Tucker Carlson Is Evil

The Fox News host is spreading vaccine misinformation that is costing lives. There's no other word for it than evil.

Jan 26, 2022

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.

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The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them

Tucker Carlson is the most popular primetime cable news host in the country. His nightly show regularly reaches 3.2 million viewers. And for much of the past year, he has used this powerful platform to spread a deluge of lies about not just Covid-19 vaccine mandates but the vaccines themselves. According to one analysis by the left-leaning media watchdog, Media Matters, Carlson has undermined vaccines in 99 percent of the segments he’s aired on them.

Carlson has claimed, among other things, that Covid-19 vaccines are killing people. He’s said they aren’t effective. He’s focused on the small number of cases in which people suffered complications from them — and he’s compared vaccines to Jim Crow, apartheid, and forced sterilization.

It’s hard to imagine Carlson sinking much lower, and yet he did last night. He brought on noted Covid misinformation spreader Alex Berenson, who told the Fox host’s millions of viewers this:

“I have not said this to you before, because I’m pretty careful … with the data. The mRNA covid vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double-boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point against omicron.”

None of this is remotely true, especially the part where Berenson says he’s “careful” with Covid data. In the early days of the pandemic, Berenson criticized media outlets for playing up the dangers from Covid and said that masks don’t work to stop the spread of the virus (he regularly referred to masks as “face diapers”). Berenson is such a fount of misinformation and lies that Twitter banned him from their site. Even having Berenson on his show is an act of monumental irresponsibility by Carlson.

As to Berenson’s argument that the mRNA vaccines don’t work against omicron, that’s blatantly untrue. Vaccines are not dangerous. They are not ineffective. Everyone should get vaccinated, and one of the reasons more than 2,000 Americans are dying every day from Covid is that people like Alex Berenson and Tucker Carlson are spreading lies about vaccines.

I have no idea if Alex Berenson believes the lies he tells, but when it comes to Tucker Carlson, I am far more confident that he knows it’s a bunch of bullshit.

For starters, it seems more likely than not that Carlson himself is vaccinated. Even after repeated press inquiries, Carlson has refused to say publicly whether he is or isn’t. Considering Carlson’s vehement opposition to the Covid vaccines, one would expect that he would gladly wear his anti-vaxxer status on his sleeve rather than making it a closely-held secret. And yet.

In addition, Carlson works for a company, Fox News, that requires its employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 and requires them to disclose their vaccine status. Last month, Fox ended a policy for its New York employees that allowed them to get a weekly test if they didn’t want to vaccinate. Now they must show proof that they’ve had at least one shot of a Covid vaccine. Keep in mind that Carlson just last week compared vaccine mandates “to what the imperial Japanese army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments” during World War II.

So even if Carlson is not vaccinated, his complaints about vaccine mandates, considering the policies of Fox News, are deeply hypocritical.

But profound and cynical duplicity is the least of Tucker Carlson’s crimes.

Blood On His Hands

Now I realize the words above might sound hyperbolic but consider the evidence. We have seen for months now that political affiliation and ideology are some of the most decisive factors in driving vaccination status.

As Charles Gaba noted again this week, in counties that voted for Donald Trump, there is a greater percentage of people who are not vaccinated. If you live in a county that went for Joe Biden, vaccination rates are higher.

In November, the Kaiser Family Foundation issued a report that showed Republicans are three times more likely than Democrats to be unvaccinated. And as Eric Levitz notes today at New York magazine, there is research suggesting a causal connection between Fox News viewership and vaccine skepticism. Of course, now there are other reasons why people might be unvaccinated, and not every anti-vaxxer is a Republican. Still, it takes some major mental gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that vaccine status and partisan identity are at least somewhat correlated.

What we know with greater clarity, however, is the costs of not getting vaccinated. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky noted today, in responding to Carlson and Berenson, those vaccinated against Covid “are 68 times less likely to die than if you are unvaccinated.”

Based on research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, we also know that 163,000 people have died because of a failure to get vaccinated.

