Sometimes corruption has so contaminated a social group that it becomes normal, without rising to the level of criminal abuse.  The mistreatments may be accepted by the members of the group, until the abuse surges beyond bullying to a prosecutable offense.  We can read the events surrounding the Fox-Dominion case and the firing of Tucker Carlson as a case of a simmering pot boiling over.

Diana Butler Bass’s blog today about Tucker Carlson and the Episcopal Church will  surprise many who see him as the perpetrator of lies and racist and sexual generalizations. Bass develops the portrait of bullying and sexual abuse in a “toxic society” in which Carlson studied from 1983-87–the St. George’s School in Rhode Island.  While he has never publicly commented on the scandal, which was investigated by the church, he married the daughter of the headmaster, who was later dismissed without charges, and he has expressed public contempt for the church.

In this 2013 interview, a right-wing magazine asked why he went to the Episcopal Church. Carlson replied: “I’m a shallow guy! That’s why I still go to the Episcopal Church. But I like it! I just don’t want to think too hard about my money going to these pompous, blowhard, pagan creeps who run the church!” https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGsmWpsltzzGdBhZcktDHxTHTTr

Rather than casting Carlson as complicit in the environment at St. George’s, Bass suggests he could be a victim of a toxic environment in which sixty students were abused, both by employees and students in the school. As the report on the scandal concludes,

This report also tells the story of a culture of hazing and bullying, absent adults, and disrespect, particularly of girls and young women, that together created an environment that permitted older students to commit assaults, including sexual assaults, against younger students—girls and boys.

If Carlson did not receive counsel or therapy about his experience at St. George’s, some of that toxicity could still run through his veins and views.  He has been accused of creating comparable toxicity at Fox News by a former employee, Abby Grossberg, who reported,

I ultimately went and complained to one of my supervisors about the abuse and the bullying and the gaslighting and misogyny that I was putting up with at Tucker.  And his response to me was, ‘We’re just following Tucker’s tone. That’s Tucker’s tone.’ And I do really believe that it all trickles down from the top.

We could read Carlson’s life as a teenager experiencing the hazing and bullying of one society and turning it on his own corporate community at Fox. The norms of St. George’s could have remained the norms of Carlson as he achieved power to bully and abuse others.  Power exposes our unarticulated prejudices, our willingness to attack the dignity of some who never received respect.

As a teenager, my favorite novel was Lord of the Flies, a story of children and teenage boys trying to survive after their plane crashed on a desert island, Because of references to school uniforms and a choir, it is clear they were raised with the civility of a British public school, a school Americans would call “private.”  The novel depicts the rise of an orderly society on the island, but it declines quickly into treachery and brutality.

William Golding, the author,  implied that the veneer of civilization would be quick to disintegrate in a savage environment. Even characters we admire at first, like Jack the self-elected leader, loses his vision of democracy and fairness and begins to bully and scapegoat kids from the school.  Eventually Simon, the one character who tries to salvage his decency, is martyred by mob violence. It is a very dismal portrait of decently-educated young adults losing all sense of morality and justice.

I always thought something was wrong at the school these kids came from that allowed them to run wild on the island. Did they lack any role models who would come to mind when they began to mistreat others? Was Simon the only character with a conscience? Was the bullying of the majority a standard they lived by before their crash on the island? How did a group of literal “choir boys” turn into the hit men for a fascist dictator?

Golding might have seen his boys as typical British teens and youngsters, but I imagined they were bred from a toxic environment not so different from St. George’s School. They learned the rules of acquiring and keeping power in a dangerous society, and they had to function by those rules in the absence of positive role models and sacred standards. The under-belly of the British or American private schools could breed these violent scenarios: the abuse and the bullying and the gaslighting and misogyny that I was putting up with at Tucker.

Finally it is exposed in the Dominion Defamation lawsuit and the Abby Grossberg civil suit, but only by an army of lawyers and investigators. The atrocious behavior had been buried and normalized by years of profit and prestige in the Fox news organization.  More secrets could yet be revealed.

Tucker Carlson does not fit the victim model. It would be shocking for him to refer to his fraught adolescence as the cause of his contempt for the Episcopal Church or his cynicism about believing one thing about Donald Trump and reporting the opposite.  That does not mean he did not ferment a little in the toxic environment of St. George’s School and could have lost the moral compass many teenagers acquire in well-run schools.

Savagery is not our default behavior, but it lurks in civilized places. It may arise in what we condone or ignore. It may smell a little, but not enough to drive us from the castle.  So we ingest contamination and eventually excrete it through our pores. It is too subtle to succumb to waste treatment, but it breeds wherever it is not condemned and eventually harms those we disrespect.  That harm may go unchecked, until the wounds are more than we can bear. Then the lawsuits begin.