A little less than two years before Tucker Carlson "left" Fox News (after the settled Dominion Voting defamation lawsuit) for being a far right propagandist in April 2023, Kirk went on his show.
In July 2021, Kirk made a regrettable appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show (when it was still on Fox News) to talk about universities COVID-19 vaccine enforcement policies. Anyone who knows about how vaccines work and has followed the six years of C19 research knows that these shots unfortunately did not and do not entirely stop transmission of COVID-19 (which we know now is what causes the cumulative full body damage, disability, and death). But they do — absolutely — shorten viral transmission time, make cases less severe, and lessen likelihood of imminent death.
But, remember…at this time (and as detailed at length in Issue Eight: Sick/ness) the far right media landscape over the last year had already gone — ALL IN — on incorrectly framing C19 not only as a “non-issue” equivalent to “the flu,” (It wasn’t / isn’t.) but also as something that’s allegedly only harming disabled and elderly folks (It wasn’t / isn’t.), while advertising that the anti-inflammatory drug HCQ would somehow work as a vaccine replacement (It never was). To make myself abundantly clear, all of these things Kirk espoused were absolutely and completely Not True, but folks believed them, including at the very least, the doctors who chose to appear on Kirk’s podcast.
This is to say, being that it was 2021, Biden was now the u.s. president. So the Fox News media landscape was having their usual field day lambasting the democrats (as if they aren’t the controlled opposition that they are). Ironically, Carlson began his episode by suggesting that their admin was going to “go door to door” to check to make sure everyone was vaccinated. (That not only did not happen, but both parties ARE responsible for funding / legalizing ICE going door to door terrorizing us all. Because guess fucking what? You can’t REFORM a domestic terrorist organization.)
Anyway, Carlson used that rhetoric as a means of striking fear into his viewership, skewing their perception of the reality of both a) the unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as b) the seriousness of this virus that we now know causes all of us full body damage, disability, and a high risk of death when infected.
How did he do so? Following in Kirk’s strategical framing from our prior issue, he cast this public health call to an action as a threat to “autonomy” and “u.s. citizens freedom”. Carlson purported, “it used to be your choice if you wanted it,” as if it wasn’t the first global / novel pandemic of our lives that we needed to take actions to end. Again, yes, the vaccines did not and do not stop transmission entirely. But they do — matteroffactly — decrease the timeline through which we are infectious, as well as the amount of damage done to us, by raising our immunity, which fucking matters!
In individualistic societies, like the u.s., we often forget just how cruel, inhumane, and outright eugenic our reluctance in the face of responsibility to protect one another is. As disabled folks and scholars have been begging us to remember for LONG before this pandemic, we DO have a responsibility to protect ourselves and one another by taking preventative health measures. We forget that we are born disabled and we will die disabled, as is the nature of human existence. To deny that, and, instead, frame our need for collective health care/work as something to “fear” as if it’s baseless “political control” is bold eugenic (racisms, ableism, classisms, cisheterosexisms, etc.) hubris.
Carlson, who’s not only not a medical doctor, but a known propagandist (who was even removed from his Fox host position [not even two years later] for consistently acting like a total egotistical piece of shit), lied that C19 vaccines don’t help.
Remember, this media event was roughly eleven months after Kirk’s podcast episode where he had those nine doctors there who went viral arguing that the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship was ruined by pharmaceutical companies (who they alleged wanted to sell you these exact vaccines instead of HCQ) since March 2020.
Now, building off of that bullshit propaganda / conspiracy web, Carlson brought a new angle: weaponizing the autonomous idea of “my body, my choice” against us all.
That’s some seriously twisted fuck shit to do to the general public — paid shill or not. It’s also beyond disgusting that we live in a colonial capitalist system that doesn’t provide most of us any, or at best, an insufficient amount of “sick days,” when we need them. Meaning, all our preexisting profit centric and “machine-like” systemic harms just intersected and compounded with the eugenics logics in our “normal” practices.
And, even one of the doctors in Kirk’s podcast episode admitted, we were failing folks who worked at or lived inside nursing homes. (And that’s blood on these fucks hands.)
Mind you, for decades these same conservative motherfuckers had been copying and pasting the implementation of TRAP (Targeted Regulation on Abortion Provider) laws incrementally across states ruining assigned female at birth folk’s bodily autonomy.
And their damage culminated in the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v Wade (2022), effectively decimating, especially our most disenfranchised, folks access to lifesaving reproductive justice / healthcare, only two years later during Biden’s administration.
Because the democrats consistently chose to never codify our reproductive rights. Neo/liberals constantly make excuses for democrats, but they didn’t because they didn’t provide the vast majority of their constituents with candidates worth voting for for many consecutive straight decades between the time it began to the time it ended.
As I have detailed at length throughout the entirety of this mini series so far, this is because both major u.s. parties operate with carceral, militarized, and eugenics logics and practices. As a result, endless specialists who incline our way of doing things as media in society building processes, like the ones on Kirk’s podcast, fail us. Just like neo/liberal constituents and democrats who stopped face masking for disability rights, despite knowing it especially harms Black / Brown gender marginalized folks, do too.
