There’s a really good reason why I never mention Tucker Carlson. He can’t sing. He can’t dance. He can’t tell a joke or throw a ball with great velocity. Yet, there he is on Fox News entertaining the masses by providing the right wing version of a whiny traumatized scold for the downtrodden . . . maskless.
Tucker Carlson is now telling his audience to harass people who wear face masks outside.
If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused — "call the police immediately, contact child protective services" pic.twitter.com/4svVH0JY3s
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 27, 2021
Do you wear a mask? I do, both because it’s just not enough of a problem that I choose not to wear a mask and I appreciate the concerns of others about some random maskless person. I’m now fully vaccinated, and I’ve never had COVID, and I generally don’t feel any particular problem with walking around outdoors without a mask. And yet, this is not a battle I care to fight.
Yet, Tucker Carlson not only sees this as a hill to die on, but a hill to kill others on. Those others include the children.
Harass children? Call the cops on the kids for child abuse because they’re wearing a mask? It’s one thing to make a personal choice to not wear a mask, even if the terminally clueless confuse their choice with some duty of stores to permit them entry, ending up on a viral video of them behaving like a flaming nutjob. But children?
At hawthorn elementary school in Beverly Hills, where a small group of anti-maskers has gathered with signs and flyers to protest public safety measures. They are telling passing children not to wear masks. pic.twitter.com/hsZvrRXNdP
— Samuel Braslow (@SamBraslow) April 21, 2021
Before the apologists show up to argue that if the scolds of the left get to demand we not use words that offend them, we get to “fight fire with fire,” not even this fallacious argument suffices. This isn’t about you making your own choice to be just as big an asshole as the other tribe, but about your taking out your butthurt on kids.
To the extent conservatives have a legitimate claim that their views are not being taken seriously and reflected in the path society is taking during the pandemic, does their personal choices, whether to go maskless or to refuse to be vaccinated, confer some right to yell at other people’s children about how they should behave? If you don’t like the fact that teachers are “reimagining” their math curriculum to include antiracist calculations, is it any better, any more justifiable, for Carlson to call for adults to make other people’s children adopt their views? Is it now acceptable for grownups to yell at kids, or even more bizarrely, to tie up the phones at child protective services that a ten-year-old is playing outside alone wearing a mask?
Maybe Tucker Carlson can tell a joke, but he’s so wry that nobody realizes it?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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