Tucker Carlson pivoted slightly away from his attempts to pander to his conservative audience in his opening segment on his Fox News show on Friday, delivering a rant that instead was geared more toward attempting to pander to supporters of Bernie Sanders.
Carlson compared Trump with Sanders during the segment, saying the establishment hates them both because they can’t be controlled. He did not, however, mention any policies on which Trump and Sanders agree, because there isn’t much to go with there. So instead he went for an emotional appeal.
“The people behind Joe Biden aren’t liberals,” Carlson said.
“A liberal believes in universal principles fairly applied. And the funny thing is, all of that describes most of the 70 million people who just voted for Donald Trump this week,” he said. “Most of them don’t want to hurt or control anyone. They have no interest in silencing the opposition on Facebook or anywhere else. They just want to live their lives in the country they were born in, and it doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. So by any traditional definition, they are liberal that way, though our language has become so politicized and so distorted that you would never know it.”
Carlson, not acknowledging his own considerable contributions to the polarized political discourse, then shifted into scary mode.
“What you do know for certain is that the people behind Joe Biden are not like that at all. They don’t believe in dissent. ‘You think one thing, I think another, that’s OK.’ No, that’s not them at all. They demand obedience. Diversity, which is to say legitimate differences between people, is the last thing they want. Diversity? It’s a cruel joke. They must mean it ironically. These people seek absolute sameness, total uniformity,” Carlson said.
And then Carlson gave an example of what he thinks life will look like under the Biden administration.
“You’re happy with your corner coffee shop. They want to make you drink Starbucks every day from now until forever,” he said, without any supporting evidence. “No matter how it tastes. That’s the future they promise. Everyone doing the same thing. Now if these seem like corporate values to you — uniformity is the most basic corporate value — then you’re catching on to what’s happening.”
This bit here is reminiscent of a 2017 meme format: “This is the future that liberals want.”
You can watch the quoted portion of Friday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News in the video embedded up at the top of this article. A judge recently ruled that Carlson is not a credible source of news.