Apparently fresh out of GOP operatives to cast as ordinary parents who are very worried about their children learning about racism, or “Critical Race Theory”, Tucker Carlson took some time this week to indulge some other fantasies designed to enrage his already violence-prone and anti-anti-racist audience.
This time, it was with a monologue-turned-FoxNews-story alleging “scientists want to use human engineering to solve climate change,” before bringing on Marc Morano to rehash his year-old paranoid delusion that Democrats are working on turning the Covid lockdowns into “climate lockdowns.”
Carlson, who FoxNews admits in court shouldn’t ever be taken seriously, used an old clip of a scientist talking about how we need to figure out the ethics of genetic experimentation, because of its potential for solving big problems like climate change, while Morano described an explicit warning against climate lockdowns as a call to institute them.
Worth noting that neither of these are new lies. But what is new is the context, in that both scientists were at least tangentially somewhat connected to recurring rightwing scapegoats, the World Health Organization and Google/YouTube.
After a rant that’s only coherent to level 10 or above FoxNews brains about Covid-19 being engineered by China and maybe Google, Carlson jumps to a tape “from a few years ago.” In it, bioethicist Dr. Matthew Liao talks about the power and peril of genetic engineering and why it’s so important to have “a really robust ethical framework.” Because big problems, like climate change, could potentially be addressed by things like letting people volunteer to be given an allergy to red meat, or shrinking down children so humanity uses fewer resources.
According to Calrson, Liao “outlined some of his proposals” to solve climate change with human engineering “in a recent paper in the Journal of ‘Ethics, Policy & Environment.’” But apparently Tucker’s meaning of “recent” is just some time barely within the last decade, because Liao’s paper was published back in 2012. In fact, it’s been so long since this idea was floated that the movie made about it, starring Matt Damon, is apparently already so forgotten that Carlson felt comfortable pretending it was new, because it was posted on YouTube, and YouTube is owned by Google, and Big Tech is working with WHO and China. Not exactly a smoking gun...
Marc Morano’s segment was similarly stale, as he’s been trying to pretend that climate advocates want a Covid-style lockdown for over a year now. His paranoid delusion got a boost back in the fall of 2020, when an economics professor at University College London named Mariana Mazzucato published an op-ed in Project Syndicate arguing for climate action now, explicitly to avoid a climate lockdown in the future.
Why is Carlson inviting Morano on to discuss a months-old online op-ed warning against climate lockdowns as being evidence that Democrats like President Biden are on the verge of instituting one any day now?
Potentially because Mazzucato has since become the chair of a WHO council, and Morano’s blog cited another crackpot Kit Knightly’s fresh blog asking “is a ‘climate lockdown’ on the horizon?” Knightly cites Bill Gates' and George Soros' funding of Project Syndicate, and Mazzucato’s appointment to a WHO council that was made a month after the post was written, to say “in short: an economist who works for the WHO has written a report concerning ‘climate lockdowns’...”
Notice how careful Knightly is to leave readers with an impression that the WHO paid Mazzucato to write a report, when the reality is that the lockdown warning was little more than a one-off op-ed by someone who doesn’t focus on climate and then took an unrelated advisory position on a WHO council on global health investments.
But of course all that careful nuance is lost on Morano and Carlson, who package these old misrepresentations as fresh new fearmongering content.
Because not only is Fox News not really news, it’s not even new!
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