Trying To Counter The Misinformation On Fox News Has Got Me All Tuckered Out
Fox anchoracist Tucker Carlson, channelling his best Charles Boyer, wants you to believe that a white person who wrote a 180 page manifesto full of hateful right-wing rhetoric was not motivated to shoot a bunch of black people at a supermarket by hateful right-wing rhetoric.
Sure he wasn’t. And when the shooter referenced Great Replacement Theory, he was talking about a completely different Great Replacement Theory than Carlson has been talking about for months. You know, the theory about why customers are not allowed to replace French fries with cole slaw when they order an Unhappy Meal. Or, possibly the philosophical conundrum (which is not a reference to the musical instrument O’Brien played in his high school band) posed by the need to replace the suspension in your beater because the wheels are wobbling precariously. Certainly not the idea that Jews and people of colour are replacing whites. Carlson’s take on CRT is a reasonable point of view, whereas the murderer’s point of view is just nuts!
Except…
There is no evidence that the shooter was diagnosed with mental illness. People around him couldn’t ignore what may well have not been happening (unless Carlson is suggesting that everybody who is part of the left-wing conspiracy to slow the growth of gun violence is psychic…and channelling a different universe, although if that was true, guns wouldn’t protect you, Tucks). Boyer would have been proud.
Although, come to think of it, Carlson is much more ambitious than Boyer. After all, Boyer only manipulated Ingrid Bergman; Carlson’s goal is to manipulate an entire country.
Comparison Is About As Relevant As An Analogy Between A GTO and the GTA (Although Not Nearly As Much Fun)
Conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan go to great lengths to Boyer the Buffalo murders of ten black people at the hands of an avowed white supremacist. Comparing Great Replacement Theory, which claims that white Americans are being replaced by Jews and people of colour by liberals who want to win all future elections (which ignores the reality that the unpopularity of Republican policies might have something to do with the fact that they don’t win elections), to Critical Race Theory, which suggests that maybe, Americans should, you know, if it’s not too much trouble, learn about the actual racism that has been part of American culture since the country’s founding, is just the sort of false equivalence that would have given Boyer a frisson of joy.
For easy understanding of the issue, I have prepared a chart comparing the two theories:
| GRT | CRT | |
| respects history |  |
 |
| is taught in law schools | |
|
| is prevalent in right-wing media | |
|
| demonizes Others | |
|
| believes in democratic deliberation | |
|
| espouses violence | |
|
| has been used to justify violence | |
|
Compared in this way, it is clear that the two theories were separated at birth, although they were obviously roughed up as children and now look nothing alike. Blame public schools.
And Speaking Of Blaming Public Schools…
Heather Anne Sprague, Republican Maine State House candidate, vaulted herself to the top of the right-wing Boyerosphere on the wings of this rant about public schools brainwashing children to become trans, confusing the shit out of them about their gender and mentally illing them, which ultimately lead them to commit mass murder. If the logic was any more tortured, you would have thought it had been given a jumpsuit and a cell at Guantanamo Bay.
The photos Sprague referred to were not actually of the shooter, but, you know, details. Pfft! Why let facts get in the way of a good Boyering when you can weave a conspiracy theory that attacks some of the right-wing’s favourite targets: trans kids and public schools? Remember: guns don’t kill people – public education kills people!
The argument that teaching children to be tolerant of those who are different from them leads to mass murder seems perverse, but no amount of logic will convince the Boyerized people on the radical right that the real problem is the easy availability of – wait – uhh, was Sprague talking about the Buffalo mall shooting or the Uvalde, Texas school shooting ten days later? I…I’m finding it hard to keep track…
If Your Prayers Are Anything Like Your Thoughts, The Families Of Murdered Children Are In Deep, Deep Trouble
Being a politician is a matter of judgment. Sometimes, you gotta level with your constituents. And sometimes, you just gotta Boyer the shit out of a situation. Yep, we definitely have moved on to the school shooting in Uvalde. On that subject, Representative Lauren Boebert knows which side her bread is Boyered on.
If guns could help you travel from New York to Minsk in less than 20 hours, Boebert might have a point. Of course, you would always run the risk of being bumped to a later gun because the one you were supposed to be on was overbooked. Or you may have to sit in the gun for hours after arriving because a shortage of holster staff had backed up the guns in the queue. Either way, you should expect the cost of a gun ticket to skyrocket because of the steeply rising cost of bullets.
Analogies are fun, aren’t they?
I would be a lot more – exsanguinated is a bit extreme, so I’m going to go with sanguine – I would be a lot more sanguine about Boebert’s reference to “law-abiding citizens” if so much of the rhetoric on the right wasn’t about their need to protect themselves from the government. Today’s law-abiding citizens are tomorrow’s insurrectionists. And, for good measure, some of yesterday’s.
As for the assertion that her guns help protect her family, the vast majority of the evidence suggests the opposite: people are most often the victims of their own weapons, whether by accident, through suicide or murder by somebody they know, or because a person who broke into the house got to the weapon first. But of course, one of the most effective techniques of a good Boyerizing is to make molehills out of mountains.
Aaaaaaaaand, The Boyerization Of The Right Is Now Complete
Sometimes, an oral argument is hard to follow because the person making it is choked up with emotion. Sometimes, an oral argument is hard to follow because the brain of the person making it is worse at moving in a straight line than a squirrel on acid trying to avoid a sniper.
It’s a fine line, really.
Former football player turned Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, when asked how he would solve the problem of school shootings (are we still talking about Uvalde, or has another one happened in the hour it has taken me to write this article?), came up with this word salad. And a terrible one it is, at that: the syntax is wilted and the flow of the argument smells like it has been rotting for days.
If there is a point to what he is saying (Vegas odds makers are not hopeful), it could be that the government should monitor the social media of young people to weed out those who appear dangerous. Law abiding citizens with guns are out of bounds for government intervention, but law abiding teenagers angstily angry about the world are fair game. Weren’t the Republicans once the party of small government, or was that just a bad dream they once had?
It’s not hard to imagine what Walker must have been thinking while he was word salading: Don’t talk about the availability of guns! Don’t talk about the availability of guns! Whatever comes out of your mouth, it better not be about the availability of guns! They key to a good Boyerizing is consistency of message!
Having said all of this, I feel the need to point out that Charles Boyer was a very good actor who was just playing a part in a movie; he cannot be held responsible for the moral depravity of his character. On the other hand, these people want you to believe every word that they say!