On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how the right-wing media landscape made the idea of mass death acceptable

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the May 30, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House

NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): So, Angelo, you framed my political worldview around this idea of narrative dominance. I would say, and I know this isn't universal, but this is an example of slippage in that category here.

ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Oh, yeah. It really is actually because -- and this ties into what John was saying before about an example. There's not -- I can't think of a political figure that's made that point, but I can think of right-wing media figures that have been saying that starting in 2020 with COVID. Tucker Carlson was the one when there, you know, there was a point with COVID where, you know, there was a little bit conspiracies, but people still wanted to protect themselves. And we largely agreed that, you know, we shouldn't just have mass death. Now, we had very different opinions about how to survive that, but we weren't cool with mass death. 

And then Tucker got out there, you know, in the early summer and started saying, "We're all going to die," literally, on the timeline, we're all going to die. So, we have to put all these policies and all these efforts to protect ourselves from COVID on that scale. And since we're all going to die anyway, all of these Republicans that are lining up that are supporting policies that are restricting access to schools or thinking about how to sort of mask policies, all these things, they're taking away your life, your quality of life when you're going to die anyway. So, they're the enemy and you need to start putting pressure on them. And what he did was plant a seed in that larger landscape that started to take off and then they weaved in conspiracies to help grow it and propagate it. But that was one of the big turning points. 

That and a few other conspiracies that really started to shift and soften the ground about where the tolerance level was for mass death, not the individual policies, but it shifted it. And yeah, it's not their whole scale perspective, I think, but it really has an example of the change because it's not that that's their overall angle, but what is a reflection of this other piece of the slippage that you're referring to is the rot. They've become callous and cruel and indifferent, nihilistic. You know, for the people that largely believe in something, right, these are supposed to be the religious people too, they're really nihilists. 

She went right to the void. And I thought that was when she voted for Hegseth, like John said before, it was -- she sort of really gave up her position as a steward, as a legislator and whatever principle she had and said, "No, I'm all in for Trump now." If you can rationalize that, you can get up there just a few months later and say the thing that she said. And the last thing that's I think critical -- so one is that they've sort of tested this before and it worked; two, that they got cruel and callous and indifferent and nihilistic, and that's just a consequence of the poison being pumped into the system. And the third is that they are so confident or I don't think it's stupidity, I don't think it's indifferent. 

But they've looked at their opponents, sized them up, at Democrats, and they've said, given what we're confronting and given the terrain that we stand on, which is our information landscape, and today has proved it so far -- no is going to write a peep about Ernst's comment in the right-wing media. Not one, not one critical, not even one saying, "Well, I'm an armchair quarterback and I think that's stupid." No, no, no, they're just quiet about it. She's not going to suffer any repercussions, at least in the larger landscape. She will politically a little bit, but she's sizing up her competition and she says, they're so bad, and I have so many advantages already with this larger terrain that Trump sort of is the conductor for, but I'm going to win no matter what I say, that I could literally tell my constituents to die, and I'm still going to beat whoever they put up against me. And that's the problem when you add it all up. And that's what I see. I see that overconfidence based on an assessment of the landscape, real cruel politics.