“When a local fly fishing guide spotted … Tucker Carlson at a sporting goods store in Livingston, Montana, he did not waste time. ‘You are the worst human being known to mankind. I want you to know that,’ Dan Bailey can be heard telling the Fox News host in a video posted to his Instagram page Friday night.
“He captioned the video: ‘It’s not everyday you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it! What an asshole!'” Huffington Post reported on Saturday, July 24, 2021. (Read story here, and/or the Daily Mail version here.)
Well, I disagree. Carlson doesn’t deserve to be called the worst person in the world. In front of his daughter yet! There are worse people than him. Perhaps not very many, but some. For example, this guy.
Mr. Bailey’s beef with Carlson goes like this: “This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation, he has supported extreme racism, he is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American.” (Details here.) I disagree with that, too. Trump has done more to rip this country apart than Carlson has. Maybe not a whole lot more, but some. The rest of what Bailey said might be true, or close to true.
Which brings me back to the first point: If Carlson is as awful a human being as Bailey says he is (people can debate that, but it’s not much of a debate), aren’t his employers, the Murdochs, worse? After all, if they didn’t give him a platform to spew vaccine misinformation, racism, fascism, and anti-Americanism, nobody would hear him.
I gotta say, though, I’m not a fan of walking up to public figures and berating them in public, not even scumbags like Carlson, who deserves it. The problem is we have a lot of people in this country who don’t know the difference between the Carlsons of the world and, say, Mother Theresa. So we don’t want to set a precedent.
Update (7/26/21): On Monday, July 26, 2021, Huffington Post‘s D.C. bureau chief pointed out that many Fox shows relied on precisely this type of “ambushing.” Read her comments here.