Despite Fox News’s many complaints that supply chain issues (always Joe Biden’s fault, of course) have left starving Americans yowling at the sight of empty grocery store shelves, let it never be said that their star personality Tucker Carlson is at immediate risk of going hungry, himself. How could he be, when he has an entire roster of conservative figureheads to feast upon, in the sort of “eat their young” cannibalism available to only the uppermost echelons of far-right media figures?
Fresh off an appetizer of Cruz a l’orange, Carlson devoted precious airtime Thursday evening to his entrée: Supreme Court justice, credibly accused sexual abuser, and noted beer lover Brett Kavanaugh, whom Carlson lambasted as a “cringing little liberal.” And what, you ask, could the one-time darling of the Trumpian right have done to fall so far from Tucker’s good graces? Why, he had the unmitigated gall to, um, hang on ... lemme just check my notes here ...
Oh, okay, got it: He had the unmitigated gall to declare President Biden’s sweeping vaccine mandate unconstitutional.
Wait a sec, that can’t be right. Can it?
Indeed! It was evidently not enough that Kavanaugh had voted — alongside the court’s five other conservative justices — to strike down the White House’s Hail Mary attempt to mitigate an ongoing viral catastrophe with a broad vaccine requirement for large employers. Instead, by agreeing that medical workers, and only medical workers, should be required to be vaccinated (you know, because they’re medical workers, and this is medicine, and if you work in the medical field but don’t trust medicine, what the fuck are you even doing in the first place?), Kavanaugh brought unto himself the worst insult Carlson could ever give someone on his program without getting an FCC fine in the process: being called a liberal.
“I’m not gonna ask you to respond to that,” Carlson quickly covered, while his guest, Center for American Liberties CEO Harmeet Dhillon, sat stone-faced.
First Ted Cruz, now Brett Kavanaugh. If Tucker keeps shoving more and more conservative power players into the center of his high-rated circular firing squad, it’s worth asking how much longer he has left before he runs out of “friends.”
