You can treat it as a rule of thumb that most media coverage you’ll read is fairly superficial. (That started as a much harsher first sentence but I thought better of it. You’re welcome.) All you righteous media reporters are now free to attack me over this. But I’m obliged to keep things real and, let’s be honest, it’s a good rule of thumb. The top practitioners at the major outlets tend to have little focus on the actual journalism, which is sorta okay if you’re really covering the business of media, but also have a thinnish grasp of the business dynamics of news as well. Their focus is on industry, news room and board room gossip — a sort of vérité Succession. (Which, yes, is an amazing show.) I was reminded of this when I read a repartee between the two media reporters for Puck last week.
Continue reading “Media Reporting on Media Remains Basically the Worst”McCarthy Has No Regrets About Tucker’s Access To Jan. 6 Security Footage Amid GOP Backlash
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told reporters Tuesday evening he does not regret giving Fox News’ Tucker Carlson exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 security footage, despite an onslaught of criticism of the Fox News segment from his GOP colleagues.
“Do you regret giving him this footage so he could whitewash the events of that day?” CNN’s Manu Raju asked McCarthy during a Tuesday night gaggle.
“No,” McCarthy responded. “I said at the very beginning: transparency. And so what I wanted to produce for everybody is exactly what I said. That people can actually look at it and see what’s gone on that day.”
Continue reading “McCarthy Has No Regrets About Tucker’s Access To Jan. 6 Security Footage Amid GOP Backlash”Election Denier Mark Finchem Sanctioned By Judge For ‘Groundless’ Midterm Challenge
An Arizona judge ordered sanctions against Mark Finchem, an election denier who ran on the Republican ticket for Arizona’s secretary of state, for mounting a baseless challenge against the 2022 election results.
Continue reading “Election Denier Mark Finchem Sanctioned By Judge For ‘Groundless’ Midterm Challenge”Immigration As A Racial Weapon: The Legacy Of ‘Legacy’ Americans
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
“Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”
According to a recent poll, 30% of Americans “completely” or “mostly” agree with this statement, often called the Great Replacement Theory. The poll shows that within that 30% are majorities of Republicans and of white evangelical Protestants, who believe that immigrants are entering the U.S. and “replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” According to cable news host Tucker Carlson, his listeners should fear “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far away countries.”
One of the more dramatic ironies around replacement theory is that, at times in American history, political elites have actually sought to the replace the electorate. But it was not a case, as today’s conspiracy theory holds, that people of color were being brought in to replace white people — it was exactly the opposite. What Carlson claims is the goal of current U.S. policy — to “change the racial mix of the country” — was the fervent hope of the White South 150 years ago. Then, the defeated Confederacy also turned to immigration — as a deliberate tool to replace the electorate and maintain the imbalance of power.
During Reconstruction, Black and Brown people weren’t invading the country; to the contrary, they’d been forcibly migrated to America and enslaved. But by winning the right to vote, freed slaves had the potential not just to have a say in the governments of the White South but, in the words of W.E.B. DuBois, to “reconstruct democracy in America.” Plantation owners saw that revitalized democracy as a threat. To counter newly enfranchised Black voters, former slaveholders started actively encouraging the immigration of foreign-born whites, focusing on a “better class” of Germans and other Europeans.
After the Civil War, newly freed slaves outnumbered whites in many states across the South. “Legacy Americans” had exercised control before the war through lynchings, floggings and other means. In 1822, for instance, when freed slave Denmark Vesey was accused of masterminding a rebellion, the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina had called out the militia. Vesey and 35 others were hanged, 31 co-conspirators were deported, and the city’s security was boosted to where, years later, Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman would describe it as “policed to perfection.”
