BRENDAN O’NEIL: Why they hate Tucker Carlson.

This is the irony of Tucker Derangement Syndrome: the very people who fear the rise of Carlson created the conditions for the rise of Carlson. You think you can condemn the masses as a ‘basket of deplorables’, as imbeciles who ‘cling to guns or religion’, as gammon and Karens, as lizard-brained lowlifes, as gullible white trash led astray by Trump and Brexit, as transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic creatures in urgent need of re-education, and that there won’t be consequences? Get real. Carlson is the consequence. If he’s a monster – calm down, he isn’t – then he’s a monster of your making. Carlson’s ‘power’ among the white working class is directly proportional to the elites’ visceral derision for the white working class. Dehumanise people for long enough and they’ll look high and low for someone who treats them as human. Carlson did that, at least: he treated his viewers as human.

Following the end of Carlson’s relationship with Fox, the liberal elite has doubled down on its contempt for Fox viewers. Carlson’s rhetoric was ‘dangerous’, they say, not least because he had a ‘very impressionable audience’. There it is. The class hatred masquerading as media theory that underpins the elite disdain for Tucker in particular and right-wing media more broadly. Tuckerphobia is underwritten by a bourgeois dread that the TV-watching plebs will be driven mad by demagogues like Carlson. It’s Carlson they bash, but it’s the masses they fear. There has been much talk in recent days about Carlson’s ‘paranoid style’, à la Richard Hofstadter. And it’s true he bent towards paranoia at times. But it was the liberal establishment’s paranoid dread of the deplorable working-class that not only made Tucker possible, but which will ensure that, soon, someone will take his place.

And right on cue, as if to prove O’Neil’s point about class hatred: Jimmy Kimmel Tries to Dunk on Tucker Carlson, Thoroughly Beclowns Himself Instead.