Time for a
fact check...
From the op article:
Jeff Bezos had one of his minions, a mentally unbalanced middle-aged man called Erik Wemple, pull our dusty college yearbook and call around and see if we'd done anything naughty at the age of 19," Carlson said...
Was Tucker Carlson actually 19 when this happened? He was just a teenager!!!1111!! Remember Trayvon Martin was 17. Remember conservatives were calling him a man...
Tucker Carlson was born May 16th, 1969 in the San Francisco, California area
1. He graduated from Trinity College in 1991
2 which was the publish year of the yearbook. Typical colleges graduate their students in the month of May, meaning he turned 22 right around the time of his graduation, possibly right after. Given that yearbooks are also typically done earlier than the graduation date, he was probably technically 21 at the time the yearbook was published.
He may have been closer to 22 or closer to 21. It isn't known which, but he was not 19.
However, directing people to scenarios of a 19 year old is a sneaky way to get people to say he was a teenager while still retaining plausible deniability that that's not what he meant. And then next in his defense, "well, 22 is close to 19 anyway, right? I mean, you're still pretty much a teenager." This from the very people calling Trayvon Martin a man at 17.
Moreover, it's not really about this small footnote. This is just a small piece of a larger pattern that includes today and will go on into the future into something worse.
1 State of California.
California Birth Index, 1905-1995. Sacramento, CA, USA: State of California Department of Health Services, Center for Health Statistics.
2 There is an article (
https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tucker-carlson.php ) that states he graduated in 1992 and implies he afterward got married. However, there are other different articles that say he was married
3 and graduated in 1991. We'd have been rounding to 22 or 23 years of age at the time of his "joke," if it was 1992, instead of 21 or 22. Therefore, I am giving him the benefit of the doubt that the article typo'ed and just using 1991. The point is still made.
3 Detroit Free Press. Detroit, Michigan. 28 Aug 1991, Wed. Page 58. -- this has the wedding announcement from the Aug 10th, 1991 wedding. So it seems he did graduate in 1991, not 1992.