The Insider Outsider

The meaning of Tucker Carlson for the present and future of US politics

Tucker Carlson’s first post-‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ appearance

I know at least some of y’all must be wo’ slap out from my focus on Tucker Carlson this week, but I really do think this is a moment of serious symbolic importance — even if you are no fan of Carlson’s. Let me explain.

First, have a look at the 2 min, 15 sec video message Tucker put out on Twitter a day or so ago. In just over 24 hours, as I write this, it has been viewed by over 21 million people. As usual these days, Twitter won’t let me embed in Substack, but if you follow the link, you can see it. In it, Tucker doesn’t mention Fox, but he points out that the Cathedral includes both progressives and conservatives. That is to say, the commoners may strongly disagree, but the elites are more united than people think. Here’s Mollie Hemingway trying to enlighten:

Here’s a piece from The Hill explaining why some DC Republicans are happy to see Carlson go. Excerpt:

Carlson was one of the most prominent critics of U.S. involvement to defend Kyiv against Moscow’s invasion. 

“It’s a bad day for Vladimir Putin,” a Senate Republican aide said. “This takes one of the biggest critics of Ukraine war in Republican and conservative circles off the table.”  

The aide noted that some GOP senators were also uncomfortable with what they viewed as Carlson’s over-the-top rhetoric opposing vaccine mandates, which divided conservatives during the pandemic.  

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) declared that the war in Ukraine was a “territorial dispute” and not a vital national interest — a statement that many Republicans later criticized — he did so in response to a query from Carlson.  

He “divided conservatives during the pandemic.” No judgment passed on whether or not what Carlson said was true and useful. The aide is complaining that Tucker was divisive — meaning, didn’t go along with the playbook. More:

One Republican senator, who requested anonymity to comment on a media figure who had a loyal following among many right-leaning voters, said Carlson’s departure from prime time would be a positive development for maintaining public support for the war.  

“He wasn’t troubled by whether something was true or not. He was mean, irresponsible and dangerous,” the lawmaker said.   

Can you believe that? Despite what we know about how the US Government has dissimulated to keep support for the war high, this GOP Senator damns Carlson for allegedly lying to smear the war effort. The senator is thrilled that the lone major-media voice questioning the war has now been silenced.

This is the state of things in the USA. I have seen online some people criticizing Tucker for not being a squeaky-clean gentleman, based on what has come out about his private in-house communications. While there are certainly some things he should bring to his confessor, if bad Episcopalians had confessors, don’t let piety prevent you from seeing what’s really going on here. The only major voice in the US mainstream media opposing US war policy, the transing of our children, of woke capitalism, of the US Government’s multi-front war on its own citizens (with the collaboration of tech and media) in the name of fighting disinformation — he’s now gone. And the final straw was a speech he gave in which he mentioned the spiritual aspect of this struggle we all find ourselves in. One Catholic friend who was present at Heritage said that since Tucker’s speech, he’s heard from a number of people in the room telling him that they left much more focused on looking beyond politics to their faith for how to resist. Another Catholic friend, a reader of this newsletter, emailed to say that he too was in the audience that day, and the feeling as Tucker delivered the talk was so intense that they all thought he was about to announce his conversion to Catholicism.

Something important spiritually happened here. Tucker Carlson, an affable sinner, went to the citadel of Washington conservatism, delivered a talk in which he took a shot at the Republican Party, indicating his disdain for them, and told his audience that the crisis engulfing our country and our civilization can only be explained in terms of spiritual warfare. He urged them to pray. A couple of days later, he was out of a job.

Some of you have pointed out that other Fox hosts are open about their faith, and still work there. That is true. I mean no disrespect to them, because it’s not everybody’s place to speak the same way about their faith in public life. I don’t see that they’re doing anything wrong. But let’s be real: their expression of faith does not threaten the Machine, the Cathedral. Again, I want to be clear: I don’t believe they, or any Christian with a public platform, is required to attack the Cathedral. I don’t criticize those Christian women. I only want to point out that they use their witness in a way that does not threaten the Cathedral. That’s the difference here.

