OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson issued an apology to a guest after a lengthy monologue to open his Friday show regarding a guest column published by The New York Times.
The essay, written by Heather Kaye, who lived in China for 16 years as a fashion designer and raised two daughters there, appeared to be very complimentary of the Communist rule, which struck Carlson as outrageous.
“She misses the communist party of China co-parenting her children,” Carlson declared. “She misses their ‘firm hand’ and we’re quoting. We’re not making this up.”
He then went on to quote a passage from the essay:
Our stringent government co-parent quickly made its presence felt. The girls’ Chinese kindergarten lectured us on everything, including how many hours our daughters should sleep, what they should eat and their optimal weight.
“The Communist Chinese Party [sic] fat-shamed this lady’s kids!” he exclaimed, as he went on to quote another passage from the piece:
We sometimes felt as if our children were on loan to us for evenings and weekends, to be delivered back to school each weekday.
“Now, again, she’s not writing a new version of Darkness at Noon, she’s complementing the government of China,” Carlson said, adding:
The piece ends by noting, “tight control of the Communist Party’s surveillance state results in its own kind of freedom.”
That is un-American. That person is sick, and if you don’t recognize how sick that person is, if you long for a fascist government to call your little girls fat, you’re a sick person, OK? The fact that The New York Times would run that and expect all of its readers to applaud? “Oh, if only the government would tell my kids they’re fat, this would be a better country.” You’ve got to fight for freedom no matter what.
At that point, Carlson then welcomed his guest, Ned Ryun, the CEO of American Majority, a conservative advocacy group, noting: “I lost control, and I want to apologize for that, but it’s true. For the New York Times to run a piece from some totally–I don’t want to keep attacking her, some mom who wants the Communist Party to tell children they’re too fat, fat-shame her little girls and she gets off on it, and the New York Times readers applaud this like that’s normal. That is not normal. That’s not American. That’s demented.”
Watch, around the 16:15 mark:
Earlier in his monologue, he noted:
Do you remember when you first heard about the Chinese government’s one-child policy? It sounded so foreign, so crazy, so grotesque. Here the Communist Party was deciding how many children people were allowed to have. There was state monitoring of pregnancy. There was forced sterilization. There was infanticide at scale. To the Western mind, the whole thing was repugnant and alien, but maybe the most un-American thing about the Chinese one-child policy was the policy itself. The idea that government could insert itself into the most intimate details of your private life struck most Americans at a gut level as incomprehensible. The whole point of America was to avoid plans like that.
The whole point of America was personal freedom. That’s why the country was founded. What you do in private, on your own time with your own money, within the boundaries of the law, was your own business and nobody else’s business. It was a foundational point and, on that question, there appeared to be, thank God, bipartisan agreement. Conservatives believed in the Bill of Rights. Liberals believed in personal choice. “My body, my choice,” they said. “Government out of our personal lives.” They said that for decades.
Now we know they didn’t mean it.
The rush of telling people they’re not allowed to do something is just irresistible to certain sorts of people, to weak people, pathetic people, who cluster together in what’s called the Democratic Party for warmth and safety and power. Notice conservatives aren’t that interested in their party. They’d rather be with their own family, but your average leftist is weak and afraid inside and so the party is the most important thing, not the individual — the party.
