The twisted view from the top

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This article was published 06/05/2023 (1024 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living sh-t out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.” Fox News Host Tucker Carlson, texting his producer on Jan. 7, 2021.

When you’re at the supermarket aisle with the giant freezers containing McCain Superfries and buckets of Breyers chocolate peanut butter ice cream, you’re very close to what makes Tucker Carlson out of sync with almost all of us.

It’s in that aisle where you find Swanson TV dinners. The company has been around since 1953. Seventy years of success has produced mountains of wealth for the heirs of the Swanson Family Fortune. Tucker Carlson is an heir.

Years before I was old enough to attend high school, I was working at Adler’s Tailor Shop in Montreal’s Snowdon district — a 10-minute bike ride from Westmount — a 40-minute ride from the most expensive real estate the top of the Westmount hill (a.k.a. Mount Royal). One of my jobs was to bike up the hill, where some of the richest families in the world were living.

I never grew up hating the rich — even though they made me do some ferocious peddling. Their clothes needed to be repaired and cleaned.

My working-class family would not have been able to afford to buy the occasional Swanson dinner without customers at the top of the hill. In 1960s Montreal, they were all as white as Tucker Carlson. They would chat with the blond-haired, blue-eyed son of the tailor. They were unfailingly kind to me. But in the polite chit-chat, it was impossible not to observe the obvious. They were oblivious to the real world.

In Tucker Carlson’s reality-absent view, white men fought the way they did in TV shows and movies — always heroes, defending good from evil.

His world did not include Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy dragged out of his home by two white men who tortured him, lynched him, shot him and sank his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Emmett Till’s crime was being Black, and allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman in Money, Miss.

The case gained attention around the United States especially because the boy’s mother insisted on an open casket funeral.

She wanted everyone to see the mutilated body of a 14-year-old son. It marked the beginning of the U.S. civil rights movement in 1955, just two years after the Swanson empire was born.

The woman who accused Emmett Till, Carolyn Bryant Donham, died just four days after Tucker Carlson’s final show on Fox, April 21. It’s unlikely Tucker Carlson would have taken notice and offered historical perspective, because at the top of his hill, that story never mattered.

At the top of his hill, a white man in Berlin wasn’t designing a genocide — the Holocaust — and white men weren’t beating or raping Indigenous children in residential schools.

White men were members of a party that was a Nazi puppet in 1944-45 Hungary, and lined up men, women and children in the city of my birth, Budapest, on the banks of the Danube just 10 years before I was born. Their victims were ordered to remove their shoes before being shot — their bodies sinking to the bottom of the river, just like Emmett Till’s.

Members of my family and extended family and my heritage were shot by white men on the banks of the Danube, gassed by white men at Auschwitz. In their twisted minds, this was their idea of a patriotic fight for country, a noble fight for the white race.

Tucker Carlson isn’t with Fox anymore. The view from the top of his hill was too toxic even for Fox’s balance sheet.

But he will always find an audience. There will always be people with an unquenchable appetite for the top of the hill view of white supremacy.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

charles@charlesadler.com