Tucker Carlson’s New Big Lie

The Dominion Election Machines’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News has caused internal Fox documents to come to light that acknowledge beyond any doubt that Fox, including its highest level leadership in Rupert Murdoch, knew it was deliberately lying to its viewers about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election when it spread the lie that Trump was cheated out of a victory.

This damning evidence if pursued in the legal case against Fox will almost certainly bring the Fox network down. At least it should.

It could be argued that the more recent attempt by Fox’s Tucker Carlson to sanitize the Trump-led January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by use of the 41,000 hours of tapes of the attack he was given by the GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy was, in fact, a desperate “hail Mary” attempt to forestall the inevitable, the demise of Fox entirely as a credible news entity that should be now forthcoming.

But of course we don’t know that this will be the outcome, as much as it should be. That’s because so much of the world’s elites are aligned behind Trump’s side of the story as outrageous as it has become.

Remember, the use of outrageous lies did not begin with Trump claims about the 2020 election outcome. It was clear the first day that Trump took office on January 20, 2017, when his then press secretary made the most outrageous claim that millions of Americans were lining Pennsylvania Avenue and filling the National Mall to overflowing for Trump’s Inauguration.

That singular, massive violation of ordinary sensibilities, was all that anyone should have needed to prove this entire Trump exercise was one of extraordinary grift and lies.

Yes, on that day, the witness of live television cameras, photographers and reporters were subordinated to an extraordinary coordinated lie, and to the extent to which

Trump was able to get away with it, the groundwork was laid for the relentless assault by Trump on the media for everything he didn’t like in the coverage of his administration for the next four years.

Honestly, if he was able to get away with that, there is nothing that he couldn’t get away with from that moment forward, including his claim the 2020 election was “stolen.”

I frankly don’t know what should have happened differently on Inauguration Day 2019 when Trump press secretary Sean Spicer came out to the White House press briefing room to insist, contrary to all the evidence, that reality was not what all the reporting said it was that day.

I served a period myself as a White House correspondent, and I honestly can’t imagine what it would have been like to be sitting in that press briefing room and hearing Spicer say what he did.

Watching on TV, I was stunned. But even more troubling was the fact he got away with it.

Should the reporters there have stormed the podium at that very moment? I don’t know. It came as such a shock to everybody. But the bottom line was that the most outrageous of lies, thrown right in the face of the nation’s elite White House Press Corps, was allowed to pass.

The rest, it might be said, is history.

For my part, I will never forget, or forgive, that moment. And, as I suspected at the time, it defined everything that followed even to this very day.

You see, democracy and the rule of law depend on one decisive thing: that reality, that truth, is recognized. Without some universal standard of truth, we the people have nothing to rely on. Our court system, for example, is dependent and relies on the ability to approximate the truth as best as possible. So do electoral outcomes.

What Trump did was far more insidious in the undermining of our democracy than just cheating about the outcome. He, and his controllers, succeeded in undermining the very basis on which our system of democracy works.

So when Tucker Carlson reverts to a similar technique – the blatant denial of self-evident facts – to make his case, it is in keeping with a now-well known method. Another big lie.

By Charlie Clark

I maintain both an historical and personal attachment to the neighborhood called Glebewood, just off N. Glebe Rd. a block south of Langston Blvd.

A slice of its vintage 1930s cottage-style row houses are listed on the national and state historic registers. And my parents in 1974-76 lived in one of the nearby modern townhomes of Glebe Common (just two years after the neighborhood’s Dominion movie theater—formerly the Glebe—closed).

I also recently learned that Glebewood shares with certain other Arlington developments the unfortunate legacy of legally enforced racial segregation.

You’re basically in Glebewood if, like me, you patronize businesses like the Sherwin Williams Paint store or the Livin’ the Pie Life pastries and coffee haunt. The Glebewood Village Historic District, designated two decades ago, comprises 5.9 acres on seven blocks with 105 brick, two-story Colonial Revival homes in alternating colors built 1937-38. The leafy intersections of 21st and N. Brandywine Sts. lead to lovely Slater Park.

My personal memories of those blocks in the 1970s include the time some tranquility-loving neighbors—my mother included—sought to block construction of an assisted living facility a block south on Glebe Rd. It is today Sunrise Senior Living. But I also recall from my mornings walking our dog noticing that a succession of chain-link fences prevented easy passage through to the nearby African-American enclave of Halls Hill.

Many 21st century Arlingtonians became aware of the “segregation wall” after a vestige of its cinder blocks several blocks away at N. Culpeper and 17th St. was marked in 2017 with a ceremony and historical sign. That informal structure—rolled out gradually by individual homeowners in the 1930s to separate the races—was finally dismantled by local black school kids in the 1950s, and officially by the county in 1966.

The existence of racial covenants—deed and sales agreement language that forbade whites from selling homes to blacks or Jews—became common in the 1920s but had faded by the 1960s. They are only recently being researched. A group of academics led by Marymount University sociology professor Janine DeWitt so far has uncovered two land records for section 1 of Glebewood Village. They read:

“This conveyance is made upon the condition and restriction that neither the said property nor any part thereof nor any interest therein shall ever be sold, transferred, conveyed, devised or leased to anyone not of the Caucasian Race.”

Modern residents have a Glebewood Civic Association, but its leader did not respond to inquiries. During a recent walk through my one time stomping grounds, I chatted with several neighbors. None were aware of the old covenants, except vaguely in one case. But all said they were fond of the tranquil neighborhood. Which is understandable.

I also noted that Slater Park today allows easy foot traffic between Glebewood and oncesegregated Hall’s Hill.

***

How many of you recall the Cherrydale fixture called Progressive Cleaners? (Slogan: “Arlington is progressive, so are we.”)

Visible from the 1940s until just into the 21st century was a mural that westbound drivers saw from what then was Lee Highway depicting the Trylon & Perisphere from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. (Its original meaning was said to symbolize either Faith, Hope and Charity, or Aspiration and Despair.)

Cleaners founder Joe Fuschini, I’m told by my boyhood friend Gary Glover, who is his grandson, admired the fair’s theme of progress after launching Progressive in 1937. So he wrote to the fair’s managers and asked for permission to reproduce the image. It was granted at no charge, provided that Fuschini (and his later partner Ed Glover) would encourage visits to the fair, which lasted for years in the 1940s before a new version opened in New York in 1964.

Gary Glover followed his father into the business, later expanding a successful chain of dry cleaners in Richmond called Puritan.