This article is in response to Erik Jonasson II’s article, “Political Commentators Inability to be Wrong.” I find this title to be ironic because the entire article is only about one video of Tucker Carlson interviewing Bill Nye. Also, he seems to have become a political commentator himself.
As mentioned, this article isn’t necessarily about political commentators in general, but about Tucker Carlson more specifically. First, he has questioned Ben Shapiro’s ability to consider if he’s wrong. Now he has moved on to questioning Tucker Carlson’s ability to consider if he’s wrong. This shows that there is a continual pattern of degrading anyone with conservative theological and political beliefs in the media. Would he ever publish any criticism of leftist political commentators’ behaviors, such as Rachel Maddow or Kate Bolduan?
One criticism mentioned about Carlson is the allegation of “pretending to be an expert on climate change.” To make his point, he writes, “If you want to tell me about conceal and carry, something I am very unaware of, I will let you talk, because I can’t pretend I am the expert.” However, Bill Nye’s background is in mechanical engineering, not in climatology, meteorology, or geology. With that, wouldn’t one think that anything Nye says about climate change should be equally taken with a grain of salt as a history major like Carlson?
Another odd critique is “At what point though do we encourage skepticism, even when the skeptic has no authority to be talking on this point?” If you have taken any natural or social science course, an underlying principle brought up is that of encouraging skepticism via hypotheses, gathering and processing data, experimentation, etc. So if any student of any field of study is encouraged to question anything, why can’t Tucker Carlson? Also, the articles regarding gun control and the 2nd Amendment seem to carry an assumption of authority or expertise. There seems to be a double standard here.
The conclusion to this article says, “If you listen to someone who claims to be an expert on everything, whether it be politics, scientific fields they have only Googled, or even worse, they are experts in individual’s experiences in the world, than please be aware that you are not getting the best source. You are instead listening to a know it all, who will not yield to anything, even if that is the truth told to them by the best authority.” This is another example of jumping to conclusions and making huge overgeneralizations based on only one single video of Tucker Carlson. These bad claims are why I think the likes of Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Jake Macaulay are better sources than this. In fact, there is a video of Carlson interviewing a white male claiming to be a Filipino woman, and they have a rather civil discussion.
Making over-generalizations like this and jumping to conclusions about one particular party doesn’t make on a rather credible source, either.
Mark Simonson
Graduate Student
Agribusiness & Applied Economics
(701) 367-3574