Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson explained that the closing of a paper mill near his home drove “one of the biggest changes” in his thinking during the Wednesday episode of the Daily Caller podcast, “Vince and Jason Save The Nation.”
“For decades, you sort of had to answer the question, ‘Why is there so much crime in black neighborhoods?'” Carlson said. “‘Why are things so screwed up?’ And a lot of people looked at this, not just right-wingers, most famously Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator, a liberal from New York, who wrote a 1965 study on it, and came to the conclusion that when families break down, chaos ensues. And that seemed right.”
Moynihan published “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action” in 1965 while serving as President Lyndon Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor. In the report, he argued that a weakened family structure, partially driven by federal welfare programs, would hinder African American economic advancement, despite the passage of Civil Rights laws.
However, Carlson continued, “what changed my mind, and made me realize that economics had a much greater effect on people’s behavior than I ever realized, was going to the same town in rural America my whole life and watching the culture change when the jobs left.” (RELATED: ‘The Republican Party Is Getting Better’: Tucker Carlson Voices His Support For Senate Candidates JD Vance, Blake Masters)
“So basically I spent my whole life in this town, live in the town half the year still, and I watched as all the jobs went away for a bunch of reasons, but mostly because of trade agreements, and none of the men had full-time employment.”
“Where I lived, the men all worked in the woods, cutting down trees and sending them to the pulp mills to make paper,” Carlson explained. “And those jobs disappeared. So what happened was men started to make less than women, and women didn’t want to get married, because, and there’s a ton of sociological research on this, women in general don’t want to marry men who make less than they do. So people kept having kids, but they stopped getting married, and all of the same social pathologies, no violence I will say, but in general the same social pathologies that you see in the inner city.”