Anyhoo, Carlson went on attempting to make colleges / universities sound “absurd” for requiring students to get C19 vaccinated (and provide proof of said vaccination statuses), claiming there were too “few / if any exemptions” (which was either a total lie, or had since changed because of propagandists like him who caused public uproar for them). Then he overconfidently asserted that students had “already recovered from COVID,” and “shouldn’t get the shot.” Which, again, demonstrated his completely ignorant ass understanding of the nature of the way C19 causes us full body damage.
To clarify, this isn’t about Carlson not being able to be a fuckin fortuneteller about what the COVID-19 research eventually makes clear. It’s about him spending his time getting paid to lie to the u.s. public that we “are not in danger” when research was inconclusive and leaning towards us being in real fucking danger if we choose not to take precautions.
Next, he said “there’s a risk involved [in taking COVID-19 vaccines] much higher than of COVID",” the first part of which was not entirely untrue — blowing the risk of the vaccines entirely out of proportion — and harmfully downplaying the risk of C19 itself.
Again, how many of his viewers watched this and then became sick, disabled, or died? (We don’t have any findable numbers on that. Especially as cases skyrocketed after the CDC irresponsibly claimed face masking can end, contradicting the language on their own fucking website [as well as the research study that they cited to support], causing C19 tests as a media to be unable to keep up with the relentless spread of the virus, catalyzing many new variants, that were, eventually, simply not even counted at all.)
This is where Carlson introduces his viewership to Kirk’s tpusa campaign “No Forced Vax” as the “solution” to their medically inaccurate, hyperbolic, and bullshit claims.
Kirk began by saying that both him and his wife “chose not to get vaccinated”. After doing that he went on to say he announced their decision not to protect themselves at (presumably a tpsua) event, alleging that students said they “can’t do the same," if they “wanted to continue going to college” because of their university’s vaccine mandates.
As one would expect from him at this point, Kirk then launched into the COVID-19 mis- / disinformation that he admitted he’d already held even before he invited those nine biased doctors on his podcast (which I summarized in my prior issue of “The Context,”). In other words, he went on Carlson’s show to spread more eugenic-minded lies, this time, to stigmatize online courses, COVID-19 testing, face masking, and/or social distancing as encroachments on student freedoms (to get sick, disabled, and die).
Once again, alongside this older version of him grifter, Kirk lied that face masking doesn’t work, even though research shows high quality ones do. He also repeated the same propaganda he did on his own podcast: that folk’s responsible health measures were about “force” and “control”, “privacy” and “medical freedom”. (Remember his favorite white ciswoman doctor who said she was a victim of “medical cancel culture” when she wasn’t allowed to keep COVID-19 mis- and disinformation on YouTube?)
Kirk reduced the complex nuance(s) of our need for collective public health down to “simple issue(s)” of “medical freedom” and “privacy,” all while he pointed fingers at neo/liberals as if they were the ones who politicized COVID-19. (And y’all fucking fell for it.) Because our colonial capitalist nations have eugenics biased built in as features.
Then, guess what he did? He verbally cited biased ass medical doctors featured on his podcast, spreading medically inaccurate and/or half-baked bullshit that “a lot of them” have “concerns” about C19 vaccines. And he inaccurately referred to college students as “low risk”. Which was both blatantly untrue and dangerous for him to virally spread because, at the time, we didn’t yet have the knowledge we do about the cumulative full body damage, disability, and death even asymptomatic COVID infections cause us all.
And, don’t get me wrong, I remember a lot of folks genuinely having concerns about the possibility of getting the mRNA vaccines. Some of those folks were even members of my own family. And, hell, as he mentioned, I even experienced an averse reaction to my first injection of the Pfizer vaccine myself. I tweeted and was interviewed in Good Morning America about my experience. After seeing numerous TikToks from other folks who can menstruate, I shared that Pfizer’s design was likely flawed because of the issue across western medicine: universalization of the white “male” medical body. (I’ve detailed some ways that’s played out in my own life at length in my own works.)
Anyway, what we see in this clip from 2021 era Charlie Kirk exemplified the ways that the risk of the C19 vaccines were majorly blown out of proportion, and the damaging, disabling, and deadly virus it-fucking-self became normally ignored and/or denied.
And that is because of motherfuckers like Carlson and Kirk who lied about them both.
Their propaganda has had inevitably devastating consequences on our global publics. Especially vulnerable folks who are non-english speaking and live in the Global South.
But these shills on Fox News don’t give a fuck about anyone but some u.s. white folks.
Because, mind you, this was also the same year he mocked George Floyd’s death and had his tour where he spread blatant fear-mongering disinformation about critical race theory. A spokesperson (Michael Hayden) of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which acknowledges tpusa as the hate group that it is, called Kirk a “good barometer” of what republicans felt they could get away with. In other words, as he was labeled a “mainstream conservative pundit” he tested and slowly normalized neo-nazi rhetoric.
As if that wasn’t evil enough, Kirk then went on to rhetorically compare students requirements to get these vaccines with a “medical apartheid”. (Fuck him for that.)