But the Civil War and the federal presence in the South after the war interrupted such “policing.” Meanwhile, newly freed slaves began to exercise their democratic rights. In the fall of 1868, 94% of South Carolina’s eligible Blacks registered to vote, a number that significantly outnumbered the state’s white electorate. (In 1870, South Carolina had 290,000 whites and 416,000 African Americans.) Nationally, 16 African Americans were soon elected to Congress and more than 600 to state legislatures. Many more won local office.
White southerners responded to this threat to their authority through legal and extralegal campaigns of terror, including an energized Ku Klux Klan. But they also devised a set of schemes to use immigrants — specifically, white immigrants — as a weapon.
Many states organized immigration commissions. South Carolina’s director of immigration, a former Confederate general, made the goal explicit. The state needed “men and women of our own blood and kindred.” In Alabama, a Mobile newspaper saw “the necessity of white immigration.” In Virginia, the Richmond Daily Dispatch believed “white immigration [would] give to the State a superior kind of industry and mechanical skill.” The ultimate goal, as South Carolina’s newspapers expressed it, was that “industrious, thrifty, enterprising white settlers” would, within a couple of decades, “throw the negroes into the shade.”
In 1866, the South Carolina legislature authorized $10,000 to encourage more foreigners to come to their state. That paid for the printing of 14,000 immigration pamphlets — in Danish, Swedish, German, and English — and for hiring agents to find likely candidates in northern Europe. North Carolina focused on British and Scottish farmers. Wilmington, Delaware would bring in Italian laborers to replace slaves. Along with Germans and Italians, Texas managed to attract a small number of Japanese rice farmers.
But all in all, the outreach didn’t work. According to the research of Professor Jeffery G. Strickland, South Carolina’s immigrant agents in Germany and Scandinavia failed to enlist a single family, and the state’s man in Ireland resigned and moved to Texas. On top of that, South Carolina’s merchants refused to support a steamship line to Europe. While former slaveholders were willing to welcome immigrants “as friends,” it turned out that many objected to treating them as equals. “Let us have not,” one declared, “social equality with our laborers.”
From their side, the immigrants felt unwelcome — or worse. Promotional material was often overtly racist, extolling the South’s former slavery system in an attempt to attract “ideal” immigrants with similar values. Instead, many immigrants ended up seeing white southerners as “lawless and semi-barbarous.” Some potential immigrants concluded that, despite the Confederacy’s defeat, its core values still held sway — and feared that “if they were to come to the South they would be made slaves instantly.”
The unwelcoming South and the foreigners’ suspicion of same meant that the efforts of South Carolina’s Immigration Bureau resulted in a total of only 147 new citizens. By the turn of the century, the entire South, including the old border states, had about as many foreign-born as Michigan; New York had three times as many. The combined immigrant population of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina barely equaled that of Vermont.
Today’s Great Replacement Theory is driven by the same fear plantation-owners felt in the Reconstruction South: that whites would be out-numbered by Black voters. Then as now, the goal of the white minority was to hold onto power. While the former Confederate states distracted the populace with talk of immigration, they simultaneously enacted new Jim Crow laws that successfully rolled back the gains of Reconstruction. That rollback remained for another century, until the modern civil rights movement. And what gains have been made since are once again in jeopardy. Then as now, immigration was a buzzword meant to heighten fear and maintain the status quo. Then as now, “foreigners” proved secondary compared to the far more effective program for keeping power in the hands of Whites: the suppression of voters’ rights.
Daniel Wolff’s most recent non-fiction book is “How To Become An American: A History of Immigration, Assimilation, and Loneliness” (University of South Carolina Press).
In The Smoldering Wreck Of Fox News, They All Deserve Each Other
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
A Calamitous Day At The ‘Fair And Balanced’ Network
I’m not sure longtime Fox News critics and observers could have imagined a day like Tuesday ever coming to pass. The cable news net’s lies, fabrications, bamboozlement, and misinformation all came home to roost in spectacular fashion.
On a day that not so long ago would have seen Fox News preening over its top star’s bogus Monday night segment downplaying the Jan. 6 attack, Rupert Murdoch’s baby was instead lambasted by Republicans and law enforcement and humiliated by more revelations from the titanic defamation case pending against it.
