Tucker up, Buttercup!
With Carlson out at Fox, and Matt Walsh pulled from YouTube, is the Uniparty making its move?
JEFF GOLDSTEIN
APR 24, 2023
On the day I finally became verified on Twitter — which also happens to be my youngest’s eleventh birthday (Happy Birthday, Tanner!) — Fox News has announced it is parting ways with Tucker Carlson, host of what was the single most popular cable TV news show, and the only show on a major network that I can think of that matters in any important way to the national political dialogue. Per the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch made the final decision — purportedly over a discrimination suit — but most likely because Murdoch despises his own audience and always has. Murdoch was also none too pleased with Carlson’s willingness to state unequivocally that Big Pharma was granted the power to harm so many of us, or that federal agents were clandestinely placed undercover on January 6, which “60 Minutes” assures us is just plain silly, Mr Conspiracy Pants!
Love him or not — agree with him or not — Tucker Carlson’s voice is strong, unique, and bracing. Unlike, say, Sean Hannity, whose narrative brush strokes are driven by instructions on the paint-by-numbers canvas provided by his GOP and corporate handlers, Tucker was one of the few on-air talents on FOX you could see at times wrestling against the network’s hidden restraints, which we’ve all long known were there, and which we’ve all long known were being used to keep certain stories out of the news cycle and to foster certain narratives that the Uniparty favors or even promotes.
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To me, it was obvious at the time of his release of January 6 footage — and the sudden and inexplicable stoppage of that release during subsequent shows — that bosses at Fox had applied the clamps to the January 6 story, and that Tucker had unfortunately buckled. Since then, though, his edge has only sharpened. He has, it seems, come to understand just exactly how important his voice has become to the New Right — which shouldn’t be confused with the “alt right.” The New Right has adopted more populist positions than the establishment GOP, certainly; and yes, they fight more effectively than Conservative Inc., because they’re willing to get dirt underneath their fingernails without fretting about their recent manicures. But more than that, Carlson’s connection to the New Right is in his nascent understanding of the ideology that is driving both the left and, by proxy, those in the Uniparty who are happy to go along with it.
Carlson, that is, understands that what we are witnessing isn’t politics and culture within the Enlightenment paradigm upon which the country was built, founded, and — through its law — framed. Instead, it is a toxic brew of applied postmodern Theory, cultural Marxism, and a move to globalize a re-worked iteration of communism under the twin values of “sustainability” and “inclusivity.” This is what Klaus Schwab means when he calls for a “move from a Production and Consumption to a Sharing and Caring economy metaphor”. To achieve this move, Schwab and his coterie of Supervillains have made it clear that they will insinuate these new values into our children, who — having been raised to insist upon such values inorganically yet obsessively — will become the vanguard for the Great Reset, the clay out of which Schwab and the transhumanist elite who run him will mold the new New Man. As I’ve argued with some frequency recently, what we are witnessing is Maoism marketed to the Western aesthetic. It is the real existential threat to this country — not “climate change,” not global overcrowding — and with it, to Western civil society, individualism, individual liberty, and all the other “discourses” of power Theory seeks to “problematize,” up to and including rationality, reason, Science, and the material world as anything useful outside the discourses that describe and maintain it. I find it no coincidence that calls from the government to rid the national dialogue of Carlson, or Matt Walsh — who likewise has made a clear call to defend the true — have led to predictable responses from media organizations or tech giants. They’ve been given the illiberal excuse to censor what they cannot abide. The truth is an obstacle to their remaking of the world. The Uniparty is a collaborator in the Great Reset — and the mainstream press is the voice of the Uniparty.
In a keynote speech for Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary Friday night (the night of his last show, coincidentally), Carlson spoke out about the pressure, in his sphere and in the political and cultural sphere more largely, to conform to the “new new thing, the poisonous thing, the silly thing” — even when it is clear that what you are being asked to do is deny truth and mouth a social liturgy you don’t believe in. He talked about his sadness in watching people he knew becoming “quislings” and “cowards”; he bemoaned the pressures to create the national reality through narratives he knew not to be true: the efficacy of the Covid vaccines; the Sainthood of George Floyd; the war in Ukraine. Carlson was making explicit that wrestling with restraints he had before merely shown through the indices most common among hostages, but which we nevertheless could sometimes see in his mannerisms, or in the cast of his eyes. Opines Carlson, “a fact of nature and of theology and of observable reality” is that there is a “countervailing force at work always,” a
counterbalance to the badness. It’s called goodness. And you see it in people. So for every ten people who are putting ‘he and him’ in their electronic JP Morgan email signatures, there’s one person who’s like ‘no, I’m not doing that. Sorry, I don’t want to fight. But I’m not doing that. It’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, it’s a betrayal of my faith, of my sense myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy. I am not a slave, I am a free citizen. And I’m not doing that. And there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it.
Continues Carlson a moment later:
Once you say one true thing and stick with it, all kinds of other true things occur to you. The truth is contagion — lying is, but the truth is, as well. And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this with this — and I don’t want to get supernatural — but you are filled with this power. Try it. Tell the truth about something… The more you tell the truth, the stronger you become. That’s completely real. And measurable in the way you feel. Of course the opposite is also true […] We should, in this sad moment, of profound and widespread destruction of the institutions that people who share our views built, by the way — earlier generations who would agree substantially with every person in this room, they built those and now they’re being destroyed, and that’s so depressing — but we can also see, rising in the distance, new things, new institutions led by new people who are every bit as brave as the people who came before us. Amen.
