Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perpetually the quasi-cinematic star of her own political career, could not help but remind us all last night that she is also in fact the main character of the Tucker Carlson Saga (or a Best Supporting Actress nominee at the very least). In a video celebrating his demise, she selfied her triumphal thoughts to the world, treating Carlson like a slasher villain who may yet return in a low-budget sequel. She summarized her message to the masses by proudly proclaiming: “deplatforming works.”
This last is already causing conniptions on the Right. And why would it not? Her rhetoric sounds as horrifying to us as Iago’s, striding to the front of the stage at the start of Othello to deliver his famous “I am a villain” soliloquy to the crowd. Conservatives watch Ocasio-Cortez sigh with contentment about how well deplatforming works — “deplatforming” being the technique by which activists lobby platforms and institutions to pre-censor “objectionable” speech and speakers, denying them both cultural legitimacy and a megaphone — and our reaction is something akin to: “Can you believe it? She’s just admitting it! Right there in public!”
But to her audience, Ocasio-Cortez is simply stating an obvious truth. Deplatforming works and is a critical tool in the activist toolbox to wield against undesirable views. In this case, the activists obviously did not waste their time lobbying Fox News directly to drop Tucker Carlson; instead, they focused their energies upon Tucker’s advertisers, threatening them with boycotts and media infamy should they “consent” to their products appearing during commercials for his show. Fox News hosts are keenly aware of this if yesterday’s discussion between Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck is anything to go on. The two famous Fox veterans came together on Kelly’s show to lament their colleague’s firing. Almost in passing, Kelly noted that while “there’s not a bigger star on Fox [than Tucker], there are bigger moneymakers.”
Kelly’s point, which I would love to see expanded upon with the sort of detail that she and Beck are well-positioned to divulge, is that Carlson’s show had become radioactive to most mainstream advertisers due to a succession of the very same “deplatforming” activist boycotts that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praised. Moreover, although they did not note this, I will: a huge amount of Tucker’s personal legal exposure in the Dominion case directly resulted from the fact that he was so heavily reliant upon his show’s biggest advertiser, Mike Lindell — remember the constant barrage of MyPillow ads during Fox’s highest-rated primetime hour? Procter & Gamble wasn’t returning Fox’s calls anymore — and thus was easily cowed into handing over chunks of his show and credibility to Lindell’s perfervid conspiracy theories.
Deplatforming clashes so harshly with the the classical liberal worldview because it actively sets itself against the idea of open discourse; its advocates embrace it without any of the moral repulsion conservatives associate with it. To these people — who are, it must be noted, experiencing nearly unchecked success in the culture wars — “open discourse” is a vaguely understood notion at best and an actively reviled principle of white privilege at worst. Instead, they want control, and are alarmingly unguarded in their willingness to acknowledge as much.
I hold no brief for Tucker Carlson — I somehow doubt we’ll ever speak after my last few pieces about him — and his behavior during the Dominion case was but one in a series of glaring ethical lapses; he was the agent of his own demise in the end, just as Nixon was his own worst enemy. But I am also under no illusion that the weapons successfully used to turn the screws on him from the outside — social media pressure campaigns, coordinated attempts at driving away advertisers, and the like — will not now immediately be turned against other inconvenient targets as well. These are the master’s tools; they are unethical to use, but know that soon they will be used in an attempt to master us as well.