The "White Grievance" piece? I take your point. But Eric Wemple (which Carlson enchantingly pronounced with the accent on the second syllable of the surname) used to go after him three times a week.
I'm confused by the conservative attention given to Don Lemon, whose show on CNN attracted only around 350,000 viewers, only 73,000 of them under 55 years old. Nobody but a few housebound senior citizens watched him. I wouldn't know he existed if conservatives didn't tweet about him. He seems like a pompous jerk, but why is he imbued with such importance?
Don Lemon attracted the attention because his persona was singularly annoying and essentially offensive to conservatives.
In many ways, Donald Trump suffers from the same problem. His persona is so annoying, and so essentially offensive to Democrats (and many others) that they simply want him to fail.
Lemon was like many other low-rated hosts in that his ego and loud mouth gave him a wider reach than did his actual shows. He fully ascribed to the Oscar Wilde theory that it is better to be talked about than not talked about. But....
He also went Full Olberman. You NEVER go full Olberman.
Fox's enterprise value is $21b so the settlement was less than 4% of their value. They had about $4b of cash pre-settlement so it's close to 20% of their cash balance
NO NO NO NO NO. Buchanan should never have run for President either. DeSantis is NOT doomed and his wonkery is a plus. Carlson needs just to find another slot, and jolly good luck to him. At least he doesn’t have to play nice with that moron Hannity any more.
"Unemployable" doesn't mean deep-sixed. There's this thing called the internet. The thing is to make it profitable, but I don't think Carlson's going to miss a meal any time soon.
You get three regular in prison, if you don't get eaten alive by insects. But it's not about not getting a school lunch. It's about if any serious dissent is allowed to be mass propagated in a land almost fully living by lies.
I published anti war opinions in my local newspaper a year ago in favor of staying out of Ukraine and letting Germany fix their own problems. After a few months they stopped printing them and I gave up trying. The Associated Press is worse than the NYT and Washington Post.
Pat Buchanan would have been as forgotten as David Broder, Jack Germond, Johnny Apple or George Will if he had not run for president. Buchanan forcefully presented his ideas and his ideas became part of the Republican Party ideology thirty years after his first run for the presidency. He took the plunge and made history. Carlson should emulate Buchanan if he thinks his ideas are correct.
While it would be awesome to have Tucker in the White House - especially given that he is not a knee-jerk right-winger - I think the nation would be better served by him using his influence to start a truly effective political movement that actually becomes what MAGA could have been (before it became a cesspool of QAnon and closeted neo-Nazis). Washington doesn't work for anything but Washington these days, and to be able to create a dialogue which forces stupid, green, and incompetent people out would be awesome. Too little is cared about the American people these days, and too much about lining pockets of those in power.
I'm a non-partisan progressive, so I have some issues with some of his thinking, but I also feel like every reform movement that comes up in recent years seems to get hijacked or derailed, so the status quo prevails. Anything that can bring reform and a better relationship between the governing and governed would be helpful, and could potentially open the floodgates for other movements to be effective in the public sphere.
Zero executive experience. Apparently no employment experience other than being a writer and commentator. Speaks words we like. Highly polarizing. Highly relatable personal background involving, er, boarding schools and bow ties.
I hope he doesn’t run, he is fundamentally decent, they keep trying to destroy him, if he ran they would stop at nothing, I think he loves his kids way too much to do that to them.
I know the heritage clip went viral over the weekend, but a few weeks ago on the Adam Carolla show he flushed out that line of thinking in greater detail, it’s a great discussion, the part about “no explanation except evil” is from the 20 min to 35 minute marks, roughly, here:
If you listen to the very beginning, before getting into that discussion, they talk about their ideal working lifestyle/environment, and the joys of being able to think freely in your middle age outside of corporate/ideological pressures. Listening to that part, very hard to believe he’ll run for office. If he doesn’t take a well - earned break, he can do the Mark Steyn thing and just do his own show, completely independently, and have a blast doing it.
I once believed that politics could help turn our failing USA around. I no longer believe that.
I also once believed that Tucker's presence on television each night could help our ailing culture heal, or at least slow its decline. I no longer believe that either, obviously.
Tucker's dismissal is a dismissal of objective journalism, a (perhaps final) smashing of counter-establishment thinking, an assault on Americanism.