Tuesday marked a collision between the Dominion Voting Systems $1.2 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News over its Big Lie claims during the 2020 election and the network’s latest Big Lie: that Jan. 6 was a hoax, a peaceful saunter of the citizenry through the halls of the Capitol. One Big Lie begat another, both centered on the 2020 election and its aftermath. All in service of Donald Trump, its own ratings, and the warped worldview that sustains a propaganda network for more than quarter of a century.
In the end though, what was most striking about yesterday was Fox News starting to eat its own. No one deserves it more than the personalities, hosts, and would-be journalists who populate the Fox News shows.
Fox v. Fox!
In a remarkable segment Tuesday night, Fox News host Bret Baier and congressional reporter Chad Pergram effectively counter-programmed Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 whitewash from the night before.
The segment starts off as you might expect, touting Carlson’s “new” surveillance video containing images that “were hidden from the public for more than two years.” But then you can almost hear the tires screeching and the gears grinding as Baier hits the breaks and reverses course, kicking it to a pre-recorded report from Pergram on the Hill, where pushback was fierce all day.
The segment ends with an amazing and hilarious “to be sure” closing from Baier: “And to be clear, no one here at Fox News condones any of the violences that happened on Jan. 6.”
Gretchen Carlson Was Having None Of It
The fiercest reaction to the Baier segment came from Gretchen Carlson, the former host of the rancid Fox & Friends morning show who left the network in 2016 after she sued longtime Fox News boss Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Ailes resigned soon after and died less than a year later. Fox settled Gretchen Carlson’s case for $20 million and a public apology. Gone yesterday was Carlson’s ex-pageant queen “Minnesota nice,” replaced with the kind of salty language you’d have expected from Ailes himself:
McConnell Renounces Tucker Carlson Segment
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) went out of his way to address Tucker Carlson’s revisionist narrative for Jan. 6:
“I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief and the Capitol Police about what happened on Jan. 6,” McConnell said as he held up a copy of the letter. “It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks.”
Capitol Police Chief Rips Tucker Carlson
In the letter to his force that was referenced by Sen. Mitch McConnell, Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger called out the Carlson segment for its “offensive and misleading conclusions.”
Sen. Tillis On Carlson Segment: ‘I Think It’s Bullshit’
One GOP senator after another shredded the Tucker Carlson segment.
- Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) was the most pungent ( but he wasn’t alone.
- Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND):
I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol against the borders of police is a crime. I think particularly when you come into the chambers, when you start opening the members’ desks, when you stand up in their balcony — to somehow put that in the same category as, you know, permitted peaceful protest is just a lie.
- Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) said it’s “really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails like that,” saying he’s “joining a range of shock jocks that are disappointing America and feeding falsehoods.”
- Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD): “I was there on Jan. 6. I saw what happened. I saw the aftermath. There was violence on Jan. 6.”
- Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA): “I was here. It was not peaceful. It was an abomination. You’re entitled to believe what you want in America, but you can’t resort to violence to try to convince others of your point of view.”
Even a House Republican piled on. “I don’t really have a problem with making it all public, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said in an interview with Politico. “But if your message is then to try and convince people that nothing bad happened, then it’s just gonna make us look silly.”
McCarthy Reaps The Whirlwind
Don’t forget that it was House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who gave Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the Capitol surveillance footage from Jan. 6. McCarthy spoke to reporters yesterday, and it was a train wreck. TPM alum Igor Bobic with a great thread on it:
‘Leave Us The Hell Alone’
I’ll give the last word to the family of deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick:
Tucker Carlson On Trump: ‘I Hate Him Passionately’
As I said, it was an epically bad day for Fox News. Amidst all the fallout from the Tucker Carlson segment whitewashing Jan. 6, Dominion Voting System dropped more juicy inside banter from Fox News in its landmark defamation lawsuit.
