Tucker Carlson has a favorite stage persona: the last sane man in the world, now at the end of his tether. His typical format for interviews starts with a folksy,\u00a0Mr Smith Goes to Washington\u00a0line of questioning, which then collapses into bitter, hysterical laughter. Episodes end up feeling like the\u00a0famous police station dialogue with Heath Ledger\u2019s Joker, with guests reduced to a discomfited Commissioner Gordon trying to maintain their poise. In\u00a0yesterday\u2019s episode\u00a0of the\u00a0Tucker Carlson Show\u00a0the Carlson technique was used on Piers Morgan \u2013 the British former tabloid journalist and host of another popular online show,\u00a0Piers Morgan\u2026<\/p>\n
Tucker Carlson has a favorite stage persona: the last sane man in the world, now at the end of his tether. His typical format for interviews starts with a folksy,\u00a0Mr Smith Goes to Washington\u00a0line of questioning, which then collapses into bitter, hysterical laughter. Episodes end up feeling like the\u00a0famous police station dialogue<\/a> with Heath Ledger\u2019s Joker, with guests reduced to a discomfited Commissioner Gordon trying to maintain their poise. In\u00a0yesterday\u2019s episode<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0Tucker Carlson Show\u00a0the Carlson technique was used on Piers Morgan \u2013 the British former tabloid journalist and host of another popular online show,\u00a0Piers Morgan Uncensored.<\/p>\n The interview was an interesting clash of ideologies. Everyone knows about Carlson\u2019s feud with the neoconservative and pro-Israel faction of the American conservative movement. But in this interview with the Fleet Street veteran Carlson decided to open up another front: against those sections of the English-speaking right for whom politics seems to be chiefly about cultural issues like transgenderism, transgender bathrooms, and the cancellations of celebrities like J.K. Rowling. Morgan set out this view of the world in a \u2013 slightly complacent \u2013 recent book,\u00a0Woke is Dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n In an episode framed around the decline of Britain, Piers Morgan rolled out the old favorites \u2013 like when the comedian Graham Linehan was briefly arrested by the police at London\u2019s Heathrow Airport earlier this year for a slightly bolshy X post about transgender men. Tucker wasn\u2019t interested. These kinds of laws were obviously crazy, Tucker said, but do they really matter when London is now only 36% White British?\u00a0<\/p>\n Piers demurred, and that\u2019s when the hysterical laughter started. There was an unedifying segment in which Tucker tried to get Piers to say \u201cfaggot\u201d out loud, which was then followed by an extended discourse on whether homosexuality was something you were born with. For his part Piers was reduced to various Keir Starmer-isms about how London was more or less fine because \u201ctop pubs\u201d were still serving up \u201cover 20,000 Guinnesses\u201d to paying customers. Tucker Carlson\u2019s new ability to set the terms of debate in the American right is certainly a major achievement; yet managing to turn an incorrigible shock-jock and outrage merchant like Piers Morgan into a bemused moderate is surely another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tucker Carlson has a favorite stage persona: the last sane man in the world, now at the end…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,22416,74357,348],"class_list":{"0":"post-312481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-piers-morgan","12":"tag-tucker-carlson","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}