There are many ways in which Fox News’s Tucker Carlson misleads his viewers. It’s a forest thick with examples, from mighty sequoias to sprouting saplings. It’s an ecosystem so robust that it’s hard to grant the benefit of the doubt even to small deceptions. Like, for example, a misleading graph.
That graph, shown on Carlson’s program Monday night, is, indeed, misleading, visually suggesting a much larger change than warranted by the data. Show the vertical axis extending to zero and the scale is shifted.
But this, as it turns out, was not the most misleading part of Carlson’s program that night. It was a sapling, crowded out by rhetoric centered on Carlson’s core competence: heightening the fear and anger of viewers. In this case, it was connecting his long-standing efforts to sow doubt about coronavirus vaccines and the government’s response to the pandemic to one of the most fundamental concerns of the political right: the decreased centrality of White Christians in American society.
Carlson pointed to Pew Research Center data showing that decline, one he hinted was somehow related to Barack Obama’s time in office. Other polling, like the American National Election Studies survey collected around federal elections, show a longer decline, one that overlaps with the decline in the density of the White population in the United States. It was around the time that Obama was elected that the density of White Christians in the United States dropped to the 50 percent mark — a benchmark that explains some of the reaction to Obama’s presidency, even if it wasn’t the sole driver of that pushback.
Recent polling, also from Pew, found that most Republicans think that being Christian is central to America’s national identity and that Christians face a lot of discrimination. It’s these concerns that Carlson is hoping to leverage.
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What Carlson argued wasn’t simply that America was becoming more secular, though he was elevating that concern. Instead, he was bizarrely arguing Monday that it was shifting its religious belief from existing traditions to what he called the “cult of coronavirus.”
“There are no secular people,” Carlson said. “Everybody believes in something. All of us are born with the need to worship. The question is what?”
So what does Carlson claim that these not-actually-secular, non-Christian Americans are worshiping? Vaccinations, by which he means science. It’s a hackneyed argument, claiming that faith in science is simply the flip side of faith in religion, but Carlson has few qualms about presenting hackneyed arguments.
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“America has not lost its religion. It’s just replaced its religion,” he said. Why does he say this? Well, because the pandemic introduced restrictions on places of worship (that were not specific to places of worship and which have largely been lifted) and because New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) wears a necklace that says “vaxed” instead of a cross.
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“No one voted for her as governor,” he said, which is true only in the sense that she was sworn in after the resignation of former governor Andrew M. Cuomo. She was, of course, elected as lieutenant governor, a position that most New Yorkers probably understand mostly as being second in line to the governorship. But Carlson is Carlson, so: “That seems odd for a politician, but it’s typical for a faith leader. No one voted for Jim Jones, either.”
This is all just shtick. Carlson’s trying to disparage vaccination as a cult, as though the idea of being vaccinated against a virus that has killed nearly 700,000 people in the United States is otherwise inexplicable. He’s enormously skilled at elevating fear among his viewers, at presenting them as a sensible line of defense against an irrational and devious world. So he wraps the effort to vaccinate Americans into a broad sense that America is changing in ways that undercut its traditions. Imagine treating a vaccine as a god! Which, of course, no one does.
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Fox News obviously sees value in amplifying Republican concerns about the vaccine. If it didn’t, it’s safe to assume that its programming, including Carlson’s, would be redirected. Fox News employees who spoke with the Daily Beast described the network’s focus on undercutting the vaccine — or, at least, the government’s advocacy of it — as “great for ratings” and something that is unparalleled in getting “our viewers more excited or engaged.”
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Fear and fury are great motivators. And if you can make vaccinations seem like part of a government-promoted effort to push Americans away from religion, all the better.
New polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that most Republicans direct their anger about the coronavirus pandemic at the government, rather than at those who haven’t yet been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Nearly two-thirds of Republicans said that the pandemic had eroded their confidence in the government — something that then-President Donald Trump actively stoked last year and something that Fox News and Carlson, in particular, continue to this day.
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What is striking about Carlson’s riff Monday is not its extremism; we’re all used to that. What’s striking about it was its sloppiness. The idea that there’s no value to vaccination beyond government-mandated compliance, that elected leaders demand unthinking fealty to their edicts about its efficacy, is hard to reconcile with the obvious utility of the vaccines. Carlson’s so mired in his universe of blame and cynicism that he offers assessments like this one, again targeting Hochul.
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“How you show your love to one another the old way is to visit people, say, in the hospital as they died, that’s no longer allowed,” he said. “The new way to show your love is to get the vax.”
Yeah, man. It is indeed better to get vaccinated and to encourage elderly loved ones to get vaccinated than to be mad that you can’t stand next to them as they die of covid-19. I don’t think that it makes me some zealous adherent to a new secular religion to hold that position.
But then, I’m not trying to get you mad at the vaccine.