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1. In 1991, the 22-year old Tucker Carlson described himself in his college yearbook as a member of the Dan White Society. White was the homophobe who in 1978 assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
2. I& #39;m afraid we& #39;re in for another tedious round of Cancel Culture discourse with the Creepy Contrarian Crackpot Pettifoggers giving us 10,000 word substack essays with the usual apologia (he was just a 22 year old child! Another era! "As a gay man I see nothing wrong...")
3. To start with, cancel culture is besides the point here. As @jackshafer shrewdly noted, Fox makes its money from subscribers as well as advertises & Carlson is too important to them. We& #39;ve already seen them brush aside many comparably bad Carlson comments.
4. I think Carlson& #39;s comments are best seen not as a biographical fact about Carlson (who really is too much a worm to care about) but rather a political fact about the American right. Carlson& #39;s celebration of Harvey Milk& #39;s assassin is not an outlier.
5. I suspect that you think that the assassination of Moscone and Milk was a horrible crime. But it& #39;s important to understand that many on the right don& #39;t feel that way. Milk as first openly gay California lawmaker represented a threat to right.
6. After the assassination, there were cops in San Fransisco that wore "Free Dan White" t-shirts. This was written in police locker room in large letters: FREE AN INNOCENT MAN WHO WAS FOR THE PEOPLE. FREE DAN WHITE.
7. The fact that Dan White got a ridiculously light sentence (voluntary manslaughter rather than murder) for shooting 2 people dead was symptomatic of the homophobia that had an implicit sympathy for the killer.
8. As a child of a very right wing family (his imbecilic younger brother is even named Buckley Carlson), Tucker Carlson surely read American Spectator & National Review in 1980s, which were filled with derision for Harvey Milk. Here& #39;s one example from American Spectator in 1983.
9. More on the need to understand Tucker Carlson& #39;s homophobia not as a personal flaw but as a political phenomenon here (along with other, happier, posts): https://jeetheer.substack.com/publish/post/35509017">https://jeetheer.substack.com/publish/p...
