Tucker Carlson’s Latest Braindead Cry for Outrage? Blaming the News Media Who Investigated the Pentagon Leak

Tucker Carlson opened Thursday night’s show as most cable programs did, covering the arrest of the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air Guardsman, Jack Teixeira, who is alleged to have leaked hundreds of highly sensitive and classified intelligence documents to a Discord chat group of teenage gamers who call themselves “Thug Shaker Central.” No really.

It’s a fairly straightforward story: a man illegally leaked classified information from the U.S. government regarding a foreign war and was arrested for it.

Not so simple for Carlson, who is so eager to be the cable news outlier and seizes at any opportunity to troll the libturd media. His hot take on the story was blame the media for doing something he hasn’t done in years: actual reporting.

Carlson spent more than eight minutes blaming the Washington Post and the New York Times for their impressive reporting on this story, with some swings at his cable news competitors for their accurate descriptions of a man accused of treason.

Carlson’s logic here is remarkably twisted but is founded in the strawman fallacy that Teixeira is an actual “whistleblower” deserving of protection. Why? Because Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared during a Congressional hearing that Russian forces in Ukraine are “waning.”

“In other words, Russia is losing the war,” Carlson unfairly paraphrased Austin. “That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in Congressional testimony. That is a crime. But Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime. Instead, the only man who has been taken into custody or likely ever will be is a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who leaked the slides that showed that Lloyd Austin was lying.”

Carlson wants us to believe that this 21-year-old guy — who went by “Jack the Dripper” on Discord as he excitedly shared state secrets to impress a few dozen teenagers that were into “racist memes” and guns — should be celebrated for outing Lloyd Austin as a criminal because of his use of the word “waning” to describe the Russian forces.

In case you are confused by this tortured logic, Carlson explained.

“That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” he said, which felt more like an admission than an accusation. “Now our news media exist and have constitutional protection precisely in order to push back against this grotesque standard. Their only job is to tell the truth.”

Carlson went on to blame the media not just for their role in the arrest of this alleged traitor but also reporting his capture as … good news?

“And yet, tonight, the news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine,” Carlson said. “They are treating him like Osama bin Laden. Maybe a little worse, actually, because, unlike al Qaeda, apparently this kid is a racist.”

No one is treating him like he’s Osama bin Laden of course. The absurd hyperbole doesn’t make Carlson’s point any less moronic — or embarrassing for Fox News executives who appear frozen with fear in overseeing his scripts.

Carlson went on to actually praise the potentially treasonous Teixeira for supposedly revealing documents that show U.S. military forces are in Ukraine fighting Russia, even though Fox’s own news organization has reported that not to be true.

The most-watched host on cable news finally arrived at his thesis: That the media are the real villains in this story because they are working hand in glove with the U.S. intelligence community, which he states as an obvious fact.

“The administration apparently used illegal surveillance techniques to identify this kid, apparently with the help of The Washington Post and The New York Times,” he said, before calling the papers “accomplices that are holding government accountable. They’re helping the government keep you from knowing what the government is doing.”

He then curiously alleged that The Washington Post committed a crime because when they first reported the story exclusively, they obtained and reviewed some of the classified documents this leaker possessed.

“So we’ve got two problems here. If it’s illegal to see these documents, if you don’t have a security clearance, how is The Washington Post doing this legally? They don’t have a security clearance. Well, obviously, they were given them by the U.S. intel agencies and are working alongside them.”

“The news media, whose job it is to inform you of what your government is doing,” he concluded. “But instead, they are working actively late into the night to lie to you on behalf of their masters in permanent Washington.”

The entire argument is astounding in its bad faith and misdirection. Carlson, as he has countless times before, took a straightforward story about a criminal prosecution and mashed it into a braindead cry for outrage. To Carlson, it doesn’t matter that the media did its job and reported accurately on this story because for one hour every weeknight on Fox News, the truth is irrelevant, and aimless fury rules.

Watch above via Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.