Laugh if you want, but I believe that this is a very specific sign of the times in the same way that the Nashville shooting (including the way the Cathedral handled it (e.g., the vice president traveled to Nashville in its wake, not meeting with the families of the murdered Christians, but with Democrats and pro-trans forces). In my book Live Not By Lies, I quote a Slovak priest who said that under Communism, the Gospel shone a clear light through the darkness. Now, though, in the face of this new deception, said the priest, the light of the Gospel hits only fog.

That was a few years ago. I suggest to you now that the fog is clearing. It is becoming easier to perceive what we are dealing with — for those who want to see, that is. Many don’t. Last night I was talking at length with a Catholic friend, a scholar who agreed with me that the rapidity and totality of the collapse we’re all living through is absolutely stunning. Speaking of what Pope Francis and his team are doing to the Catholic Church, he said that he never could have imagined how fast and how thoroughly things could have gone so bad there. He said that he cannot explain it except through the demonic. He sounded like Tucker Carlson.

We both lamented how so many religious leaders in our own country remain silent in the face of this crisis. I shared with him what a Protestant pastor friend in the US told me: that one of his congregants observed after Bible study this week that it’s bizarre that with so many religious leaders checked out, it’s bizarre that it falls to Tucker Carlson, of all people, to raise his voice in any strong, concerted way against the darkness overtaking us. I am reminded once again of the advice the Christian anti-Communist dissident Kamila Bendova gave me. I asked her how it was that she and her late husband, as strict Catholics, were able to work closely with Vaclav Havel and others in that senior circle of Czech dissidents — this, given how notoriously loose the others were about morality (meaning, they were sleeping with each other, cheating on their spouses, and so forth). Kamila told me that when you are fighting against totalitarianism, the most important quality to look for in allies is not personal piety, but courage. Havel and the other hippie types had it; most Christians did not. Kamila said they knew who would stand with them if they were attacked by the state, and who would not.

This is very important advice for us! You might disdain Tucker Carlson’s politics, or his personal style. But you had better get it straight in your head now: when the Machine comes for you, there will be a lot of pious Christians who will look the other way, to preserve their own viability in the system, but there may also be Tucker Carlson types who are willing to help you — when even the people in your own church will not.

Ross Douthat’s analysis of Carlson’s conservatism — that it is best understood as suspicion of authorities — is spot on. Excerpt:

There have always been conservative versions of this kind of suspicionism; Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was directed rightward. But for a long time after the 1960s the most influential version of suspicionism was left-wing. It was the hippies. It was don’t trust anyone over 30. It was Noam Chomsky. It was Oliver Stone. It was Michael Moore.

The young Reaganite or the George W. Bush admirer certainly believed the media was liberal and that the Ivy League could not be trusted. But he or she believed in the CIA and NATO, in General Motors and Wall Street, in Coca-Cola and the American Medical Association and the United States Marine Corps.

Not so for the conservatives who have come of age since the Iraq War, the financial crisis and the Great Awokening. Alienated from many more American institutions than their predecessors, staring at a record of elite failure and a social landscape where it seems like there’s little to conserve, they increasingly start out where Carlson ended up — in a posture of reflexive distrust, where if an important American institution takes a position, the place to be is probably on the other side.

For we of a certain age, it is more than a bit astonishing that in our lifetimes, the Left has become the party of Trust The Authorities, and the Right — well, the non-GOP normie Right — has become the party of hostility to institutional authority. It certainly happened to me. In my case, it began with realizing what a damned lie the Iraq War was, and how the US Government, in particular the GOP administration, went along with it. And not only the government, but the entire conservative establishment (of which I was a small part, as a minor right-wing journalist), with the exception of obstreperous dissenters like Pat Buchanan. (Note well that David Frum, who denounced Buchanan on the cover of National Review as one of the “unpatriotic conservatives,” is now busy making the very same denunciations of Americans, like Sen. Mike Lee, who question US policy towards Ukraine.)

And then it was discovering that the institutional Catholic Church, to which I was devoted, was run by deeply corrupt men — some sexually corrupt, most, though, unwilling to stand against them, out of fear. The institutional corruption was so deep and so broad that I lost my ability to believe that my salvation depended on being in communion with them. I not only left behind the Catholic Church, but I left behind my ability to easily trust any religious authority, no matter what confession.

