Thursday, October 24, 2024

Tucker Carlson's Daddy Issues

 


Just so we're up to date on this, not that long ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (my imaginary boyfriend from Canada) testified that Tucker Carlson was a paid propagandist for Russia. Which I really don't need more "proof" about because we are looking right at him. Like Tucker is that guy you absolutely know is a sell-out. 

Now, you could ask yourself how this white supremacist-identified misogynist stays around after his break with Fox News, but wow. I dunno. Some people probably do feel like his break with the mainstream (I know, I get the joke--it's the joke I'm actually making) gave him freedom and power to be more truthy, or whatever.  But I think he really just has to bite down harder on his schtick, and that is entirely what he did just now bigging up Trump at Turning Point, by referring to the US rejecting Trump as a willful little girl and Trump, vengeful, as a disciplining Daddy figure

Can one's mind's eye vomit? Because I think my forebrain just virtually puked a little. 


It's an interesting incitement to unrest using a really screwed up familial metaphor. It settles in the wheelhouse of "theobros" who talk openly about women with the "Jezebel spirit" and repealing the 19th Amendment. It fits in with JD Vance's own alliance to a weirdly "men on top" and specifically "mommy issues/why did the lady not support me?" scorn.  

There is some real Freudian shit going on here. Is America--think of the Statue of Liberty as a convenient insert--what you want to see spanked? The country humiliated and dominated by people who don't understand what their own motherland stands for?  Is it just resentment of Kamala Harris--a woman, being a competent candidate when theirs is a sleazy fascist reprobate that would motivate that? or the demographic--woman voters, that votes against what Carlson/Kirk/Trump represent regularly? 

Honestly, I don't want to see Trump's hands all over any little girl--especially not spanking her. This is a nation where the voters are grown people, thanks, and I want to believe the majority of us will choose liberty over....

whatever weird deeply personal and fucked up stuff this is. 

A Daddy figure--a supposed strongman?--whipping America for the crime of democracy? 

That seems downright un-American to me. And something someone should maybe seek therapy for.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The way the crowd came alive when "Dad comes home," implying hetero-norm married folk

Vixen Strangely said...

There is a lot going on here--standard nuclear family/heteronormatively gendered assumptions. Clearly, pro-corporal punishment, which is not modern child-rearing. (But popular with a certain fundamentalist teaching--see the Pearls and James Dobson--the IBLP in general.) "Dad comes home" implies stay at home Mommy can't do the child-rearing (can she do *anything*?) so Poppa has to take charge (where has he been, though? why hadn't the parents already taught the kids trust and respect earlier on?)

The implied cruelty and the idea that some people's ideas about freedom are a little too free is a permission slip for authoritarianism. Infantilizing the people who dissent from actions of the state degrades the concept of democracy as a dismissal of the rational desires of grown people as nothing more than whims of the immature

I hate it.

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