It’s truly amazing how much crap a white Republican can say without repercussions. It seems like no matter what depraved nonsense spews from their lips, they never lose the love of their supporters. Despite revealing himself as one of the worst offenders — one bad enough that even Fox News kicked him from their lineup — Tucker Carlson consistently manages to weasel out of any real consequences.
The MAGA cheerleader and so-called “journalist” is more than content to say some of the most ick-inducing things if it gets daddy Donald Trump’s attention, and his recent appearance at a Turning Point USA event upped his creepy ante.
In a clip circulating on TikTok, Carlson lets his freak flag fly — even as the rest of us beg him to put it away. Describing a household straight from a Lifetime Original Movie, Carlson indulged in some bizarre hyperbole to get his ass-backward point across. Apparently, in the Swanson heir’s mind, teenage girls slamming doors is an indicator that she will one day “light a joint at the breakfast table.” Even worse, a toddler who happens to “smear the contents of his diapers” on a wall is headed straight for rehab one day.
While his eye-rolling claims are ridiculous, his “solution” made our skin want to crawl right off. “Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know,” he told the crowd.
It quickly becomes clear why Carlson focused on an unruly teenage girl, because his next line is beyond weird. “You know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.”
No decent father has EVER said that to his daughter. It smacks of creepy porn history and strange fetish language. It makes you wonder what a peek at his internet history search would unveil. Even worse, Carlson has three daughters, making us wonder how in the world he didn’t choke on the phrasing.
But Carlson’s bizarro-land daydream didn’t stop there. Instead, he somehow upped his cringy rhetoric.
“And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.'”
The delight on Carlson’s face is almost as dystopian as the crowd that cheers him on. He yet again doubles down on his beyond-gross analogy, “You’re getting a vigorous spanking cause you’ve been a bad girl,” he says of the fictitious rebellious daughter.
It calls to mind the practice of husbands spanking their wives for disobedience. Infantilized discipline at best, predatory and unsolicited kink at worst. And that’s not even touching on the weird delight over physically abusing children.
While the analogy is gross in essentially any context, its intent rockets it to the worst thing anyone outside of the Orange Cult will hear all week. In Carlson’s demented analogy, Trump is America’s pissed dad, and, presumably, anyone outside of his purview of sycophants — which, yes, includes men — is his unruly teenage daughter in need of that “vigorous spanking.”
It would seem strange for the party of small government to cheer for the idea of “Federal Daddy” coming to give a beatdown, but it’s classic MAGA at this point. When Trump took the stage later in the event, the crowd of bootlickers joyfully chanted “Daddy,” up at a man who declared he would be a dictator on his first day in office.
As long as it’s done in the name of “justice”, which Carlson asserts is the “purest and best thing there is,” any kind of violence is fine. And as long as Trump and his supporters are doing the “spanking,” anything flies.
Let’s hope the next few weeks show that this sort of rhetoric is unacceptable to most Americans and the election delivers the “vigorous spanking” that Trump and his cronies are so desperate for.
