While a bunch of white terrorists occupy a federal wildlife building in Oregon, stooges over at the cable news channel devoted to scaring old white people have chosen to largely ignore the events. On the January 3, 2016 edition of Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, Clayton Morris, and Juliet Huddy only gave your grandparents about 15 seconds of conservatocentric coverage of Ammon Bundy and his confederacy of dunces, but found time every hour to give their two cents on the Confederate flag’s place in middle American culture and comments director Quentin Tarantino made about the endurance of Confederate Civil War imagery.
Because, priorities.
The host’s defense of the Confederate flag stems from a recent interview where film director Quentin Tarantino made some fairly direct comments about the state of Confederate-oriented Civil War imagery in the United States while promoting his new film The Hateful Eight, which deals with racial tensions in the years following the American Civil War. From The Guardian:
“All of a sudden, people started talking about the Confederacy in America in a way they haven’t before. I mean, I’ve always felt the rebel flag was some American swastika. And well, now, all of a sudden people are talking about it, and now they’re banning it, and now it’s not OK to have it on fucking license plates, and coffee cups, and stuff.
And people are starting to question about stuff like statues of Bedford Forrest [the Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan grand wizard] in parks. Well, it’s about damn time, if you ask me.”
As the purveyors of “not racist” racism, Fox just could not let comments like this float through the fields of punditry uncontested, especially since they came from a hyper-liberal Hollywood guy who makes violent movies. So, Carlson, Morris, and Huddy did what any good Roger Ailes employee does —
“‘I don’t think he knows anything about the Confederacy,’ Carlson quipped. ‘I would be shocked if Quentin Tarantino could name three Civil War battles if his life depended on it.’
‘This is an attack by the elites on middle American culture,’ he continued. ‘Using the confederacy and the battle flag and all that stuff, they’re just symbols to them of what they believe is the backward culture between Malibu and Georgetown.’
It’s like they look out and, man, everyone is in the Klan. You know, they eat pork rinds, they watch NASCAR, they’re horrible.'”
This kind of intellectual density is why I love Tucker Carlson. He begins his commentary with that is effectively a schoolyard taunt, then dives headfirst into the shallow end with broad attacks on what he promotes as classism.
Carlson calls the criticism of Confederate imagery an attack on middle American culture by “the elites,” then proceeds to engage in pure conjecture, implying that people on the coasts view middle Americans as “horrible” people who eat pork rinds and watch NASCAR.
That’s how you manipulate older white people.
Clayton Morris felt it was beneficial for their stirring discourse to play “devil’s advocate,” stating that there were similarities between the way white supremacists have co-opted both Nazi and Confederate flags, because on Bullshit Mountain, playing “devil’s advocate” is not a means by which to test the strength of an opposing argument.
All Juliet Huddy could contribute to the conversation was that Quentin Tarantino has made “so many violent movies.”
Even though Carlson stated that criticism of the Confederate flag is “an attack on middle American culture,” he insisted he isn’t defending the flag because he is “against” declaring war on the federal government. However:
“‘I would say that [Tarantino] is not making a reasonable point here,’ Carlson opined. ‘He’s making the point that the president always makes, that the real threat is middle America. They have too many guns, they’re into this Christianity thing. They are opposed to abortion. They have all kinds of medieval views that are threat to America.'”
Exactly, Tucker. That’s exactly what President Obama, coastal “elites,” and everyone who criticizes the cultural acceptance of a symbol of hatred are saying. We’re attacking middle American culture because we have no tolerance of symbols and cultural allocations that promote insurrection, treason, racism, and slavery.
But, what does it say about the portions of middle American culture that are tolerant, or even accepting, of that symbolism? Considering rhetoric commonly observed on conservative media, they’re likely Fox News viewers.