Observing from within how my own profession, journalism, lied to protect their favorite demographics when it came to reporting on Islamic radicalism, homosexual networks among the Catholic clergy, and on gay rights, caused me to lose faith in journalism. There is still good journalism done, just as there is good work done by clergy (Catholic and otherwise), and there are Republican politicians who are good men and women fighting the good fight. My point is simply that I lost faith in the institutions.

The Great Awokening, and how thoroughly it captured educational institutions, caused me to lose my wavering faith in academia. The Woke Capitalist gang that bullied the State of Indiana into submission over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2015 made me realize once and for all that Big Business, on the whole, was the enemy. The utterly specious reasoning that brought us Obergefell made me realize that the purpose of the Supreme Court, most of the time, is to ratify what US elites believe. Discovering in the fall of 2015 that the Congressional Republicans had no plans at all for legislation to shore up religious liberty in the wake of Obergefell told me exactly how much the faithful can rely on the party most of us vote for, to look out for our interests.

The 2019 “Afghanistan Papers” report, which revealed that US politicians, military leaders, and diplomats knew full well that Afghanistan was unsalvageable, but kept spending American blood and treasure because they couldn’t admit the truth, ruined what faith I still had in the US military and national security establishment. I was a latecomer to Russiagate, because my inability to trust Donald Trump from the get-go opened me to believing him capable of anything. Jeff Gerth’s dissection of Russiagate for the Columbia Journalism Review bounced the rubble of what was left of my faith in American journalism. That faith had already been thoroughly demolished by the spectacular mendacity of its reporting on race and LGBT. Fear of Covid caused me to trust the government and the medical authorities at first — but then the medical establishment saying, “Oh, wait, you can all go out in public as long as you’re protesting against racism” demolished that. And the subsequent revelations about how the US Government, the tech world, and compliant media collaborated to control the Covid story — well, do I even need to elaborate on that?

You get the point. Whether you are a person of the Left or of the Right, if you trust the Cathedral at this point, I don’t know what to say to you, except to hope that the scales fall from your eyes some way. This is why I listen to and value Tucker Carlson, even when I don’t agree with him fully. Who else at that level is (was) asking these questions? Who was paying attention to semi-radical voices questioning the status quo? I was irritated when I heard that Tucker had RFK Jr. on, on the grounds that everybody knows RFK Jr. is a conspiracy nut. Well, just the other day, I read David Samuels’s long interview with the guy, and … well, let’s just say that I’m a lot more interested in what RFK Jr. has to say than I once was. Doesn’t make RFK Jr. right about everything, but the man has something to say. And Tucker got to him first.

Tucker came to Hungary two summers ago, spent a week, and became the only major US media figure to question the received wisdom about the country. As you know, from living here, it astonishes and infuriates me how the media, academia, and the US Government frame Hungary to the American people. If most Americans knew what things were really like here, they would understand how our elites lie to us about it. Hungary has problems, no doubt about it, but it is very, very far from what the Cathedral wants you to think about it. Hungary’s greatest sin, in their mind, is resisting the party line handed down from Washington, Brussels, and the Soros class of oligarchs and the NGOs they fund. The most important thing for Americans to know about Hungary is that it is treated in the international area, by the Cathedral, the same way that conservatives, especially dissenting conservatives, are treated by the Cathedral domestically.

Tucker Carlson came here, saw it for himself, and told you that news. Very damn few others followed him. Once you see this, it’s hard to unsee it. Once you see it, you can’t regard people like USAID Administrator Samantha Power coming over in February to deliver $20 million to fund “democracy” promotion in Hungary as anything but Color Revolution stuff. Similarly, US Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, is not satisfied to be a diplomat, but is following the US State Department’s policy since the second Obama administration, which is to use the diplomatic power of the US Government to lecture other nations — in his case, Japan — to leave behind their prejudice and embrace the full LGBT agenda. Once you, as a conservative, have lived abroad for any time, and have seen the imperial contempt the US globalists have for foreigners who don’t do what they say, you come to realize how uniquely valuable Tucker Carlson is. Or was. I have faith he will be again.