He says one thing on the air to please his audience and something very different off the air. The most charitable name you can give that is "performance art". But maybe I was wrong and he would make a good politician having mastered the art of faux sincerity while saying only what people want to hear.
Yeah, I don't watch TV but I can tell from context in various comments and stories that Carlson is damaging conservative credibility. We really don't need that, bad enough that Fox itself is damaging our credibility. I always mention that I don't watch Fox in any comment if it seems germane to do so.
Republicans had no credibility before him. I was independent because both parties have ruined the country albeit in very different ways. Romney and McCain and Graham are not a benefit to the party.
True however I don’t see how one can say he’s damaging the image if he doesn’t even watch it. Most people who tell me he’s a horrible person are only parroting what others say and slice and dice sentences. I know first hand because I used to be a fan of olbermann.
I love Tucker also. But I think he does more good doing what he is going. He is one of the best journalists out there and probably the most impactful one.
I know that where ever he goes, I go.
He and Gutfeld were about the only reason I watched Fox News. Wow.
He's the classic atheist libertarian conservative. I do like the guy, but you can tell he's definitely bought into the whole sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll lifestyle
I watched a clip of Gutfeld for the first time this week, and I realized that conservatives (myself included) will now happily embrace just about anything as long as it's not wrapped in wokeness. It is refreshing compared to all the other late night shows.
This is a real shock. How about Dreher/Carlson 2024? Trump and family have said some things that weaken his hand in the last 10 days. Like you I am pro DeSantis and can't understand why folks don't see how he is superior as an overall candidate. In any case, I'm glad you are around Rod.
Rod referred to this in the last post's comment thread, it's an old running joke about a fellow student's strange-looking uncut black bird, periodically he reverts, can't help it:
"I lived in a place where blacks and whites shared the same location, but didn't know each other. Going to elementary school with black kids was the first time I was around black people up close, though I saw them every time we went to town. To be nine years old and peeing at the urinal trough at Bains Elementary school, and noticing that the black boy standing next to me was not circumcised was very weird. I thought it meant that black people were deformed. I asked my dad about it. He laughed, and said no, that boy was probably born at home, and that there is this operation called circumcision that usually happens to boys in hospitals. The point of the story was to talk in a funny way..."
I went to schools where locker rooms, gym showers and toilets didn't provide much privacy. It was an unwritten rule that you just didn't notice other guys in various states of deshabille.
Carlson is more valuable as an independent citizen as opposed to an elected official. Any direct involvement in politics, especially party politics, would require him to censor himself.
There is no debating the key role Fox News played in allowing Carlson to find and hold an audience, allowing him to develop genuine influence. This, of course, is why that platform has now been eliminated.
With regret, I assert that Substack is entirely inferior to television for being able to generate influence. Despite all the fun we have here, this is where like-minded fellow travelers argue over the details...the way car guys debate which is the BEST Porsche of all time. Our musings here are allowed specifically because they have no substantial influence. As such, I think a Tucker Carlson Substack would be pointless.
A Tucker Carlson Spotify podcast would be similarly pointless. Joe Rogan can say whatever he wants on Spotify because those with real power know that his influence there will never be more than trivial.
I don't know how Tucker Carlson can ever match the influence he was able to develop at Fox News.
True. And Trudeau could shut it down as it is Toronto based. I'm pretty sure now we're being frog marched to World War as dissent gets strangled by lawfare.
I understand your position, but I'm not sure I agree. If you look at young people for example, I don't think they're more influenced by TV people than by YouTube/podcast/streamer/whatevers.
In the "Big Picture" however, the real argument is not whether television or podcasts have the most influence. Truth be told, ideas not part of the approved "narrative" will be banished from any medium the moment they approach broad currency, and become a threat to The Establishment. The fact that the Joe Rogan Experience continues is proof positive that he is not considered a threat. Carlson was cancelled because he was becoming dangerous.
>> Carlson is more valuable as an independent citizen as opposed to an elected official. Any direct involvement in politics, especially party politics, would require him to censor himself.
