A spokesperson for Fox "News" recently called a charge that former Fox "personality" and MAGA cheerleader Tucker Carlson created a hostile workplace "unmeritorious."
Abby Grossberg, a former head booker for his show, recently sued Fox News, charging that Carlson promoted a hostile workplace, where he and his producers routinely said sexist things about women, including guests, and made antisemitic jokes. Grossberg has also sued the company for coercing her to provide inaccurate testimony in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox.
It's hard to believe anyone would doubt that Carlson could be that guy, since, without any discernible talent, a limited palette of facial expressions, and an unnerving laugh seemingly modeled on various older character actresses in screwball comedies he made himself one of the most successful shillers of fear and hate in the history of the country.
There are many things to wonder about the far-right in this country, such as why they are afraid of history and science, why they say they hate tyranny and yet want to control other people's personal choices and keep them from voting, and why they think religious freedom is their freedom to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us. (Oh, wait, I just answered my own question!)
But given that they lie so much — about the Constitution, about their political opponents, about what it means to be a patriotic American — one would think they'd at least be good at it.
When I heard that unmeritorious in a report about the lawsuit naming Carlson, I laughed out loud. Well, when they use a twenty-dollar word like that, he must be innocent.
The viewers of Fox and OANN and Newsmax want to imagine they're being told the truth while also knowing, somewhere in their lizard brains, that they're in on a big lie.
When a person is lying, it's nearly impossible to be simple, to be forthright. A liar just has an overwhelming need to gussy it up. Thus, you're not innocent, you are completely innocent or absolutely innocent. A charge against you isn't merely false, it's totally false or completely bogus, or some such, from the liar's well-thumbed thesaurus.
If you are a certain conman cult leader, you're not just absolutely innocent of the many serious charges brought against you, it's a political witch hunt, a massive fraud, a conspiracy not against you, but against your followers, you being, by the way, the MOST INNOCENT and BELOVED president in the history of the world who will have vengeance on all his enemies, who will be your retribution.
In this case, a false profession of innocence invariably includes the liberal use of ALL CAPS and deranged spelling.
Oh, and the word frankly. If you hear someone open with that, you can pretty much expect a whopper (or a manipulation on the level of "As everybody knows…").
Though often attributed to Mark Twain, apparently Jonathan Swift was first to say that clever bit about a lie running quickly into the world while the truth limps after, too late to have an effect. (Twain said many things about truth, perhaps most pithily, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.")
So, the lie, coming first, sticks in people's minds — the "primacy effect" we may or may not have learned about in school, depending on when it was brought up — and the truth, coming later, is ignored or forgotten, like a correction at the bottom of page B7 of your local newspaper. And propagandists take advantage of this effect, which journalists must learn how to counter.
But what if we could help people immediately see when a profession of truthfulness is untrustworthy, when they should prick up their ears? Shakespeare's "The lady protests too much, methinks" cannot be beaten (except, maybe, for that methinks, which people tend to place first, and wasn't a "doth" involved?), but perhaps something a bit more in line with Swift (whose very name makes it easy to remember he came up with the lines about a lie being a fast runner)? How about:
Emphatic or ornate, your protest of innocence stumbles out of the gate.
Okay, that's a bit fusty. I'll work on it.
Should we not be pointing this out to them, the liars, that we see through them, that they (frankly) say far too much? I think it doesn't matter. They know not to "profess too much," but, being totally and absolutely guilty or completely and horrifically conscious of supporting a guilty party, they can't help themselves. You could liken it to Poe's "Imp of the Perverse," doing something for the very reason you know you should not.
Others, including Salon's Amanda Marcotte, would say that the lies are spewed out in order to placate the ravenous desire for comforting untruths that viewers of Fox "News" and other far-right media demand in order to live in their own reality and "own the libs." As Marcotte writes, "the major driver of Fox conspiracy content is viewer demand that the network air the lies they're hearing on social media."
So, the viewers of Fox and OANN and Newsmax want to imagine they're being told the truth while also knowing, somewhere in their lizard brains, that they're in on a big lie, worth telling (and believing in) for "the good of the country."
So, wait a minute: maybe the Republicans are good at lying, at least in the way their followers enjoy most: with a wink and a nod. As Salon's Heather Digby Parton recently wrote, many Trump supporters well understand he is a liar, but they're comforted by that. "They admire him for refusing to acknowledge the facts and have willingly joined him in bending the truth to fit their desires."
In real life, people who may not be telling us the truth often exhibit other "tells," physical and vocal, about their obfuscations, as skillfully depicted in Matt Damon's SNL satire of Brett Kavanaugh's acting out at his confirmation hearing, after Christine Blasey Ford's compelling testimony (yet another thing a certain someone has lied about). But beyond the telltale sniffing and water gulping, there remains that basic inability to not overstate your innocence: "Let me tell you this. I'm going to start at an 11. I'm going to take it to a 15, real quick!"
And now — also live from New York — we have more court testimony about the actions of one Donald John Trump, this time in the defamation and battery case brought against him by writer and former Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in late 1995 or early 1996.
As a side note, the timeline of Trump's best-known affairs may be of interest here. His affair with Marla Maples began sometime in the months after Ivana gave birth to Eric, in January 1984. Stormy Daniels said she began to see Trump in 2006, soon after Melania had given birth to Barron. (Trump's disgust with women's bodily functions (like menstruation or pumping breast milk) is well known. He told Howard Stern that the pregnant Melania was a "blimp" and a "monster" before catching himself and adding, "in all the right ways.")
Should we not be pointing this out to them, the liars, that we see through them, that they (frankly) say far too much?
Maples gave birth to Tiffany in December 1993, and while there is no record of a Trump affair at that time, in late April 1996 Marla was found to be in a tryst with Trump's bodyguard Spencer Wagner. Trump allegedly asked Carroll, who we now know looked a lot like Maples, even to Trump himself, to help him pick out a gift at Manhattan's premiere department store sometime in that "late 1995 or early 1996" period when there was obviously serious issues in the Trump-Maples marriage.
Ridiculous speculation? Maybe so. But as Salon's Amanda Marcotte notes, Trump's lawyer may have just revealed the motive for the attack: Carroll teased him about lingerie, and he became enraged imagining she was laughing at his masculinity. Rape is about control, not sexual desire. And what if the person laughing at him also looked very much like the wife who had strayed?
But let me utilize Trumpian locution here: I'm not saying that he's guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll, a woman he said looked just like the wife who had recently betrayed him, serving him up a measure of his own kind of unfaithfulness. But I think everybody knows the truth about this case — and all the others.
Oh, Trump's reaction to this rape charge? Among other things, he's called it "ridiculous," "a hoax," "a complete con job" and "a complete Scam [sic]." He said (as he has said of some of the numerous women who have claimed with great specificity that he sexually assaulted them) that Carroll is "not my type." (Now, we definitively know she was precisely his type. And from that response, typical for him, one must assume that he has had over the decades a go-to type for sexual assault.)
But nowhere can I find a statement where he simply says it isn't true — and leaves it at that.
