Tucker Carlson finding a way to blame anyone who doesn't share his slavish devotion to President Donald Trump and his White nationalist ideals is no surprise.
So when Carlson and his guest, YouTube pundit Dave Rubin, blamed California's latest wildfires on diversity in the fire service and other emergency agencies, it wasn't a shock.
But it was still an amusing far reach to avoid examining climate change and private utility mismanagement.
In a transcript of the exchange provided by media watchdog, Media Matters for America, Carlson stated to Rubin:
"You moved to California because it's a beautiful place and I agree with that. You've seen it really degrade in the time that you've been there, but PG&E strikes me as almost a metaphor for the destruction of the state."
"So, here's the utility which doesn't really know anything about its own infrastructure but knows everything about the race of its employees. How did we get there?"
Rubin responded:
"It's just unbelievable. I've been in LA right now. I live about a minute away from one of the big fires that's still going."
"I have friends that are evacuated. Los Angeles, putting politics aside, and Southern California might be the most beautiful part of the United States."
Carlson agreed, then Rubin added:
"The problem right now is that everything, everything, from academia to public utilities, to politics, everything that goes woke, that buys into this ridiculous progressive ideology that cares about what contractors are LGBT or how many black firemen we have or white this or Asian that, everything that goes that road eventually breaks down."
Carlson concurs again.
Rubin continued:
"It is not how freedom is supposed to operate."
"What is supposed to happen—Tucker, imagine if your house was on fire, would you care what the public utility or what the fire company, what contractor they brought in, what gender or sexuality or any of those things he or she was?"
"I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous."
Carlson—who always appears confused on camera—chimed in.
"Who would care? Who would care about something like that?"
But Rubin wasn't finished.
He added:
"And right now we've got a situation—of course you wouldn't care, and we have got a situation right now where there are literally—we are doing preemptive blackouts in this state, which I think is the 11th largest economy in the entire world, we do preemptive blackouts because they don't want to put too much power—too much pressure on the grid."
"I mean, try to imagine the absurdity of what's going on here, and I hate to tell you but we just don't have enough clear thinking, say, more libertarian or conservative-minded people in California to fight what the progressives are doing to the state."
Carlson said:
"If you can't keep the lights on and you can't keep the place from burning down, you've reached the point where there is no kind of lying about it anymore."
"Like it's falling apart. It's a disaster. It's not civilized anymore."
Watch the exchange here:
Working for Fox News, it's easy to understand why Carlson struggles with the idea of diversity in hiring.
But the duo got a few other things wrong too.
Like PG&E being a public utility operated by the government.
Others commented on Carlson's audience.
It's one thing to be lied to when you know it's a lie, but what about those who don't know?
California is facing high winds, dry conditions and poorly maintained power lines. Combined, those factors are a recipe for wildfires.
To mitigate the risk, PG&E began blackouts, cutting the power supply in vulnerable areas leaving many paying customers in the dark.
The critically acclaimed book Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change is available here.
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