusion is very pleasant and refuted only by the facts.
Caulfield’s Confirmation Bias
I have run down six alleged lies, and on each Caulfield is wrong and Carlson right. This sits uneasily with Caulfield’s self-comportment as the voice of empirical reason, fighting the forces of darkness and right-wing Fox News conspiracy-theory misinformation.
Caulfield has some misinformation of his own, and I’ll stick to two brief examples. Tucker, he says, “has called transgender people ‘a cancer on the country.’” Professor Empirical doesn’t give the full quotation, but Google did: “The ideology [of transgenderism] leads to the castration of children and therefore it's bad. It's a cancer on the country.”3 Pronouns have meanings, even today, and “it” is an ideology, not a people.
The professor of misinformation didn’t read more than the first line, which was obviously too confirmatory to move past.
A second example of misleading claims from Caulfoild is his citation of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the effect that hate groups are growing in number. The SPLC numbers among these groups Moms for Liberty (which wants gender ideology and pornography out of schools), and the conservative Family Research Council. They have also named Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Carlson himself as hate figures, calling Carlson “anti-democracy,” an absurd claim I disassemble here. The SPLC is not a reliable source, but does point to the circular and self-referential character of leftist discourse about “hate.”
As I argued in the earlier post, the transparently polemical nature of the SPLC’s claims will undermine its credibility over the long term, while in the short term providing validation for people like Caulfield who need to cite a putatively neutral expert factory (Leslyn Lewis’ wonderful term). Confirmation bias afflicts us all, but the left’s large universe of foundations, NGOs, universities, journals, and activist groups is so big, well-funded, and well-credentialled that they are particularly prone to it, and here Caulfield unintentionally exemplifies the problem.
The Pleasures of Polemic
Carlson’s supporters present a problem for Caulfield, who — credit where it is due — attended Carlson’s Edmonton event, along with 8,000 others. Caulfield’s answer, buttressed by academic links, is primarily psychological, with a side of patronizing superiority:
It involves everything from social media echo chambers to a lack of critical thinking skills to vulnerabilities created by fear, anger, mental health challenges, and/or economic stress. And, of course, ideologically fuelled confirmation biases play a significant role. We all want “our team” to win.So half the country is motivated by fear and anger, with a superadded charge of stupidity. The reference to economic stress alludes to the old Marxist concept of false consciousness: the idiots won’t follow me, they are too benighted to know their own interests.
Caulfield’s problem is unintentionally exposed by his rhetoric: seeking to strike a note of cool, academic, fact-based analysis, he often slides into angry clichés: “alternative facts, “post-truth poster boy,” “spewing lies,” “pants on fire,” “fact-free pontifications,” are but a representative selection. Caulfield cannot decide if he wants to write a polemic or an analysis.
A good polemic can be a pleasure, though perhaps not of the most edifying kind. That is one reason why I enjoy Tucker (and now that I am enjoying him, I’ll drop the surname). The CBC, he says, tells him constantly that, “I’m a racist, because I drive an SUV and I’m not trans.” Tucker offers in those twelve words more authentic perception than anything Caulfield writes, and is wickedly funny too.
Alinsky was right that power hates being mocked, and Tucker knows that: “I look forward to your mockery of the people who misrule you,” were his concluding words in Edmonton.
Readers of The Walrus will not notice Caulfield’s misadventures with facts, and his angry rhetoric will give them the pleasures of a confirmatory echo chamber. But his, and their, spittle-flecked incomprehension will remain. It is the incomprehension of class hatred and also of class fear. As we have learned, the fears of an elite with a police force and a banking system can be dangerous.
In my next post, I shall leave the Regius Professor of Misinformation behind, and look further not at Caulfield’s errors but at Tucker’s appeal.
29 January 2024: Part 2 up:
The Attack on Tucker (2): The Sources of his Support
In part 1 of “The Attack on Tucker Carlson,” I refuted claims that Tucker Carlson lies made by Professor Timothy Caulfield in the state-supported cocktail party magazine The Walrus (link here). Caulfield is an excellent proxy for elite opinion, and his view of Tucker’s immense popular appeal comes down to what Marxists call false consciousness: in the…
Tim Caulfield is right about points 2 and 3.
Vaccines DO work, vaccines ARE as effective as advertised, and vaccines DO stop transmission. Tucker Carlson has knowingly lied outright about that fact for years, in order to prey on gullible conspiracy theorists. A million people died as a consequence of lies from people like Tucker.
Excellent analysis. I can't tell if Caulfield is just obtuse, or a bad faith actor.