THE POST-TRUMP GOP WILL BE AN EVEN MORE RACIST PARTY, SANEWASHED BY THE "LIBERAL" MEDIA

This morning, Matthew Gertz of Media Matters posted this at Bluesky:

Here's what Tucker Carlson is up to when he talks to his own audience, instead of interviewers from NPR or NY Times: Explaining that white people are facing extinction and the ADL is trying to cover it up. He concludes, "Noticing is hate. Noticing is violence." www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carls...

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— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 8:32 AM

Gertz is right. Carlson talks like this all the time, but he was respectfully interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro in The New York Times this past spring and by Steve Inskeep on NPR last week. My one quibble with Gertz's post is that Carlson didn't really conceal his bigotry in those interviews -- in the Times interview, as I noted at the time, he argued, essentially, that Benjamin Netantyahu brainwashed Trump into starting the war with Iran and manipulated him into going through with it, thus implying that Trump is effectively blameless because an evil Jew made him do it. He says similar things in the NPR interview. Of course, he swears that none of this is anti-Semitism.

Inskeep and Garcia-Navarro don't care very much. They let him say these things and then politely proceeded to other subjects. They did this because Carlson is an insider. He regularly talked to Trump! He's an influential voice on the right who could be a 2028 kingmaker, yet he knows how to have a polite chat with liberal-coded journalists.

So the Times and NPR sanewashed him.

One poster who responds to Gertz calls this "a kind of fascist glow up service." Another one says that "liberal" outlets publish this sort of thing out of a delusional sense of what's good for their audiences: "All for 'fairness' & to get readers like me out of the 'liberal bubble.'"

But Carlson isn't the only influential bigot on the right who gets far more respectable coverage from the "liberal" press than he deserves. There's also Chris Rufo. Christopher Mathias of Talking Points Memo reports:

To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in America, Christopher Rufo is considered part of it. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the tony midtown think tank that holds black-tie galas; he recently enjoyed a polite sit-down interview with Ezra Klein on Klein’s massively popular New York Times podcast....

This past weekend Rufo introduced an alarming new term that feels like an escalation, even for him: the “Indian Question” — that is, what to do about the very existence of Indian people, citizens and noncitizens alike, in America? Rufo’s new phrase formed the title of the latest episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” the BlazeTV podcast he co-hosts with Jonathan Keeperman, a lesser known and less “respectable” proprietor of white nationalist talking points....

Rufo and Keeperman discussed the tweet in which this year's Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, Bo French, recoiled in horror at the sight of University of Texas football fans who were of South Asian descent. Mathias writes:

Keeperman and Rufo’s “Indian Question” episode amounts to an hour-long defense of French’s post....

“Successful assimilation is precisely that you wouldn’t notice it, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about,” [Keeperman] said. “The mere fact of us being able to notice that, no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game, is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.” ...

Rufo nods along with all of Keeperman’s arguments. When Keeperman expresses disgust for the phrase “diversity is our strength,” often used by liberals, Rufo excitedly agrees, saying it “sounds like a slogan from [George Orwell’s novel] ‘1984.’”

This makes me furious. Like me, Rufo is of Italian descent. I have immigrant grandparents from Sicily on my father's side and immigrant great-grandparents from the southern mainlaind on my mother's side. Rufo's father immigrated from Italy to America, and Rufo has said that he and his children have Italian citizenship and speak Italian at home. (I don't speak any Italian.)

Rufo and I are perceived as white in America now, but my ancestors, at least, weren't always accorded that privilege. Many people thought we didn't look the same and act the same as "real" Americans. This also true of Keeperman's ancestors -- he's Jewish.

But our skin is light enough and our facial features are European enough that we're all now regarded as white. We can assimilate and "you wouldn't notice it." You wouldn't notice that we're descended from foreigners who were darker-skinned and regarded with suspicion.

The South Asians who are being attacked by Rufo and Keeperman don't have that option. They can't disappear into whiteness, at least as it's currently conceived -- not the way Rufo, Keeperman, and I can.

So even though these kids were doing the most American thing imaginable -- excitedly watching a college football game (something I never did when I was an undergraduate) -- Rufo and Keeperman are holding them to an impossible assimilation standard. But Rufo and Keeperman don't want them to succeed, Mathias writes:

The pair’s “solution” to the “Indian question” is the forced deportation of Indian immigrants who aren’t assimilated, and a complete ban on all immigration. “That means cutting off the spigot right now, getting rid of anybody who’s only here temporarily, and encouraging — through remigration efforts — to compel people who don’t wanna go through that process of assimilation to go back to where they come from and let this thing cool off for a matter of perhaps decades,” Keeperman says....

For Indian-American citizens or other Desi people otherwise allowed to stay in America, Keeperman advocates them being “subjected” to an “assimilation hazing process” that will include instances of “vulgar, defamatory racism” until they have sufficiently left parts of their Indian “identity behind.”

Rufo is embracing this argument not just because he's a vile bigot, but because he has a keen eye for which culture-war attacks will keep the rubes angry and willing to vote Republican. As Mathias notes, he was the guy who urged the right to go after DEI, critical race theory, and "gender ideology." He's telling us that this is next.

And yet "liberal" journalists will continue to give him extremely respectful coverage. Why? Because he has connections to the Republican establishment, and because they believe that bursting our "liberal bubble" is more important than calling bigots what they are.