I refer to it as the “clustertuck.” It’s the phenomenon of right-wing media outlets working in concert to convince Americans to hurt themselves as well as to undermine our democracy. I named it after Fox News’ inflatable Tucker Carlson, its most notorious proponent.
Carlson and others have been spreading two dangerous lies: that the COVID-19 vaccine is a hoax and should be avoided, and that Joe Biden’s election in 2020 was fraudulent and he is an illegitimate president. The former has sickened and killed numerous Americans. The latter has sickened and threatens to kill American democracy.
Carlson didn’t even wait for votes to be counted to fire the first clustertuck election salvo. “The outcome of our presidential election was seized from the hands of voters,” he blustered, “where of course it rightly belongs, and now resides in the control of lawyers and courts and highly partisan, clearly corrupt, big city bureaucrats. So, no matter what happens next, that is a tragedy. Many Americans will never again accept the results of a presidential election.”
There was no basis for his accusations, but truth is not the currency of the clustertuckers. Carlson likely knew that Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2016 and never enjoyed a positive approval rating, would lose the election. Trump seemed to know it as well, given that he began attacking the validity of the election months before a single vote was cast. But they lied for different reasons. Trump wanted to stay in office. Carlson’s motivation was darker.
Carlson is also a leading clustertuck vaccine skeptic. “So maybe it doesn’t work,” he told his viewers on April 13th, “and they’re simply not telling you that.” On May 5th he told his viewers that the COVID-19 vaccines killed more than 3,300 people in the U.S. during the previous four months, citing a source that is demonstrably invalid. In early July he denounced a Biden administration effort to have health care workers and volunteers go door to door to encourage unvaccinated individuals to get shots. He accused the administration of trying to “force people to take medicine they don’t want or need.” He called it “the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far.” What an amazing accusation from a man who routinely applies a flame-thrower to his coif!
Carlson is not the only storm-trooper in the clustertuck vaccine denial infantry. He is joined by many Fox News colleagues, including Brian Kilmeade, who bristled when his “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy said the federal government was trying to keep Americans from unnecessarily dying. “That is not their job,” declared Kilmeade. “It’s not their job to protect anybody.” Kilmeade unwittingly hinted at the clustertuck’s dark secret.
Carlson has numerous fellow travelers advancing Trump’s stolen election lie. “But crucially,” wrote Bill Keveney and Maria Puente in USA Today, “supportive media outlets amplified (Trump’s) claims, from wholehearted cheerleading on Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN) to credulous acceptance of gossamer-thin (and failed) legal challenges by Sean Hannity, among other Fox News commentators.”
What motivates the clustertuckers? While they may want to perpetuate Trump’s relevancy for political reasons, I don’t believe their motivation has anything to do with politics or philosophy. Go back to Kilmeade’s comment that it’s not government’s role to protect anybody. That statement is projection. What he meant was, “it’s not my job to protect anybody.” Kilmeade and the clustertuckers relish the prominence of media, but avoid the responsibility that goes with it.
When I taught Media Law and Regulation in the 1980s, I included a viewing of the movie version of “1984” My point was to emphasize how media can be dangerously weaponized by malicious actors. If I taught the course again, I would assign a viewing of the opening scenes of the movie, “The Fisher King.”
In that movie, a talk show host named Jack Lucas, played by Jeff Bridges, took a call from a listener named Edwin. When the caller confessed a crush on a woman he met at what Lucas referred to as a “yuppy bar,” Lucas went into a rant:
They’re repulsed by imperfection and horrified by the banal — everything America stands for. Edwin, they have to be stopped before it’s too late. It’s us or them.
Edwin replied, “Okay, Jack.” A newscaster related what happened next:
Edwin Malnick arrived at the peak hour of seven-fifteen, took one long look at the handsome collection of the city’s best and brightest then removed a shotgun from his overcoat and opened fire. Seven people were killed before Mr. Malnick turned the gun on himself and shot a hole through his head.
Jack Lucas might be the clustertucker poster child. He relished the power of media but disdained responsibility. He said crazy things because he could. He enjoyed it, listeners were attracted, and nothing mattered besides his success and self-satisfaction. It never occurred to him that a susceptible listener might take him seriously and do something horrible. I suspect that Carlson, Kilmeade and the others spout dangerous vaccine disinformation and sedition because they can, they enjoy the notoriety, and it makes them feel good. I doubt if they believe the election was stolen and the COVID-19 vaccine is a hoax. It’s unlikely they expected their outbursts to get anybody hurt or killed.
But hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of COVID-19 and there was a violent insurrection on January 6th. Now that’s a cluster(t)uck.
© 2021 by Mike Tully
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Debt Default and the Death of American Democracy
Yesterday on “Morning Joe,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough made the following prediction: “Mitch and the Republicans are being too clever by half,” he intoned. “If Democrats are voting every day, every single one of them, to raise the debt ceiling — and none of the Republicans are, and the Republicans won’t even let them cast a vote on it — it all falls on the Republicans.”
Scarborough is dangerously wrong. It will fall on all of us.
By “it,” Scarborough refers to political fallout. He believes American voters will blame Republicans for the disaster that follows default on the national debt. In his view, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are setting themselves up for political exile. But “it” also refers to the calamity that will result from the United States defaulting on its debt obligation for the first time in history.
Since World War I, Congress has voted to raise the national debt limit to ensure the country is able to pay its bills. It has no impact on the budget. The debt limit is post-budget; it pays for bills already incurred. But the Republicans are using the filibuster to prevent the Democrats from raising the debt limit this year. Unless they drop their objection, the nation will default on its payment obligations in mid-October.
If that happens, six million Americans will lose their jobs and 15 trillion dollars in wealth would be lost, according to Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics. On September 30, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress that default would trigger a financial crisis and recession. She described the damage as “irreparable.”
“But the damage from a U.S. default would not be contained to the United States itself,” writes Rob Garver on the Voice of America website. “Securities issued by the U.S. have been so trustworthy for so long that they are treated as essentially risk-free in financial markets, and are used to underpin a vast number of financial contracts worldwide.”
It’s logical to assume voters will selectively punish politicians they hold responsible for a national calamity. Some will, a handful of well-informed voters who follow the news daily. But “well-informed” describes a sliver of the electorate. Most Americans don’t follow national politics the way Scarborough does.
What of the tens of millions of voters who work full-time, drag themselves home, and follow dinner with an evening of “Dancing with the Stars?” Do you think they know a lot about the debt ceiling and Washington politics? Most Americans know more about the “Masked Singer” than political issues. Consider social media:
Britney Spears has seven times as many Twitter followers as President Biden – and she’s been under a conservatorship. Duane “The Rock” Johnson has twelve and a half times as many followers on Instagram as the President. The only politician with a massive following on social media is Barack Obama – and he’s retired. Otherwise, the ranks are dominated by entertainers, athletes, and those who are famous simply for being famous. Celebrities dominate the dance floor of social media; politicians are lucky to score left-over condiments.
If America defaults on its debt obligation, there will be a global recession, a permanent reduction in America’s standing, rampant job losses and loss of wealth. How would the majority of Americans react?
The answer: they would throw the bums out. Scarborough believes only Republican bums will get tossed, but he’s wrong. The voters will turn on Biden and the Democrats because they’re in charge. Low information voters won’t associate the disaster with reckless Republican monkey-wrenching. But Republicans won’t escape voters’ wrath either. Every sitting politician will be in the bulls-eye because voters will blame everybody in power for the calamity. And they will be inclined to turn to a strongman. They will turn to Donald Trump.
Last year, Salon conducted a survey that confirmed what was already widely believed: Trump supporters had little faith in institutions. “We chose three institutions that Americans perceive as liberal” they wrote, “journalists, professors and scientists — and three that conservatives either traditionally support or currently control — the police, the Supreme Court and the federal government.” The result? “Even when we controlled for age, education, gender, ethnicity and ideology, Trump supporters had the lowest trust in the six institutions, at 3.75 out of 7 — at least 11.4% lower than anyone else we surveyed.”
Trump and his supporters have already sown the seeds of an insurrection that will be far worse than what happened on January 6th. Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, described a recent study in The Conversation:
“We have found,” he wrote, “that 47 million American adults – nearly 1 in 5 – agree with the statement that ‘the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.’ Of those, 21 million also agree that ‘use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.’”
A calamity that voters blame on the political establishment will inflate those numbers. More people will support laws that disenfranchise voters and overturn election results. The crisis triggered by default will be a tipping point and American democracy will be lost.
If the United States defaults on its debt later this month, the result will be financial devastation and, quite likely, a loss of faith in democracy. Would establishment Republicans and McConnell – who predicts there will be no default – allow that to happen? They wouldn’t deliberately sacrifice American democracy on the altar of Trump, would they?
Yes. Yes, they would.
© 2021 by Mike Tully
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