For those who don’t know, that was extra EXTRA racist of him to say because, as Harriet A. Washington overviewed at length within her book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, there is a REAL medical apartheid in the u.s. against Black folks. But, instead of acknowledging that, he misused her term, and in a way that disproportionately harms especially disabled Black / Brown gender marginalized folks (FUCK Kirk!!!).
Folks need to understand that this sort of racist maneuvering of his was far from an isolated incident.
As I discussed within the Political Correctness Issue at length, far right extremists like him consistently do that as a form of co-opting terms, manipulating narratives, and further radicalizing his viewership through fear / urgency.
Harriet A. Washington’s (2006) book Medical Apartheid.
Around the three minute mark of this awful four and half minute video, Carlson had the Absolute Fucking Nerve to compare vax mandates to the fucking Handmaid’s Tale.
Him, a talking head of the far right (who did his part over the years to actively chip away and destroy the bodies and lives of anyone who can become pregnant’s dominion over their own body), acted appalled at the thought of institutions enforcing medically accurate and realistic public health responses that he and Kirk worked hard to cast as :checks notes of what Kirk said about masking in the last issue: quasi-fascist policy.
Again, this is also So Fucking Ironic because Atwood’s book is both a white-washed version of Octavia Butler’s book series (that starts with Parable of the Sower)AND it described one fictive likelihood of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that the republican party openly fights to return to with Project 2025’s REAL fascist fucking support — most of which white folks literally did to enslaved Black folks here.
And also why, as I said in a thread I posted across all my text platforms just last night:
This is your reminder that neo-nazis used Charlie Kirk’s death as a recruitment strategy the day after The Heritage Foundation’s outlet The Daily Signal wrote a hit piece about me quoting this tweet of mine acting shocked I appropriately called him a nazi.
The hate group, The Heritage Foundation, responsible for Project 2025, the fascist playbook designed to strip away all progressive policies and civil rights, fuckin loved him. That says everything you need to know about how much Kirk was a pawn used to spread textbook, and increasingly radicalized, neo-/nazi hate speech under the guise of civility and patriotism.
Here’s an article about Kirk’s death being rightfully compared to a nazi who hitler’s party capitalized on as a martyr.
In short: “Wessel made a name for himself convincing working class people to join the Nazi Party, Siemens said in an interview. ‘He basically was a good bridge builder between traditional conservative leaders and theoretical Nazis,’ said Siemens. ‘And that’s what made him particularly useful after his death, as someone who could combine and bring people together posthumously.’”
Here’s another source aptly referring to him as our eras version of the american nazi party leader in the 1960s who did the exact same method he did of going to college campuses and making himself appear respectable and willing to have conversations with opposing sides to prey on u.s. youth.
Here’s an openly neo-nazi teen shortly after Kirk was murdered openly threatening violence on innocent people after the entire far right media sphere erupted in assumptions of who his killer was blaming folks like me and inspiring weeks of targeted harassment and threats.
And, finally, here’s the Google Drive I called “Charlie’s Fans” that I created to document and organize an archive of the eugenic and fascist hate speech / threats that I received upon my life across every possible way to contact me — for weeks — after I told the truth about who Kirk was during his subtly/covertly/explicitly/overtly hateful ass life.
See also, this editorial about some ways Christian nationalism has been, and continues to be, weaponized to radicalize and mobilize folks into neo-/nazism and fascism(s).
But, I digress….These fuck faces ended their dreadful far right double creature feature with Kirk providing their viewers tpusa resources and eugenic-minded suggestions.
First, Kirk said his organization, tpusa, was offering legal help from “legal experts” to students who apparently want exemptions so that they can…NOT protect themselves against a sickening, disabling, and deadly virus — at all costs…?
His second recommendation began with an admonishment of republican legislators who, in his view, didn’t do enough to ensure there were “religious exemptions” for C19 vaccines. (How AWFUL of politicians within our eugenic society to not do more to ensure their constituents harm themselves and others within their jurisdiction….?)
Third, he said tpsua would do a massive “PR campaign” to put pressure on republican governors to make sure state universities don’t mandate these C19 shots. In doing so, he quite clearly and deliberately rhetorically established himself, and his organization, as “advocates” for assumed “silent” students who he presumed hid “alone” and afraid. (Remember, he did this same advocacy spin last time, and his favorite white ciswoman doctor also alleged that her patients were “self-censoring” in the episode of his podcast that I went over at length in the prior issue. Kirk had a pattern of making himself seem like a “hero” while he propagandizes his viewership into genuinely harmful ideas.)
Finally, he referred back to his diabolically manipulative rhetorical move of a “medical apartheid,” positioning the COVID vaccines against “having freedom” as a u.s. citizen.
To close this anti-vax segment, Carlson, for the final time, repeated his three lies that his viewers “don’t want, don’t need,” and that they “could be hurt” by the C19 vaccines.
This Issue, in particular, Pissed Me The Fuck Off. Because I see now just how deeply invested in spreading COVID-19 denialist discourse by perverting “bodily autonomy” and “freedom” that Charlie Kirk REALLY was…it was more than I ever had any idea...
At the end of the day, both of these fucks AUTONOMOUSLY chose to be fucking grifters who catalyze/d the eugenic and fascist uprising within the western world.
