Just when you think the lies and threats from MAGA world can’t get any scarier, Tucker Carlson shows up.
The fired Fox News personality spoke at a Trump rally in Georgia Oct. 23 sponsored by Turning Point Action, an evangelicals-for-Trump group led by the equally outrageous Charlie Kirk.
But dear God in heaven, save us from Tucker Carlson’s parenting advice. In a 20-minute speech filled with so many lies a fact checker would have given up hope, Carlson compared Democrats to belligerent children who need a spanking from their father. And that father, of course, is Donald Trump.
Mark Wingfield
The purveyor of so many lies even Fox News couldn’t defend him told the cheering crowd Democrats are “an offense against the truth, against reality and against justice itself.”
Trump, on the other hand, is the all-wise father whose job it is to keep his family in line. I’m about to quote his speech verbatim, but to get the full effect you need to watch it and hear it. The anger in his voice, the way he accentuates “bad little girl” should trigger you into a Halloween nightmare.
What he says, and how he says it, is disgusting, despicable and disturbing. It is violent, it is unhinged, and it is exactly what Trump has modeled. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for Tucker Carlson.
“A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for Tucker Carlson.”
Carlson’s illustration, he says, “is very familiar to anyone who has children”: If you allow bad behavior to go unchecked, the bad behavior will only increase.
“If you allow it, you will encourage more of it. If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it. And those kids are gonna wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for them.
“No, there has to be a point at which dad comes home,” he continues to roars of approval from the crowd who know exactly the comparison he’s making to Trump. “Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home and he’s pissed; he’s pissed but he’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they are 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 jumps briefly to imitating a mother saying to a child, “Get to your room right now and think about what you did.”
Then he picks up the father theme again: “When dad gets home, 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. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you, no it’s not. I’m not gonna lie. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me and you earned this; you’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl and it has to be this way. It has to be this way because it’s true and you’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did.”
Carlson then compares “what you did” with a series of lies about the 2020 presidential election being stolen and Trump being falsely accused of all the things he’s legitimately been accused of and convicted for in court.
He calls Kamala Harris “a hapless victim who happened to be there in the right color so they grabbed her.” And he says of Tim Walz, “they needed some, you know, whatever Tim Walz is. They needed a weak man because it is the party of weak men and unhappy women — one of which leads to the other by the way. Where you find weak men, you will inevitably find unhappy women. Sorry. And they make them on purpose. They weaken the men to drive the women insane to have the most consistent voting bloc ever in the history of politics. Unhappy women made unhappy by weak men.”
What Dad Trump is going to do for America, Carlson says, is bring “the return of freedom” and “the return of the country you grew up in where you could say things like, ‘I like that guy’ and maybe I like the other person and that’s fine; that was not allowed for nine years.”
“Carlson spews the worst kind of complementarian family hierarchy mumbo-jumbo imaginable.”
If you can’t see the venom in this speech, your conscience is broken. It may be one of the most vile pieces of political speech I’ve ever heard in my lifetime.
Apart from the baseline of an uncountable number of lies in the 20-minute speech, apart from the angry delivery, apart from the fact this was happening at a rally sponsored by evangelical Christians — apart from all that, Carlson spews the worst kind of complementarian family hierarchy mumbo-jumbo imaginable, mixed with calls for physical violence.
Taken as a metaphor for Trump returning to the White House, it’s clear Carlson is endorsing Trump’s pledge to weaponize the Justice Department and courts to go after his own political enemies. They are the ones who need to be spanked hard by Daddy Donald.
Can you see the sexualized nature of these comments? It’s a little girl getting bent over daddy’s lap for the spanking. And Carlson relishes talking about what a “bad little girl” she has been.
Clearly, that’s a disturbed fantasy Carlson carries of seeing Trump spank a subservient Harris.
We’ve often wondered where evangelical supporters of Trump’s authoritarian insanity might draw the line, and I wish this would be it. But it most likely won’t be. God help the children raised in these MAGA families. They are not being subjected to biblical family values.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His brand-new book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.
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