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Eyes on the prize. (Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
America is perishing. The streets are awash with fentanyl and beset by homelessness, illegal immigrants flood the border, lawlessness sweeps from Maine to Montecito. Under the stewardship of today’s elites, this once great country is collapsing.
This is the Republican message of 2024. And it is best articulated by the most important man in the conservative movement, after Donald Trump: Tucker Carlson. Over the past month, Carlson has been travelling America on a speaking tour, visiting 16 different cities with guests including Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Kid Rock, and Russell Brand. The shows have not toured the liberal bastions like New York City or Los Angeles, but cities where the Trumpian message of decline is not only seen and heard, but felt, too.
I see him in Reading, one of the most dangerous cities in Pennsylvania, where violent crime is significantly above the national average and rising. Its school system is failing and buildings are collapsing. At the 7,000 capacity Santander Arena, unhappy residents cram in for Tucker: if there’s a uniform, it’s MAGA regalia, camo vests and Infowars Ts. One member of the faithful tells me that he had already been to three of his shows. “He just understands us,” Chris, clutching two beers, says. “He’s not a politician.”
Tucker isn’t in a t-shirt. He stands out in his own uniform: blazer, chequered shirt, beige chinos and loafers. But he speaks for the crowd. “A leader’s only job is to take care of the people he leads,” he declares. “It’s not to defeat climate change or to defeat Vladimir Putin — or anybody else.” The audience is enthralled, buttressing Carlson’s comments with chants of “USA!” and “Survive till ‘25!”.
His rhetoric is earthy and vulgar, describing the state’s governor and former V-P contender, Josh Shapiro, as “evil”, “creepy” and a “ghoul”. Comparing the governor with a father who abandoned his family, Carlson doubles down on the character assassination. “I don’t care what story he tells you about himself,” he says, “he is a bad father and a bad man.” He’s appalled by a picture of Shapiro signing an artillery shell bound for Ukraine with Zelensky at hand.
Ukraine is a Carlson fixation — representing, as it does, his metamorphosis from Iraq-war supporting neocon to isolationist firebrand. It mirrors a similar evolution on the New Right. Disturbed by the Iraq war and its fallout, Carlson and the new Right became foreign policy radicals, with their outlook defined more by alienation than patriotism. Carlson describes a visit he made to Iraq that precipitated this change of heart. It is also why so many Trump voters in Pennsylvania voted for Obama in 2008, before switching. They did not like Obama per se; they just hated George W. Bush and his foreign-policy adventurism more.
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SubscribeTucker Carlson has no interest in running for office and would be terrible at it. He’s a talker, not a doer. He knows what his talents are, and what they aren’t. As he told his biographer:
Tucker Carlson knows his lane, and it’s journalism. It’s not elected office.
Not journalism either. Rabble-rousing.
Shame Starmer did not read this before trying to become PM.
“Journalism” or more accurately, steaming hot takes
“But the problem with autodidacts is that they don’t have anyone to tell them when they’re wrong.”
No. The problem with autodidacts is that they never had The Narrative injected into their veins.
“But the problem with autodidacts is that they don’t have anyone to tell them when they’re wrong.” This is a complete non-sequitur. What does it even mean?
It’s not a well-formed claim and doesn’t seem true enough to be a solid rule. But it means something like this: Those who teach themselves serve as their own authority and don’t get (or maybe seek or maybe listen to) much feedback. So they tend to be in a self-confirmation loop. Or to be overinfluenced by the first or most recent thing they’ve read.
Yet there are quite a few contrarians within institutions too, and conformists over-credit certain authorities too.
Also, when someone reads widely and well enough this shortcoming is largely removed, because great and very good thinkers are often in dynamic conversation with each other, even when they are separated by generations or centuries.
You could say that about the entire article.
Both.
Alex Jones may be an idiot sometimes but a $1+ billion fine is ludicrous beyond belief.
Did you see what they fined Trump for saying a woman was lying about him regarding allegations she suddenly made about two decades after the alleged incident and with no more proof than her say-so.
Yes but If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is probably a ……. .
““You get some poor little columnist from the Daily Oregonian who said Trump is Hitler, and you beat the shit out of him for 10 minutes.”
Perhaps the columnist deserved it? The comparison is beyond gauche, and rather offensive to people who actually suffered German WW2 depredations.
Part of the problem with modernity is that we are surrounded and harangued by people who have never had the shit beaten out of them, or likely never been in any antagonistic, physical danger in their lives.