I don't think Carlson works as a national candidate at all. He's too Tweedy, far too much of a warrior Partisan to attract more than a trifling amount of moderates, and he's a lightweight by means of background -- he's never actually run anything at all, which is a really big problem when running for President. I think you're projecting your rightly-placed angst about 2024 onto a person's shoulders whom you personally like very much, but who is an extremely polarizing person nationally and someone who is very much disliked by many moderates. And that's even assuming Carlson wants to run, which he almost certainly does not, due to the massive pressure it would place on his family, something he has expressed a great deal of sensitivity about already in his life as a news personality -- it seems very unlikely he's interested in diving into the deep end of the piranha pool with his wife and kids.
You're right that DeSantis is basically cooked, though. It was always suspected that he didn't have the charisma to beat Trump head-to-head -- the hope was that he wouldn't have to face off directly due to Trump being somehow barred from the race, but that isn't what is happening, and DeSantis really isn't going to peel off many MAGA voters from Trump at all.
2024 is shaping up to be Trump, like it or not. Which means Biden wins, like it or not. This will keep happening until Trump definitely goes away.
We don't know how bad the recession is going to be. Herbert Hoover probably thought a second term was assured in the summer of 1929. Events can change situations very quickly. But if the recession is short, Biden will probably win again.
The voting rules in the crucial states have been changed so no matter who runs the pubs aren’t going to have a shot until they learn to start fighting dirty with dirty.
Really? Yet they dominate more than half of the state governments. Oh, and don;t look now, but they're the ones trying to change the rules to make it harder for citizen referrenda to become law: in Ohio, North Dakota and a couple other states they're instituting super-majority requirements.
Voting by mail, ballot harvesting, going into nursing homes to ‘encourage and assist’ filling out ballots, voting for a month instead of taking a day, all legal now and totally gaming the system and don’t safeguard it against cheating. People who were expected to win didn’t and none of the explanations put forward by the left suffice. The RNC should be fighting with everything they have but are being their typical useless selves. We need new blood desperately.
Absentee ballots have been legal for a very long time.
Re: People who were expected to win didn’t
Who? Hillary in 2016? In 2020 Trump was trailing Biden. Given Trump's poor performance as president and the mess the country was in, that should hardly be a shock. But otherwise the GOP did a bit better than expected.
The rules hadn’t been changed in 2016. Polls have we proved to be useless and if it was so certain hiden’ Biden would win businesses wouldn’t have been boarding up in anticipation of leftist riots...
I don’t have a problem with people who can’t get out physically to vote like the elderly and handicapped but the systems have to be tight and controlled.
Polls aside why would anyone paying attention expect Trump would win in 2020? The guy had lost the poplar vote in 2016, and he did absolutely nothing to expand his appeal beyond his base (which in the early 00s George W Bush did do in a similar situation). His presidency was one unnecessary melodrama after another and the 2018 midterms were a fiasco for the GOP. Then in 2020 the nation was a godawful mess and as the saying goes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Trump completely botched the politics of the Pandemic, and flailed about impotently during the summer riots too. His defeat should be no more surprising than Carter's in 1980.
The "White Grievance" piece? I take your point. But Eric Wemple (which Carlson enchantingly pronounced with the accent on the second syllable of the surname) used to go after him three times a week.
I'm confused by the conservative attention given to Don Lemon, whose show on CNN attracted only around 350,000 viewers, only 73,000 of them under 55 years old. Nobody but a few housebound senior citizens watched him. I wouldn't know he existed if conservatives didn't tweet about him. He seems like a pompous jerk, but why is he imbued with such importance?
Don Lemon attracted the attention because his persona was singularly annoying and essentially offensive to conservatives.
In many ways, Donald Trump suffers from the same problem. His persona is so annoying, and so essentially offensive to Democrats (and many others) that they simply want him to fail.
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy
Lemon was like many other low-rated hosts in that his ego and loud mouth gave him a wider reach than did his actual shows. He fully ascribed to the Oscar Wilde theory that it is better to be talked about than not talked about. But....
He also went Full Olberman. You NEVER go full Olberman.
Yep. One wonders what he and so many others in the media really believe.
