Fox News Host Tucker Carlson gave a surprising olive branch to this Democratic presidential candidate on Monday at the National Conservative Conference:
“Elizabeth Warren wrote one of the best books I've ever read on economics,” Carlson said. “She wrote The Two Income Trap with her daughter. It's an amazing book. You should read it.”
He noted how Warren dissected in the book “the single biggest change to society that got no press — the moment it became impossible for the average person to support a family on one income.”
"She's making a case that we ought to be working toward a society in which a parent can stay home to raise the child," Carlson said. "Most people want that, actually."
But the compliments stopped there. Carlson also labeled the presidential candidate as a “living tragedy” who, like many other Democrats, remains entangled in identity politics to see, in his views, the true enemy.
“[She is] race obsessed, bizarre, identity politics obsessed person,” Carlson said. “I hate that stuff. ... It's a distraction designed to get us to stop thinking [about] who is getting richer.”
Few people attack Warren for being blind to those who are “getting richer.” And yet, the comment was consistent with the rest of Carlson’s keynote address for the inaugural conference, during which he repeatedly attacked self-enriching corporations as a threat to liberty.
“The major threat to your ability to live your life as you choose doesn't come from the government anymore but from the private sector,” Carlson said.
He singled out two rather different examples of this corporate overreach into American private life — Oreo cookies, and Google.
Nabisco, a snack manufacturer, distributed special edition Oreos at the World Pride in New York, according to Newsweek. The company made three different variants of Oreos for the event, each with a different pronoun listed — his/him, her/she, and they/them. Nabisco's decision is not just another marketing decision for Carlson, but a “profound statement against nature.”
“A large American company is committing a pretty brazen act of propaganda aimed at your kids and the message is that the binary gender scheme that we were taught in seventh grade is no longer operative,” he said.
Meanwhile, Carlson also believed that Google also poses a significant threat to freedom of thought, as he thought the company can “make whole ideas disappear, and there’s some evidence that they are working to do that.”
“You have a company through which all human information in English flows that we can't control — there's no democratic way of controlling [it],” Carlson said. “As Orwell noted, once you take away the words, you take away people's ability to think about the concepts. You can't have an idea if you don't have the words to express it, so the person in charge of the words has the power over your mind.”
He acknowledged the intellectual journey to this anti-corporate conclusion was long and confusing. Growing up during the Cold War when America faced off against the statist Soviet Union, he was accustomed to thinking governments and bureaucracies threatened individual liberties.
However, the victory of President Donald Trump in 2016 was a paradigm-shifting moment for Carlson.
"The Trump election was so shocking, so unlikely,” Carlson said. “It did cause some significant percentage of people to say 'wait a second, if that could happen, what else is true? If the Loch Ness Monster is true, then what about the Yeti?'"