Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

“It was three against one, at least,” Tucker Carlson observed in a text message obtained by the New York Times which had been redacted in court filings. “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.”

Carlson was wrong. That’s how barbarians fight, how Tucker Carlson fights, how mobs fight.

They want to taste it.

While the odious and reprehensible Carlson, whose abhorrent, misogynistic, and racist views — spewed for years from an unchallenged platform on Fox News — were tolerated for far too long may, for the moment, be unemployed, his popularity among true believers has not diminished.

Indeed, so deeply embedded are Carlson’s abhorrent worldviews that one letter to the editor in a New Hampshire newspaper was headlined: “No reason to watch the news now that Tucker Carlson’s gone.”

For true believers, for Tucker Carlson, the north star is a white America, where books are banned, children are taught half-truths, science is denied, where all believers serve a United States of America dominated by white Christian evangelical nationalists.

A Christian nationalism that, as described by Rev. William J. Barber II, “... attempts to sanctify oppression and not liberation. It attempts to sanctify lies and not truth. At best it’s a form of theological malpractice. At worst, it’s a form of heresy.”

They want to taste it.

To understand that taste we must understand that the white men Carlson was talking about weren’t the patriots who fought at Lexington and Concord or the patriots who fought to defend Fort Sumter. He wasn’t praising the troops who fought at Iwo Jima and the Battle of the Bulge or the heroes who resisted terrorist hijackers on 9/11 and brought Flight 93 down into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

He wasn’t talking about first responders who risk their lives daily to save innocent victims of natural disasters, accidents, and terrorism.

No, he was speaking to the cowards who attacked Washington D.C. during the insurrection of January 6, 2021, speaking of those members of the Proud Boys who, today as I write, were found guilty on 31 of 46 counts of seditious conspiracy in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He was speaking of the cowards who blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, who attacked marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, who tried to cleanse Tulsa Oklahoma of its Black population in 1921.

He was speaking of the men who lynched, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,000 Americans, including some children, between 1877 and 1950.

He was speaking of those who beat Rodney King, who murdered Medgar Evers, who murdered George Floyd and Eric Garner, who strangle Black men in well-lighted subway stations.

That’s how Tucker Carlson’s white men fight.

That’s what we must resist.

“First of all,” theologian Henri Nouwen argued in “Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World,” “you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this.”

What Tucker Carlson’s white men refuse to acknowledge is that the United States is supposed to be different, that because America was founded upon a principle, upon an ideal higher than those of religion, ethnicity, color, or wealth — an ideal that all people are created equal — we were superior to nations with tribalism-based loyalties.

That was the plan.

That’s how America was designed to fight.

I don’t know if Fox would have fired Carlson if not for the Dominion lawsuit, the discovery process, and redacted texts and emails, but I don’t believe he was fired just for being a liar, white nationalist, misogynist, and racist. In the end, I believe, he was fired for naming what he is, who his followers are, out-loud.

That’s what must be unmasked, what must be resisted.

That’s what we must fight back.

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