Sarah Harte: Bullies think they rule the world, but small acts of hope change it

Many champions are out there shaping the world and quietly taking over the public square, writes Sarah Harte

Tucker Carlson, recently fired by Fox, in conversation with former US president Donald Trump, with Donald Trump Jr in the centre. Picture: Seth Wenig/AP

Last week was a bad one for big mouths and the big business that supports them.

Far-right populist Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News. Over a seven-year stint, the network’s most popular prime-time host was credited as mainstreaming whackjob ideas previously residing on the fringes of the alt-right.

His pet subject, ‘the great replacement theory’, is the ludicrous white supremacist idea that whites are being persecuted by Jews and liberals who are aiming to replace them in Western countries.

Recently, one commentator in The Atlantic magazine described Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network as having “a marked effect on American politics and culture because Fox has become its own language”. It’s a language that’s bad for anyone who isn’t a white conservative.

Various theories are doing the rounds as to why Carlson, who was a ratings-getter, was ousted.

Good for ratings

Internal company communications brought to light during a defamation action against Fox exposed the fact that Carlson and other Fox hosts disbelieved that the 2020 presidential election was rigged in Joe Biden’s favour despite what they said on air. The political utilitarian Rupert Murdoch may have been embarrassed by the revelation that nobody at Fox stopped the election denialism because it was good for ratings.

A discrimination lawsuit from a former Fox producer against Carlson and the network claims that male producers frequently made vulgar jokes about women and antisemitic jokes, which potentially opens up a further avenue for embarrassment and cost to Murdoch, although Fox denies the charges.

A further thesis is that advertisers ran a mile from Carlson’s far-right ravings. Marina Hyde in The Guardian theorised last Saturday that nonagenarian Murdoch is becoming increasingly erratic, with Carlson’s canning further proof of the media mogul losing his grip.

Another Fox ratings-getter with a dark and outsize influence has just gone on trial for sexual assault. Journalist E Jean Carroll claims that in the mid-1990s, former US president Donald Trump raped her. Trump denies all claims and says her case is politically motivated.

Trump, Carlson, and Murdoch make a striking trifecta. They have each used public platforms or, in Murdoch’s case, provided public platforms for others, to push sexist, racist, homophobic, and antisemitic narratives.

Recently, Fergus Finlay wrote in the Irish Examiner that “it is men who have created systems and the rules and the culture and the mores that belittle and demean women”. He could have added that also demean people of colour, the LGBTQ community, and Jewish people.

Certainly, in the western world, white men of a certain age have constructed many of the ‘systems’ we live with. But ordinary people can also be changemakers and, when they band together, the reforms they effect can be striking.

Last week, it was reported that the National Library had acquired documents from the single-parent group One Family, formerly known as Cherish. Cherish was set up in 1972 by Maura O’Dea Richards, a single mother who wanted to keep her child, which was then a radical notion.

Archbishop McQuaid

Archbishop John Charles McQuaid died that year. He was an ideologue who had a pervasive influence on Irish society, one that was deeply inhospitable to single mothers or to anyone who didn’t toe his narrow line and could also be described as a changemaker.

Single mothers were thrown out of their homes, lost their jobs, couldn’t rent flats, were shunned by their families and communities, and, worst of all, sometimes had their children taken away from them under the auspices of so-called Christian family values.

O’Dea Richards put an ad in The Evening Herald, seeking to reach other unmarried Irish women who had children, and from this acorn grew Cherish.

Cherish campaigned for the introduction of the unmarried mother’s allowance and the abolition of the status of illegitimacy.

This radical outsider organisation brought changes to society that were of great significance. These women reformed entrenched systems that said their faces — and the faces of their children — didn’t suit the prevailing orthodoxy of the time.

The Cherish archive will be available to the public from the end of the year. It gives voice to the stories of women and children who were largely spurned by Irish society. It provides a record of what was done and shows how norms can change.

Of course, McQuaid, Trump, Carlson, and Murdoch are from different eras, backgrounds, nationalities, and social strata, but each man could be argued to have constructed a social reality with dark effects.

But every dog has his day, right? McQuaid must be spinning in his grave at the secular, liberal, outward-looking society Ireland has become. And while the anti-Catholicism that is fashionable at the moment is tedious, Amen to that.

Carlson was negotiating a new contract when he was ousted and was reportedly blindsided, although it’s highly unlikely that the world has seen the back of his hate-filled invectives. The wagons are circling for Trump. We will be shot of the orange-skinned self-described pussy-grabbing misogynist — the only question is when.

Fox is unlikely to soften its editorial tone post-Carlson because Carlson built an appetite for a certain type of content and the ratings beast must be fed. Although there is money in craven fear-mongering, Murdoch is not going to be around forever.

James Murdoch is reputedly horrified by Fox News and believed to be biding his time until his father exits the stage when he and his politically aligned sisters may try to wrest control and steer the empire towards the centre-right.

Nothing lasts forever. On RTÉ, Mary Kerrigan, a single mother who ran the Clare/Limerick branch of Cherish for years, spoke about being an “unacceptable person to know”.

She said: “We went from people who were shunned to now being important, we are in the National Library of Ireland.”

Determined champions

Determined champions like Maura O’Dea Richards, Mary Kerrigan, and all the other women who were part of Cherish agitated for change. They were neither rich nor powerful and they had to fight for a platform. We should salute their bravery as change-makers of the best kind.

And there are many more champions like them out there shaping the world and quietly taking over the public square. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”