In important ways, Carlson is extending Orwell’s famous maxim that “during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” And as others — including very recently myself — have done, he’s putting to words and voice his refusal to surrender to those very “new new things, poisonous things, silly things” that we’re being told, without hesitation, that we must and will conform to.
Beyond that, though, Carlson has reached a more fundamental realization, which he explains thusly:
It might be time to reassess the terms we use to describe what we’re watching. So when I started at Heritage, the presumption was — and this is a very anglo-American assumption — the debates we’re having were kind of rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes…so like, ‘we all want the country to be more prosperous and free and people to be less oppressed or whatever, so we’re going to argue about tax rates, and I think higher taxes gets you there,’ you’re a Keynesian, or you might disagree, your Austrian, or whatever. But the objectives is the same: so we write our papers and they write their papers, and may the best papers win. I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all. I don’t think we’re watching a debate over how to get to the best outcome […] I’m just saying this as an observer of what’s going on, but there’s no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement, with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it, at all. If you have people who say, ‘I have an idea: let’s castrate the next generation, let’s sexually mutilate children,’ I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate […] That has nothing to do with politics. What’s the outcome we’re desiring here? An androgynous population? Are we really yearning for that? I don’t think anyone could really defend that, as a positive outcome. But the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that. Well what is that? It’s irrational. […] When the Treasury Secretary stands up and says ‘you know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion,’ that’s like an Aztec principle, actually. There’s not a society in history that didn’t practice human sacrifice. Not one, I checked […] What’s the point of child sacrifice? Well there’s no policy goal entwined with that. That’s a theological phenomenon. And that’s…the point I’m making: none of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government — the largest human organization in human history — decide that the goal is to destroy things — destruction for it’s own sake, ‘hey, let’s tear it down’ — what you are watching is not a political movement, it’s evil. […] Good is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace…lack of conflict, cleanliness — cleanliness is next to Godliness — […] and evil is characterized by their opposites: violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth. So if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you are really advocating for is evil.[…] I think two things: one, we should say that — stop engaging in these totally fraudulent debates where we are using the terms we used in 1991, where…I could win the debate if I marshaled more facts…, and two, maybe we should all take like ten minutes a day to say a prayer about it.
What Carlson is recognizing is that the Western world has been overtaken by alien ideas, specifically anti-American ideas, in the sense that they were born originally from French thought (though it’s true that some of the applied ideas grow out of native theory produced alongside postmodern thought, borrowing some of its tenets). Most important to the postmodern conception of the world — which underlies much of cultural Marxism — is constructivism, which reduces everything observable to a matrix of power dynamics determined through tensions in discourses, themselves designed to normalize, to maintain, to ossify. Postmodern Theory, therefore, has as its goal to pressure, investigate, and “problematize” what it posits are stultifying discourses; to unmask them; to expose their power; to “free” us all, to the extent we can be said to be an “us” at all, from the oppression of the meta-narratives that control us. The purest formulation of this can be found in Queer Theory, which I’ve recently written on at some length, and whose theoretical maneuvers it pays to familiarize yourselves with, in my view. Once ordered this way, power dynamics are policed through intersectionality, which acts as the final arbiter where at one time the metaphysical notion of truth held sway. Whether you’re religious or not doesn’t matter; you are living through a spiritual battle, like it or not.
The upshot of his remarks — even without knowing much about the internal and intentional inconsistencies and abstruse formulations that make up Theory — is that, what Carlson sees as “evil,” is everything Theory aims to do: to commit violence against tradition; to hate the status quo and the standards that govern it; to disorder the known universe by claiming it fundamentally unknowable; to divide us into our various constructed identity packs, which we pit against one another in an atomic attempt to achieve peak “authenticity”; to disorganize the social order by constantly aiming to “queer” it; and to redefine filth as Godly, and Godliness as a form of constrictive filth that represses the human as god. The social construction of sex or gender intentionally blurs lines and posits a gender spectrum while declaring the sex binary non-existent. From this grows the natural progression toward blurring all delineating boundaries, with age being the real prize for the left. In the constructivist worldview, age — and the idea of “consent” that goes along with it — must be broken down, and children granted “universal human rights,” which are merely rights that prevent parents from claiming dominion over their own children.
This is the rupturing of the nuclear family the Marxists have long wanted, because without the family to repeat tradition, tradition can be killed off and replaced with new values determined by, and policed through, the State. The State becomes God. Or rather, those forces that control the State. And if some elites want the intellectual cover to diddle the kiddies, they can simply sniff and point to the glutted argot of diseased relativism to justify their actions. After all, they’re merely queering moribund constructs. With their shriveled old dicks.
As I wrote elsewhere, “‘Queer theory’ is ‘critical race theory’ is ‘critical consciousness’ is the Marxist rejection of the individual as individual. Cultural Marxism is determined to raze norms, sow chaos, tear families asunder, and reduce being to collective conformity. I reject its premises as fully as I reject its adherents. I will not comply.”
It seems Tucker Carlson won’t comply, either. That Fox News has signaled it will comply — and indeed in many instances has already been complying — means that, in the mainstream of extant major news outlets, there are none left to stand athwart the new new thing, the poisonous thing, the silly thing, yelling stop.
The institution has been fully taken.
What we do next is up to us.
