Today is “National State the Obvious Day,” a holiday I may or may not have just made up and one I’m going to celebrate either way with a statement to commemorate the no-shit-Sherlock festivities in hopes that I don’t end up on Captain Obvious’ naughty list:
Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist.
If you say the word “diversity” in the mirror five times, Tucker Carlson will emerge from the all-white-everything dimension holding a meat cleaver and wearing a wool suit fashioned from a Klan robe and he’ll attack and drag you back with him to white nationalist hell—which, as far as I can tell, is Cracker Barrel. (Emphasis on… Nah, I’m just going to move on. Captain Obvious is watching, after all.) So, it should surprise no one who has more than two kinds of non-salt or pepper spices in their cabinets that the Fox Noose host had as a guest on his show a fellow white supremacist who takes his Klan-ish-ness a step further by claiming that his racism isn’t actually racism—it’s science.
HuffPost reports that on Wednesday, Carlson had social “scientist” Charles Murray on Tucker Carlson Today—which appears on Fox News’ only fans streaming service Fox Nation—to talk about how it isn’t racism, redlining or lack of educational resources that keeps Black people underemployed, paid less for doing the same jobs as white people and generally finding it harder to move up the corporate ladder, it’s our tiny negro brains that keep us on the field while the cognitively superior white man sips lemonade in the big house.
“Essentially, you have registered nurses, and we have data on fairly large numbers of registered nurses, Black and white, and the difference in mean IQ between the two of those is a dozen IQ points, which is a lot,” Murray said. “It means you have a whole lot of extremely able Black nurses. You have some incompetent white nurses, but it does mean you have a difference in job performance, and that’s eventually going to be reflected in income as well. It’s going to be reflected in the nature of their careers, and the nature of how they end up and so forth.”
Carlson, of course, didn’t bother to challenge any of Murray’s white nonsense. He didn’t even look uncomfortable. He just sat there attentive and fairly motionless as if he was trying to hide a raging hard-on inspired by the live, interactive neo-Nazi porn that his guest provided him. And why wouldn’t Carlson agree? I’m sure he believes patriots like Murray and himself are reflective of America, and it’s not like America is a racist country or like racism is defined as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”—that’s actually how Critical Race Theory is defined, according to Fox News and its obsession with the academic study, which obviously needs to be banned because it’s raci...wait, now I’m confused.
Anyway, I don’t need to go into a whole thing about how Murray’s IQ-Anon bullshit is racist pseudoscience largely rejected by actual scientists, because The Root has already published that piece. Here’s a snippet:
There are studies of IQ tests that show Asian countries score the highest on IQ tests, followed by white countries. However, actual scientists usually disregard these studies because, when one reads the fine print, almost every study admits that the IQs from many of the countries (more than half, in some cases) are estimates or come from a small sample size.
But it is all pretty racist.
How is it racist? It’s an IQ test.
Because the same studies show a correlation between gross domestic product (GDP) and IQ. Studies also show a relationship between health and IQ, rate of infectious disease and IQ, access to education and IQ, wealth and IQ etc. There is even a correlation between IQ and the temperature of the room. It’s almost universally known: People with more money, better lives and more opportunity perform better on IQ tests.
Scientists and psychologists know that there are so many determinative factors and variations between countries and no study has ever been done with a large enough sample size from every country. It is only white people who look past all of these probable causes and conclude that race is the determinative factor.
But Carlson is a guy who thinks United Airlines’ diversity push will end in more plane crashes because the spongy thinky-thingies in our heads are too small for us to learn to fly the sky cars, and Murray is a guy who HuffPost noted is characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities” and that “disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior.”
Not that that fits the literal definition of racism or anything.