Conservatives had taken the upper hand in the recent battle over decade-old comments being used against people. After Media Matters dug up comments from then-MSNBC contributor Tucker Carlson saying nasty things on a shock jock program, the now-Fox News host fired back by pointing out terrible things the president of Media Matters said around the same time.
Two can play at this game.
But now, to cover for Media Matters president Angelo Carusone, Leftist and their media counterparts have a new plan.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post published an article trying to claim the young woman who works for Media Matters and discovered the tapes is the so-called powerful bully Carlson claimed to be the victim of. Seriously. Here’s the headline:
“Tucker Carlson says he’s the victim of a powerful bully. Meet the 24-year-old who found the tapes.”
As if she doesn’t work for Media Matters, which amplified what she found and organized their typical advertiser boycott against Carlson.
The woman, Madeline Peltz, is portrayed as some innocent girl, rather than an adult woman working for a powerful company:
“In reality, credit for the tapes’ publication is due to Peltz: a 20-something in her first adult job who lives in the basement of a Washington, D.C., house she rents with five other people, a few cats and a dog named Noodles.”
“I’m not like some high-power wielding globalist,” Peltz said, adopting the conspiracy-inflected jargon of the far-right. “I’m this kid who’s been on the Internet my whole life and knows how to get around it.”
So, this is the tactic the Left is going to take now: Ignore the weight of the organization someone works on and focus on the young person who did the actual work. Let’s see how that works out for them the next time they trash The Daily Caller or the Heritage Foundation or any other conservative employer. Certainly, this could never be used against them, right?
This doesn’t appear to be the only tactic the Left is taking. Angelo Carusone himself is trying to defend his old words by claiming he was just writing as a “parody of a right-wing blowhard.”
Sure. That’s why he used offensive words like “Japs,” “Jewry,” and “trannies.”
As National Review pointed out, this argument doesn’t hold up:
“Carusone’s right-wing satire explanation, which appeared in [CNN host Brian] Stelter’s newsletter, does not account for the liberal positions he espoused in other blog posts. As the Caller noted, Carusone used the blog to attack Republicans and express support for former Vice President Al Gore.”
Yep, right-wing blowhards all love Al Gore. Good parody, Angelo.
Let’s not pretend that what Carlson said wasn’t offensive, but the point of shock jocks is to be offensive. The real bully is the “outrage mob,” as Carlson said. It doesn’t matter how old the person is that actually dug up the tapes, the organization she works for whipped up an online mob to go after the host. No amount of whitewashing from left-wing journalists will change that.