BY MARK MITCHELL
Los Alamos
Editor,
We all grew up hearing the phrase “a tiger doesn’t change his stripes.” We all know what this phrase means. It is because of this conditioning that I am always fascinated when I come across situations in which a tiger appears to radically change their stripes. One such instance of this is when the scales fell from Saul’s eyes in the fifth book of the New Testament, “The Acts of the Apostles.”
Award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald illuminates a more recent example of this phenomenon with his interview with the recently fired FOX News talk show host Tucker Carlson [1]. We all know Tucker Carlson as a lifelong libertarian and adherent of neoliberalism philosophy. Neoliberalism is the staunch belief in laissez-faire capitalism, meaning free-market
capitalism. And, we also all remember Glenn Greenwald as the award winning civil-libertarian journalist chosen by Edward Snowden to report on classified information absconded by Snowden while working for the National Security Agency (NSA), which documented that our government was spying on us contrary to our 4th Amendment protections. A civil libertarian is a person who advocates or works to protect civil liberties.
In this interview, titled “Neoliberalism has failed!,” Tucker Carlson said that “… I think a lot of people have awakened to the now demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending.”
“I think you need to ask: ‘Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?’ And if it does, it’s not a system that you want, because it degrades people—and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society. And anything that increases ugliness is evil.”
“So if it’s such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores?” Carlson asked. “The Dollar Store itself is a symbol –it’s a real thing but it’s also a metaphor– for your total lack of control over where you live and the position of aggressively in-your-face ugly structures that send one message to you: ‘You mean nothing. You’re a consumer, not a human being or a citizen.’ So again, I don’t know what we call our current system, but its effects are grotesque,” he said. “This has become a much uglier place, a much more crowded place, a much more hostile place, a place that cares much less about people. Whatever system, that produces that outcome is a bad system.”
“I’m beyond caring about name-calling, it is bad and I oppose it.”
The name-calling Carlson is referring to is the recent labeling of him as a “true socialist” by Greenwald [2] and others. Greenwald now lives in Brazil and his recently deceased husband, David Miranda was a Federal Congressman representing the state of Rio de Janeiro, serving from 2019 to 2023, and was affiliated with the Democratic Labour Party, after switching parties from the Socialism and Liberty Party in 2022.
So where am I going with this? On Tuesday night, our County Council unanimously voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. What’s funny about this is that they raised the minimum wage for County workers to $15 per hour based on an MIT study that showed that a living wage in Los Alamos required a pay rate of at least $16.90 per hour. Our Los Alamos County Council voted to perpetuate our scam economic system, according to Carlson, defending the well off, at the expense of the least among us. This places our current County Council solidly to the right of Tucker Carlson on this matter. Another way of stating this is that Tucker Carlson is solidly to the left of our current County Council on this subject. I don’t know about you, but I find this fascinating.
They call the city of Santa Fe: “The City Different.” I think we should start calling Los Alamos: “The City Indifferent.”
[1] Carlson, Tucker. Interview. Conducted by Glenn Greenwald. Date. December 15, 2023. https://rumble.com/v41ep7r-
system-update-show-200.html .
[2] Chait, Jonathan, ‘Why Glenn Greenwald Says Tucker Carlson is a True Socialist,’ The New Yorker Magazine, March 4, 2021.