“Shocking” and “vulgar” is the way he characterized Trump, back at the beginning of 2016—“shocking, vulgar and right.” I don’t think anything has changed. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-is-shocking-vulgar-and-right-213572/
Fox's enterprise value is $21b so the settlement was less than 4% of their value. They had about $4b of cash pre-settlement so it's close to 20% of their cash balance
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
No problem
NO NO NO NO NO. Buchanan should never have run for President either. DeSantis is NOT doomed and his wonkery is a plus. Carlson needs just to find another slot, and jolly good luck to him. At least he doesn’t have to play nice with that moron Hannity any more.
Sue D. Nym, eh?
Substack needs Orange Checks?
A color revolution?
He's as unemployable as Rod Dreher is now. At least Rod is safe from the DOJ living in exile.
The Deep State is not going to let any loose cannons be reloaded.
There are now no war skeptics in any media, which is directly or indirectly Deep State territory.
"Unemployable" doesn't mean deep-sixed. There's this thing called the internet. The thing is to make it profitable, but I don't think Carlson's going to miss a meal any time soon.
You get three regular in prison, if you don't get eaten alive by insects. But it's not about not getting a school lunch. It's about if any serious dissent is allowed to be mass propagated in a land almost fully living by lies.
I published anti war opinions in my local newspaper a year ago in favor of staying out of Ukraine and letting Germany fix their own problems. After a few months they stopped printing them and I gave up trying. The Associated Press is worse than the NYT and Washington Post.
Pat Buchanan would have been as forgotten as David Broder, Jack Germond, Johnny Apple or George Will if he had not run for president. Buchanan forcefully presented his ideas and his ideas became part of the Republican Party ideology thirty years after his first run for the presidency. He took the plunge and made history. Carlson should emulate Buchanan if he thinks his ideas are correct.
Nearly every syllable of Buchanan's speeches and books have been shown to be correct....30 years later. Truly, Buchanan is/was prophetic.
A bona fide great man, in the grand style.
Yes I’ve voted for Buchanan in every election where I couldn’t stand either candidate.
I prefer Calvin Coolidge. Or even Pat Paulson.
🤣🤣I’m old. I know who Pat Paulson is
But not quite old enough to have voted for Coolidge
While it would be awesome to have Tucker in the White House - especially given that he is not a knee-jerk right-winger - I think the nation would be better served by him using his influence to start a truly effective political movement that actually becomes what MAGA could have been (before it became a cesspool of QAnon and closeted neo-Nazis). Washington doesn't work for anything but Washington these days, and to be able to create a dialogue which forces stupid, green, and incompetent people out would be awesome. Too little is cared about the American people these days, and too much about lining pockets of those in power.
I'm a non-partisan progressive, so I have some issues with some of his thinking, but I also feel like every reform movement that comes up in recent years seems to get hijacked or derailed, so the status quo prevails. Anything that can bring reform and a better relationship between the governing and governed would be helpful, and could potentially open the floodgates for other movements to be effective in the public sphere.
I don't think his wife would be down with that.
You're putting Tucker at the top, and DeSantis won't go for that one. But I agree with you. The future is now.
"I hope Tucker Carlson runs for president."
Zero executive experience. Apparently no employment experience other than being a writer and commentator. Speaks words we like. Highly polarizing. Highly relatable personal background involving, er, boarding schools and bow ties.
Not a winning formula.
Relatability is vastly overrated, IMO.
I hope he doesn’t run, he is fundamentally decent, they keep trying to destroy him, if he ran they would stop at nothing, I think he loves his kids way too much to do that to them.
I know the heritage clip went viral over the weekend, but a few weeks ago on the Adam Carolla show he flushed out that line of thinking in greater detail, it’s a great discussion, the part about “no explanation except evil” is from the 20 min to 35 minute marks, roughly, here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-v3hTJs988A
If you listen to the very beginning, before getting into that discussion, they talk about their ideal working lifestyle/environment, and the joys of being able to think freely in your middle age outside of corporate/ideological pressures. Listening to that part, very hard to believe he’ll run for office. If he doesn’t take a well - earned break, he can do the Mark Steyn thing and just do his own show, completely independently, and have a blast doing it.
Gaty.substack.com
I once believed that politics could help turn our failing USA around. I no longer believe that.
I also once believed that Tucker's presence on television each night could help our ailing culture heal, or at least slow its decline. I no longer believe that either, obviously.
Tucker's dismissal is a dismissal of objective journalism, a (perhaps final) smashing of counter-establishment thinking, an assault on Americanism.
