Left-wing activists in the media loathe Tucker Carlson, the journalist and ratings-crushing host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News Channel, where this reporter is a contributor. The brave and independent thinker challenges stultifying orthodoxies on both left and right, making him a unique threat to the establishment that has dominated the political conversation for decades.
Because he is willing to take on powerful interests and their role in shaping foreign policy, economic policy, and immigration policy, he is the biggest threat to the established media order that seeks to control those policy discussions. He is smart, dialed in, and remarkably savvy at dealing with media opponents. So much so that left establishment leaders have collectively decided he needs to be destroyed. They regularly target him for destruction.
Like tens of millions of other concerned American citizens, Carlson has noticed what many in corporate media seek to hide: the Biden immigration policy is to encourage millions of non-Americans to stream illegally over the border as part of a long-term Democratic strategy for political dominance. To keep him from talking about the short and long-term effects of the Biden open borders policy, left-wing activists with close ties to the Democratic Party are accusing him of anti-Semitism, of all things.
Last night, the far-left Democratic activist group Media Matters ran an absolutely absurd and over-the-top hit piece arguing that Fox is not allowed to notice Democratic political strategy as it relates to Democratic immigration policy, no matter how obvious those things are. Listing a series of completely anodyne quotes from Fox reporters and hosts who noticed basic reality about how Democratic support for policies that enable illegal immigration followed by massive amnesty for said illegal immigrants is part of a strategy to gain new voters for the Democratic Party, Media Matters claimed that noticing reality is somehow racist. The cited quotes themselves are all eminently sensible and substantive.
For example, one of the supposedly horrific quotes requiring censorship was of Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., claiming that Democrats have a “broader political agenda” to encourage illegal immigration to the size of “one of the largest cities in America.” One host was chastised for noticing that legal citizens are forced to pay for the medical and educational expenses of illegal immigrants. Media Matters even got mad at a border resident who told a Fox News reporter that Biden is “using people to advance his political agenda, to collapse our border, and change our style of government, and that’s scaring us.”
It’s clear that Media Matters for America’s real problem is that the Democratic Party it exists to support is in a political crisis of its own making. President Biden campaigned on a plan to welcome illegal immigrants, tore down every policy and procedure the country had put in place to limit illegal immigration, and is now unable to hide the trauma his policies are causing communities at the southern border and throughout the United States. Democrats are terrified about massive mid-term losses, destroying their narrow control of the entire U.S. government.
Joining them in their anti-free media effort were other Democratic Party subsidiaries, such as the once respectable Anti-Defamation League. The group was formed to fight anti-Semitism but in 2016, it dropped that portion of its work from its mission statement in favor of straight-up advocacy on behalf of political allies in the Democratic Party.
“The Anti-Defamation League, a century-old Jewish civil-rights organization, has essentially become another J Street — an arm of the Democratic Party’s stable of pressure groups,” noted the New York Post at the time. In 2016, the former vice president and board of trustees chairman of the World Jewish Congress complained that ADL’s leader Jonathan Greenblatt was “tilting the ADL policy away from its primary mandate of combating anti-Semitism and steering it toward partisan social action issues.”
Other Jewish groups concerned about anti-Semitism have complained about this turn of events specifically as it relates to their most recent political work. After Greenblatt joined other Democratic activists in attacking Tucker Carlson and demanding his firing for noticing the border crisis, a group of more than 1,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis complained vociferously. Noting that ADL was muted in response to issues of real concern, such as Democratic political stars blocking funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system, they wrote, “If the current leadership of the ADL is unwilling to call out real antisemitism in an unbiased fashion, the ADL must urgently find new leadership who will.”
Rabbi Dov Fischer was more direct in his piece “Yoo Hoo, Tucker Carlson, We’re Here and We’ve Got Your Back.” He wrote, “In fact, it is Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL who needs to be terminated, not Tucker.”
More alarming than acknowledged Democratic partisans engaging in these attacks on journalism was that Axios recycled the Media Matters hit piece, clearly part of a partisan operation, just a few hours after it ran. In a shockingly unsubstantiated propaganda piece headlined, “A racist conspiracy theory goes mainstream,” Axios reporters Dan Primack and Russell Contreras reprinted the allegations of Fox News’s partisan critics as if they were fact, redefined all opposition to Biden’s border mess as “white replacement theory,” hid the partisan nature of the ADL, declined to quote the many Jewish critics of the ADL’s partisan campaigns, took quotes out of context, and generally accepted the left’s view that Americans do not have a right to speak out against Biden’s immigration policy without being called racist.
This is a common technique of moral blackmail, regularly used by the establishment and others on the left to silence opposition to progressivism’s march through American institutions. It has been used to fight opposition to nation-building wars, loosening of immigration restrictions, trade policy that harms average Americans, the indoctrination of critical race theory, and various other leftist and establishment agenda items.
Axios has been funded by a consortium of corporate leaders and interests, such as Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Atlantic Media, and NBC News.