So for the purposes of simplicity, let’s narrow this down.

Those who are not vaccinated are far more likely to die from Covid.
Republicans are less likely to get vaccinated than Democrats.
Republicans are thus more likely to die from Covid than Democrats.
Many Republicans watch Fox News regularly.
Tucker Carlson is the most popular prime-time host on Fox News.
Carlson and his guests regularly claim that vaccines don’t work, can cause more harm than good, and as of this week, “should be withdrawn from the market.”
Ergo, Tucker Carlson has blood on his hands.

One could take the position that no one believes anything Carlson says. Amazingly, this is an actual argument made by Carlson’s lawyers at Fox News. In a 2019 slander case against Carlson, Fox lawyers argued, successfully, that “Mr. Carlson himself aims to ‘challenge political correctness and media bias.’ This ‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ Fox persuasively argues … that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

I wish that were true, but of course, not every viewer of cable news is “reasonable.”

What if people do take Carlson seriously? What if Carlson’s war against vaccines has either convinced or confirmed the anti-vax opinions of Republican viewers of his program? Indeed, the children of one man who died of Covid have argued that watching videos of Carlson’s show on YouTube pushed him not to get vaccinated.

Even in the most charitable view, Carlson’s undoubtedly doing more harm than good in spreading misinformation about vaccines that we know save lives. And what if he’s expressing views that run counter not only to the place he works but also his vaccination status? The first is undoubtedly true; the second is likely the case.

As Philip Bump put it today in the Washington Post, “it is safe to say that someone watching Carlson’s show on Tuesday is going to be less likely to get vaccinated, not more. That someone who might have been thinking about getting vaccinated now may not. That someone at risk may go unprotected. That someone unprotected might die.”

Somewhere in America, there is likely a son or daughter, father or mother, brother or sister, husband or wife who will go through the unimaginable pain of losing someone they love to a preventable illness because of a lie they heard on Tucker Carlson’s show.

Why would he be doing this? Perhaps he truly believes what he is saying. But I think the better explanation is that he knows his viewers lap up vaccine skepticism so he’s telling them what they want to hear — and more importantly, what keeps them tuning in to his show. Certainly, Carlson would not be the first Fox primetime host to say one thing on the air and another in private because it’s good for ratings.

But the explanation for Carlson’s behavior, as odious as it might be, is less important than the result. He is spreading vaccine misinformation to Fox viewers already inclined to believe it, thus causing them not to get vaccinated and be more likely to die if they catch the virus. And long after we’ve all passed away Carlson will be remembered, in posterity, for the evil he did … in the name of ratings.

While I wouldn’t even attempt to get inside of Carlson’s head, I’d be curious to hear from Fox employees (90 percent of whom according to the company are vaccinated) how they can work for a news organization that allows a man to go on air who is committing such depraved acts.

(For today’s trivia question: without googling can anyone identify the reference in the title above “The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them”).

Shout-Out

Yesterday I promised a shout-out to the first reader who figured out why I used the picture below for a piece titled “Returning To Normalcy Is Easier Said Than Done.” The winner was Jerry Sweeney, who noted that “Warren G. Harding's campaign slogan was ‘Return to Normalcy’” (and yes, that’s a picture of our 29th president).

My old college buddy Eric Ashman speculated that I used the photo because Harding was president at the end of the last pandemic, which is accurate and would have made a ton of sense. Others like Andrew Levin speculated that throwing the first pitch of the major league season was my effort to represent a return to normalcy, which was another smart guess! Thanks to everyone who chimed in.

Today Harding is considered, by historians, one of the country’s worst presidents because of the scandals that plagued his administration. But when Harding ran for president, he won 60.1 percent of the vote, which was the highest percentage ever after the advent of the two-party system. One of the keys to Harding’s electoral success was his “return to normalcy” message, which resonated with voters after several years of war, pandemic, and instability. The 1920 election was also the first presidential election in which women voted. Unfortunately, 2.5 years into office, Harding contracted pneumonia and died during a trip to San Francisco. He was replaced in office by Calvin Coolidge.

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