Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, Apr. 28, 2023
“… the ADL’s attempt to brand Carlson’s concerns about the spread of transgender ideology or the way it has been used to endanger children as homophobic is equally wrongheaded. It’s also out of touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens who view the way mainstream liberals have embraced this trend with alarm.”
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt finally got his wish. He’s been advocating for the firing of Tucker Carlson for years. And that’s what happened earlier this week when Fox News fired the host of its most popular and influential program. In the absence of any explanation from the network or its parent corporation, News Corp., the public and Carlson’s millions of fans have been free to speculate about the proximate cause of the decision. There is also great uncertainty as to how or when he will return to the spotlight and resume his role in public discourse, which, perhaps as much as any other individual in the media, he has helped shape since “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began appearing on Fox in 2016.
Though Greenblatt and other partisan liberal Democrats deplore the very existence of Fox News and have sought to de-platform it since they seem to think that having a news channel—let alone one whose viewership dwarfed that of its competitors—that dissented from liberal orthodoxies was an outrage not to be tolerated. But Carlson was a particular object of scorn and anger.
They accused him of, in Greenblatt’s words, using “his primetime show to spew antisemitic, racist, xenophobic and anti-LGBTQ hate to millions.” In particular, the ADL claimed that Carlson was guilty of “spreading the Great Replacement Theory,” and in so doing, was an ally of the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017.
Though most of those accusations are untrue, Carlson is still a problematic figure. …[To read the full article, click here]
