No One Knows Elite Victimhood Like Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson attacked Meghan Markle as an example of "elites' unseemly victimhood," but elite victimhood is his whole schtick.
Tucker Carlson is an every man.
Sure, he makes millions of dollars being on TV, but he still knows how tough it is out there for working Joes, and he just wants the politicians and Hollywood bigshots to get off their high horses and stop lecturing us normal folks about how racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are "problems" for other people. He's tired of guys like him and all the white men in his audience getting pushed around and shamed by the rich jerks with all the power.
At least... that's how he likes to portray himself. It's the best way he knows to pander to his audience — he knows that this kind of rhetoric gets them energized up and keeps them watching, so he runs segments like his Tuesday night piece on the Meghan Markle Oprah interview entitled: "Meghan Markle: latest example of elites' unseemly victimhood."
The only problem is: Tucker Carlson's populist routine is pure performance. We know for a fact that he's not some bastion of common-sense truth-telling — he has openly admitted that he will say anything his bosses want. He is — as he succinctly put it in describing Meghan markle — "a manipulative opportunist."
On top of that, he doesn't know the first thing about what working Americans are really dealing with. He's been rich his whole life — the son of a wealthy heiress to the Swanson frozen dinner company. The fact that his signature look used to be a bowtie pretty much says it all.
In reality, Tucker Carlson is not just the elite of the elite — with more power, money, and influence than 99.9% of his audience will ever be allowed in the same room with — he's a professional victim. His job description might as well read "elite victimhood by the hour."
His whole show is devoted to grievance. If you were to believe his schtick, you would have to conclude that straight white Christian American men — the wealthiest and most powerful single demographic on the planet — are constantly being trammeled by women and minority groups.
If we try to give a boost to historically disadvantaged people, that's an attack. If in-person church services are canceled to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic, that's an attack. If people are being kicked off social media platforms for violating terms of service and spreading hate speech, you better believe that's an attack.
And no individual is more under attack than Tucker himself. When people shared audio recordings of him saying disgusting things, he was being attacked. When the New York Times was planning to publish a mean article about him — with no mention of his address — that was actually an attempt to dox him and hurt his family.
But when tabloids publish a false story about Meghan Markle causing Kate Middleton to cry, it's not even okay her to correct that falsehood, because explaining the true story — that Kate Middleton had actually made Meghan Markle cry — apparently implies that she thinks it was a great tragedy. As Tucker put it, "It was her 9/11, so of course she considers it newsworthy."
Even the time Carlson's racist writer was outed and had to be fired, he managed to spin that as an attack. And of course, when CNN reached out to cable companies to see if they wanted to reconsider platforming a network where men like Tucker Carlson were manufacturing dangerous doubts about the 2020 election results, that was a direct attack on the very institution of free speech. Never mind the fact that cable providers are private companies and the anchors have no constitutional right to an audience of millions.
But what about when Meghan Markle was a new member of the royal family and was reportedly not allowed to share her suicidal thoughts with an outside therapist? According to Tucker, she is falsely claiming victim status, saying, "I'm being silenced" while being interviewed by Oprah for a massive global audience...after she and Harry left the royal family, which really has nothing to do with what she was talking about.
He then went on to claim that Meghan Markle is a narcissist (unlike Tucker Carlson...) and listed some other elites who have supposedly made themselves out to be victims, including Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weird that they're all women and that two of them are Black... But never mind that; the point is that they're elites.
That's when Tucker really laid it all out: "For rich people, deciding that you're a victim has many levels of appeal. For one thing, it gives meaning to your decadent, empty life ... Martyrdom means you're forever the hero of the story. So you can see why narcissists love it." Where does he get such trenchant insight on this tendency. Hmm...
He then went on to say of people like him (but who want to pay higher taxes in order to fund programs to help the poor), "If you were very rich, you might imagine that you owed something to the people below you ... But self-identified victimhood instantly nullifies this deal and restores power to the powerful."
Wow... If only there were some group of people we could identify who have held onto power in America since before it was even a country and who continue to cling to it to this day, claiming victimhood every time an attempt is made to loosen their stranglehold.
If only there was a mass media source that they disproportionately turned to, who could send them this message so that we coul all move forward. Hmm...
Oh, well. For now the important point is that Tucker Carlson and his audience are the only real victims. There's no room for anyone else on the victimhood pedestal, so Tucker just has to keep kicking down, and never looking in a mirror.