Please. Tucker Carlson is practically synonymous with "lying on the air".
Not from my perspective. I am not in full agreement with any person, but Carlson, among major media figures, gets closest to my own world view.
He says one thing on the air to please his audience and something very different off the air. The most charitable name you can give that is "performance art". But maybe I was wrong and he would make a good politician having mastered the art of faux sincerity while saying only what people want to hear.
Yeah, I don't watch TV but I can tell from context in various comments and stories that Carlson is damaging conservative credibility. We really don't need that, bad enough that Fox itself is damaging our credibility. I always mention that I don't watch Fox in any comment if it seems germane to do so.
Republicans had no credibility before him. I was independent because both parties have ruined the country albeit in very different ways. Romney and McCain and Graham are not a benefit to the party.
Do nite that the poster above was not talking about "Republicans" but about "conservatives". There's some overlap but they aren't one and the same.
True however I don’t see how one can say he’s damaging the image if he doesn’t even watch it. Most people who tell me he’s a horrible person are only parroting what others say and slice and dice sentences. I know first hand because I used to be a fan of olbermann.
No, that’s morning Joe and his trainer Mika...
I love Tucker also. But I think he does more good doing what he is going. He is one of the best journalists out there and probably the most impactful one.
I know that where ever he goes, I go.
He and Gutfeld were about the only reason I watched Fox News. Wow.
Gutfeld's funny, but he also plays to sexual perversion.
He's the classic atheist libertarian conservative. I do like the guy, but you can tell he's definitely bought into the whole sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll lifestyle
I watched a clip of Gutfeld for the first time this week, and I realized that conservatives (myself included) will now happily embrace just about anything as long as it's not wrapped in wokeness. It is refreshing compared to all the other late night shows.
Like Zelensky's playing the piano with his own dingaling I guess.
Don Lemon fired by CNN this morning. I change my mind to Carlson-Lemon ticket. Lock down both wings of the eagle.
Lol....
This is a real shock. How about Dreher/Carlson 2024? Trump and family have said some things that weaken his hand in the last 10 days. Like you I am pro DeSantis and can't understand why folks don't see how he is superior as an overall candidate. In any case, I'm glad you are around Rod.
Dreher as politician. Ha ha. Never going to happen. As Rod admitted, he's an encourager, not an organizer.
As Ted Kennedy never could live down Chappaquiddick, Rod Dreher will never live down Primitive Root Wiener.
Rod referred to this in the last post's comment thread, it's an old running joke about a fellow student's strange-looking uncut black bird, periodically he reverts, can't help it:
"I lived in a place where blacks and whites shared the same location, but didn't know each other. Going to elementary school with black kids was the first time I was around black people up close, though I saw them every time we went to town. To be nine years old and peeing at the urinal trough at Bains Elementary school, and noticing that the black boy standing next to me was not circumcised was very weird. I thought it meant that black people were deformed. I asked my dad about it. He laughed, and said no, that boy was probably born at home, and that there is this operation called circumcision that usually happens to boys in hospitals. The point of the story was to talk in a funny way..."
I went to schools where locker rooms, gym showers and toilets didn't provide much privacy. It was an unwritten rule that you just didn't notice other guys in various states of deshabille.
I really did laugh out loud at this.
Carlson is more valuable as an independent citizen as opposed to an elected official. Any direct involvement in politics, especially party politics, would require him to censor himself.
There is no debating the key role Fox News played in allowing Carlson to find and hold an audience, allowing him to develop genuine influence. This, of course, is why that platform has now been eliminated.
With regret, I assert that Substack is entirely inferior to television for being able to generate influence. Despite all the fun we have here, this is where like-minded fellow travelers argue over the details...the way car guys debate which is the BEST Porsche of all time. Our musings here are allowed specifically because they have no substantial influence. As such, I think a Tucker Carlson Substack would be pointless.
A Tucker Carlson Spotify podcast would be similarly pointless. Joe Rogan can say whatever he wants on Spotify because those with real power know that his influence there will never be more than trivial.
I don't know how Tucker Carlson can ever match the influence he was able to develop at Fox News.
Rumble
Rumble's reach is but a minuscule fraction of Fox News.
