The Cathedral Defends Itself

Whatever you think of Tucker Carlson, his swift and brutal end teaches a lesson

Explanation of the neoreactionary term (Source)

So, Tucker Carlson is out. We don’t yet know the reason, or reasons, why, though there has been speculation. Some say it has to do with ugly things he said in private about Fox executives, but I doubt that’s true. You can tolerate a lot of that kind of thing from your top network star. More plausible are the reports that this has to do with the lawsuit a former Carlson producer filed against the network, alleging sexism and other bad behavior (though not actual sex). These are at this point nothing but allegations; Fox has denied them. But Fox has been through this kind of thing before, with Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes — who, unlike Carlson, actually sexually harassed women — so maybe Rupert Murdoch had no stomach for any sort of replay.

A friend of mine who is wise in the ways of the world wrote overnight:

If you doubt the power of the Cathedral [the neoreactionary term for the Establishment], look at what is happening. They silenced Tucker with ease. The GOP base is seriously considering passing over DeSantis in favor of Trump, which the Cathedral would love to keep around as an ineffectual straw man enemy. The Cathedral can suppress the story of the Nashville shooter, who targeted Christians. It suppressed the revelation that a former CIA head, Mike Morell, orchestrated the false letter signed by 51 former intelligence chiefs calling the Hunter Biden laptop leak “Russian disinformation,” at the request of the Biden campaign. With Tucker gone, you can expect a rush to rally Americans to the side of Ukraine.

The reader went on to say, “This is why the Benedict Option is necessary. The Cathedral is well protected from those who would challenge it from within.” He didn’t elaborate, but I’ve heard this from him in past correspondence. He believes that the power of the Cathedral is so great that Christians cannot successfully resist in ordinary ways. He’s not suggesting that we not fight back, only that our prospects for success are far smaller than most US Christians think.

I would also remind you of these things, courtesy of the leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, a frequent Tucker Carlson Tonight guest:

I could be wrong about this, but to my knowledge, now that Tucker is gone, there is nobody — not a single host on any cable or broadcast network — who is unsympathetic to continuing the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. Not one. We have no real antiwar Left, and barely an antiwar Right. This, after the lies that got us into Iraq and kept us in Afghanistan. This, after the deceit revealed by the Teixeira leaks. The Cathedral is all in for this war. It just rid itself of its most powerful — and lone — major media critic.

Seriously, think about that: it’s as if everything that we learned about the US Government, its wars, and the trustworthiness of the leadership class, over the past twenty years has been swept under a rug. Forgotten. Here is a relevant passage from Live Not By Lies:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

Children, never look back! Forget about that trans person who murdered those Christians. Forget about the lies your government told you about Iraq and Afghanistan, and is telling you about Ukraine. Pay no attention to the fact that the political campaign of the man who is now the US president asked a former top CIA official to orchestrate some effort to make a story that was true but potentially hurtful to the cause of making Donald Trump go away — and the retired spook did so, corralling fifty of his former colleagues from the senior ranks of the US intelligence establishment.

If you remember those things, the fabulous trans-imperial globalist security-state future they have planned for us might not happen. You might not have the opportunity to eat bugs. Your children might miss out on the chance to discover their true gender in elementary school, and to be raised by the state when Child Protective Services seizes them from you. Your daughter might be denied the opportunity to go into combat to queer the Donbass, and to gain enlightenment by seeing the Girl Todgers Of Progress on the transgendered “women” soldiers in the shower. Think of what you’re missing! Tucker Carlson is no saint, but he is — was — at least someone who raised these issues substantively on his national show. That’s over now. He won’t be interfering with the future any longer, children. Nobody on TV will. If only he hadn’t changed President Trump’s mind in 2019, we might have had our jolly war with Iran. Don’t worry, that’s over now. Lock and load.