Tucker Carlson tilts at windmills

Tucker Carlson is settling into his role as the Don Quixote of white supremacy quite nicely. In recent years, the former bowtie- wearing wunderkind of Reagan- Bush conservatism has been recast as the resident intellectual of Fox News’ evening bloc of reactionary pundits.

Just as Cervantes’ knight errant was supremely courtly and rule- bound in his madness, Mr. Carlson is the foolish, deluded exemplar of a conservative pundit class that unreservedly bends a knee to President Donald Trump.

With his declaration this week that the problem of white supremacy is “a hoax,” Mr. Carlson proves that he’s just as out of touch with reality as that ingenious gentleman of La Mancha. When he thinks he’s dispatching monsters, he’s actually tilting at the windmills of political correctness he’s constructed himself.

With many days to go before the last funerals in El Paso have been officiated, Mr. Carlson looked into the camera and attempted to bend reality into a shape more accommodating to his opinion that white supremacy is yet another liberal conspiracy theory.

“It’s actually not a real problem in America,” he said extending his thumb and forefinger into a pincer shape to show how small it is. “The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside of a college football stadium.”

Because Mr. Carlson lives in the clouds and not in the America where white nationalist/ white identity violence constitutes the majority of domestic terrorist activities, he feels free to ignore contrary evidence in places like Pittsburgh, El Paso, Charlottesville, Charleston and Gilroy.

“This is a hoax,” he said, squinting into the camera with feral intensity. “Just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

It’s not that Mr. Carlson doesn’t believe the death and carnage committed by white nationalist terrorists in recent days and years isn’t happening. It’s his contention that the number of card- carrying white nationalist terrorists is still relatively low even if you’re able to fill all 100,000 seats of, say, Michigan Stadium with white supremacists and their guns.

But the killers who do the actual dirty work of massacres at churches, synagogues, mosques, Walmarts and night clubs are rarely card- carrying white supremacists a la David Duke. The haters who fill newspaper comment boxes with vile racist screeds don’t belong to any club that would be glad to have them as members, either.

Most white supremacists are “loners” who are socialized into murderous conformity on 8chan, YouTube and hundreds of ratholes on the “dark web.” They’re all loners who have found virtual communities online, making the need for formal group associations unnecessary.

Of course, the numbers of white supremacists, whether affiliated or not, are low as a percentage of the population. Still, the National Socialists would’ve been happy with even a fraction of those numbers when they were taking over Germany in 1933 and 1934.

Meanwhile, Mr. Carlson’s argument that small numbers equal little influence is completely contrary to what usually animates Fox News pundits and personalities when they’re ginning up blind panic.

For years, Fox has generated hysteria- level coverage about the New Black Panther Party based on the presence of two beretwearing clowns outside of a North Philly poll station on Election Day 2008.

Fox painted these Panther cosplayers as part of President Barack Obama’s alleged network of urban shock troops poised to steal future elections by intimidating white people ( and black people who want to vote Republican) at the polls.

In 2010, the year of the midterm elections that saw Republicans wrest control of the House from the Democrats, Fox ran 95 segments and devoted eight hours of airtime to the New Black Panther Party, a group that would count itself lucky to have even a few thousand members nationwide.

Dragging the NBPP out for periodic horsewhipping as a major source of social destabilization in America is still a reliable go- to strategy for a cable news outlet devoted to terrorizing its older, conservative viewers for ratings.

But just as Don Quixote saw what wasn’t there while attempting to convince others he was correct in his delusions, Mr. Carlson sees what is there, yet convinces himself — and others — that what they see doesn’t matter. Like Cervantes’ hero, he’ll always choose willful ignorance if it will spare him even a moment of soul- crushing selfawareness and embarrassment.

Despite their reversal of status in this analogy, Mr. Trump is the donkey- riding squire Sancho Panza to Mr. Carlson’s Don Quixote, though the president lacks the fictional sidekick’s wit and penchant for truth- telling.

While Mr. Trump routinely turns to Fox’s Sean Hannity for blind allegiance, it’s clear that he values Mr. Carlson for the alleged “heft” of his ideas. If Mr. Trump picks up on and echoes Mr. Carlson’s notion that concerns about white supremacy are overblown or a “hoax,” it will be a disaster for a nation many believe to be in the beginning stages of a white supremacist insurrection.

Mr. Carlson’s bizarre downplaying of white nationalism and white supremacy as existential threats comes at a strange time in the history of our democratic republic.

Thanks to Mr. Trump’s naked embrace of the underside of the American body politic, more Americans than ever finally understand that much of our national politics is rooted in a complicated history of structural and individual racism. It is no longer considered the paranoid ranting of disaffected black people “crying racism.” White folks can see it now as clearly as anyone thanks to smartphones and YouTube videos.

While Mr. Carlson goes on the offensive denying the threat of white supremacist terrorism, people of all backgrounds are seeing the results of it in real time. Who are they going to believe — Mr. Carlson’s quixotic lies or their own experience?

It’s only fitting that Cervantes has the last word about Mr. Carlson and his ilk from a passage in his magnificent novel: “The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”