True. And Trudeau could shut it down as it is Toronto based. I'm pretty sure now we're being frog marched to World War as dissent gets strangled by lawfare.
I don't fear kinetic war nearly as much as I expect curtailment of free speech and civil liberties in general.
Joe Rogan's audience on Spotify is larger than Tucker's on Fox though...
https://unherd.com/thepost/who-is-joe-rogans-audience/
I specifically cited influence, not audience size. Major network television and a podcast are not equivalent in terms of impact/influence.
I understand your position, but I'm not sure I agree. If you look at young people for example, I don't think they're more influenced by TV people than by YouTube/podcast/streamer/whatevers.
https://aaronrenn.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-influencer-class
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
In the "Big Picture" however, the real argument is not whether television or podcasts have the most influence. Truth be told, ideas not part of the approved "narrative" will be banished from any medium the moment they approach broad currency, and become a threat to The Establishment. The fact that the Joe Rogan Experience continues is proof positive that he is not considered a threat. Carlson was cancelled because he was becoming dangerous.
>> Carlson is more valuable as an independent citizen as opposed to an elected official. Any direct involvement in politics, especially party politics, would require him to censor himself.
No, it wouldn't.
I don't think Carlson works as a national candidate at all. He's too Tweedy, far too much of a warrior Partisan to attract more than a trifling amount of moderates, and he's a lightweight by means of background -- he's never actually run anything at all, which is a really big problem when running for President. I think you're projecting your rightly-placed angst about 2024 onto a person's shoulders whom you personally like very much, but who is an extremely polarizing person nationally and someone who is very much disliked by many moderates. And that's even assuming Carlson wants to run, which he almost certainly does not, due to the massive pressure it would place on his family, something he has expressed a great deal of sensitivity about already in his life as a news personality -- it seems very unlikely he's interested in diving into the deep end of the piranha pool with his wife and kids.
You're right that DeSantis is basically cooked, though. It was always suspected that he didn't have the charisma to beat Trump head-to-head -- the hope was that he wouldn't have to face off directly due to Trump being somehow barred from the race, but that isn't what is happening, and DeSantis really isn't going to peel off many MAGA voters from Trump at all.
2024 is shaping up to be Trump, like it or not. Which means Biden wins, like it or not. This will keep happening until Trump definitely goes away.
We don't know how bad the recession is going to be. Herbert Hoover probably thought a second term was assured in the summer of 1929. Events can change situations very quickly. But if the recession is short, Biden will probably win again.
The voting rules in the crucial states have been changed so no matter who runs the pubs aren’t going to have a shot until they learn to start fighting dirty with dirty.
Really? Yet they dominate more than half of the state governments. Oh, and don;t look now, but they're the ones trying to change the rules to make it harder for citizen referrenda to become law: in Ohio, North Dakota and a couple other states they're instituting super-majority requirements.
Voting by mail, ballot harvesting, going into nursing homes to ‘encourage and assist’ filling out ballots, voting for a month instead of taking a day, all legal now and totally gaming the system and don’t safeguard it against cheating. People who were expected to win didn’t and none of the explanations put forward by the left suffice. The RNC should be fighting with everything they have but are being their typical useless selves. We need new blood desperately.
Absentee ballots have been legal for a very long time.
Re: People who were expected to win didn’t
Who? Hillary in 2016? In 2020 Trump was trailing Biden. Given Trump's poor performance as president and the mess the country was in, that should hardly be a shock. But otherwise the GOP did a bit better than expected.
The rules hadn’t been changed in 2016. Polls have we proved to be useless and if it was so certain hiden’ Biden would win businesses wouldn’t have been boarding up in anticipation of leftist riots...
I don’t have a problem with people who can’t get out physically to vote like the elderly and handicapped but the systems have to be tight and controlled.
Polls aside why would anyone paying attention expect Trump would win in 2020? The guy had lost the poplar vote in 2016, and he did absolutely nothing to expand his appeal beyond his base (which in the early 00s George W Bush did do in a similar situation). His presidency was one unnecessary melodrama after another and the 2018 midterms were a fiasco for the GOP. Then in 2020 the nation was a godawful mess and as the saying goes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Trump completely botched the politics of the Pandemic, and flailed about impotently during the summer riots too. His defeat should be no more surprising than Carter's in 1980.