Some of the highlights:
- Two days before Jan. 6, Carlson texted a colleague: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”
- More Carlson on Trump: “I hate him passionately. … What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
- Carlson on the eve of touting the bogus claims about Dominion: “The whole thing seems insane to me. And Sidney Powell won’t release the evidence. Which I hate.”
For its part, Fox News denies Dominion’s claims and maintains it was engaged in normal reporting on a newsworthy topic.
Jim Jordan Is In A Panic And It Shows
With MAGA world disappointed that Rep. Jim Jordan’s bogus ‘weaponization’ subcommittee isn’t chumming the waters enough, the House Judiciary chair is racing to turn up the volume. Great …
This Axios headline captures it perfectly: Jim Jordan scrambles amid claims “weaponization” probe is a dud
A sign of how bad things are for Jordan: He consented to an interview about it all with Semafor.
Jordan is also having to beat back a concerted effort by House Democrats to preempt his nonsense narrative. But it’s notable that it’s the cries from the right for more blood in the water that has Jordan on his heels.
Arizona Big Lie Aficionado Sanctioned By Court
Mark Finchem, the defeated GOP nominee for Arizona secretary of state, has been ordered to pay attorney fees and costs for filing a frivolous lawsuit seeking to overturn his loss in the 2022 election.
Some Good News A Century In The Making
We may be finally turning the page on a century of bad, car-centric urban planning. This is a very high level view from the NYT, but it is a sign that the obsession with the automobile that ruined so many American cities and revamped the entire map of the country is finally ebbing in favor of saner public planning and livability. I won’t be sorry to see you go, surface parking lot!
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Right-Wingers Have A New, Very Dependable Strategy To Game The Courts. Can It Be Stopped?
You would think, based on the flurry of litigation unfolding there, that a lot of drama is going down in Amarillo, Texas.
Continue reading “Right-Wingers Have A New, Very Dependable Strategy To Game The Courts. Can It Be Stopped?”Where Things Stand: Republican Lawmakers Withdraw Bill To Rename John Lewis Way After Trump
Last month, my colleague Hunter Walker published an in-depth look at Nashville city councilwoman Zulfat Suara efforts to fight a Tennessee state Republican push to rename a portion of John Lewis Way in Nashville after Donald Trump.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Republican Lawmakers Withdraw Bill To Rename John Lewis Way After Trump”Russia Didn’t Blow Up Nord Stream, US Intel Says
Today, the New York Times and a German publication named Die Zeit each published articles about last year’s Nord Stream pipeline bombing which pointed to the same conclusion: Russia didn’t do it.
Continue reading “Russia Didn’t Blow Up Nord Stream, US Intel Says”Tucker Carlson Convinces At Least One Guy With His Jan. 6 Nonsense: Elon Musk
Monday night Fox News host Tucker Carlson took to his conspiracy theory swamp show to lay out his latest cherry-picked take on the violent insurrection of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Continue reading “Tucker Carlson Convinces At Least One Guy With His Jan. 6 Nonsense: Elon Musk”Tucker Carlson and No Crying in Baseball
I understand that people are outraged by the Tucker Carlson/Kevin McCarthy video stunt. It’s natural and understandable to react negatively and angrily to liars and traitors. But this is not at all the best or most effective response. The first response is simply mockery. That’s the most logical response and also the most effective. Watch these videos. They’re moments when the insurrectionists weren’t breaking down doors or hitting Capitol Police over the head with flag poles. This is like showing a Zapruder film containing just the part where JFK is happily waving to the crowd in Dealey Plaza. He’s having a great time. Why does Oswald get such a bad rap? Similarly, it’s been shown that probably 99% of the time Osama bin Laden wasn’t blowing up anything. And yet, look at what’s gotten all the focus.
This is more Saturday Night Live skit than outrage.
Continue reading “Tucker Carlson and No Crying in Baseball”