You need to watch Tuck’s fawning, pathetic interview of Darryl Cooper if you want to see where his sympathy lies for regarding 30s national socialism. Then google and watch Victor Davis Hanson’s response (i pick a right leaning historian so you can see how far-out Tuck is on this)
Here’s the comment I made to the UnHerd podcast about the Tucker Carlson interview of Darryl Cooper. People are jumping on the two of them unfairly.
Darryl Cooper is a podcaster, not a professional historian. He doesn’t publish scholarly articles or books but produces The Martyr Made Podcast, tweets on X, and writes a Substack. He does a lot of historical analysis, and frequently bases his podcasts on his research. He is a popular historian, not an academic one, but he is a historian nonetheless, with a big audience.
Journalist Tucker Carlson interviewed Darryl Cooper on his show, and the conversation drifted into World War II. In the course of the interview, Darryl Cooper talked about Winston Churchill, saying he was one of the chief villains of World War II. He said at the time that his comment was hyperbolic, and meant to be provocative, not to suggest that Winston Churchill was worse than Adolf Hitler or others. He also talked about the concentration camps that the Germans put millions of Soviet prisoners in after their 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, over half of whom died over that winter.
In this These Times podcast Tom McTague and Churchill historian Andrew Roberts “rebuke” Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper for their comments in the interview. They call Darryl Cooper an antisemite who wanted the Nazis to kill 6 million Jews, a Holocaust denier like David Irving, and a “complete idiot”. Several times they call his statements “absolutely ludicrous”.
That’s wrong. I disagree with a lot of what Darryl Cooper believes, but he is an insightful and thoughtful commentator who does his research. He is a veteran, which perhaps explains and colors his views of war. One can certainly disagree with him and challenge his facts, but to attack his character and intellect like these two do unfairly defames him. Shame on them.
Like I say, watch Victor Davis Hanson and then have a think about what you’ve just written. Insightful my posterior. Tuck knew exactly what he was doing. His interview didn’t go out live.
I did watch Victor Davis Hanson on your recommendation. He didn’t point out factual errors as much as disagree with opinions. And one shouldn’t be cancelled for disagreeing on historical opinions.
That’s the point that Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper were making in their conversation, and how they got on the subject of World War II and Winston Churchill. That wasn’t the point of their conversation, it was only an example.
As Will and Ariel Durant say, “history is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice”. The historian is not like a scientist who can test theories by experiments in the real world. The best way to test historical analyses is by discussion and debate, not by experts spouting off the party line.
And I stand by my comment that Darryl Cooper is an insightful analyst of war and its causes and conduct. Some of his comments in his Martyr Made podcast on the Ukraine war were things I hadn’t heard before.
Like that shotguns with special ammunition to combat drones have been innovated. Tank crewmen are shooting drones like skeet. Reminds me of UnHerd contributor Edward Luttwak’s The Art of Military Innovation.
You make a forceful defense of Cooper, and are clearly fond of Carlson What do you think of his fawning treatment of both Orban and Putin?
I’d just remind you of something I’m sure isn’t news to you, at least in principle…things that are new to you or contrary to consensus should not be considered insightful, let alone trustworthy, on that basis alone.
Truth isn’t arrived at just by exploding an existing half truth and erecting another shakily founded claim, nor by muddying a pool until all seems equally untrue.
What’s your problem with Victor Orban? The man is looking after his people and their nation, unlike too many leaders today.
He tries to legislate religious worship and personal behavior. He is avowedly illiberal and controls the media with a heavy hand. His notion of “my people” does not include the whole nation of Hungary but only those who agree with and support him. That’s a short list for you.
On a more subjective note that I think is well sustained: Orban is more about himself than anyone or anything else he pretends to care about. Just like his fanboy, DJT.
The guy is a Nazi apologist, one of the things he said in the interview is that the reason why the Nazis killed the jews was not because they were jews, its because they did not have the supplies to provide for them and they killed them as an act mercy then have them suffer from starvation. If the guy is not lying about the facts and believes this, it shows how warped that guys morality and how fringe he really is.
Darryl Cooper didn’t say a word about the Nazis and the Jews. The camps he was talking about were for Soviet prisoners taken during Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Over half of the 3.5 million of them died during the winter. They were not killed outright but died from hunger, exposure and disease.
Darryl Cooper said nothing of the kind. He only talked about Soviet prisoners in camps who were captured in the German invasion in 1941 and died in their millions that winter.
Stop being obtuse and disassembling, The guy is Nazi apologist for whatever reason. A strong indication of this is that the fact that acknowledge the Holocaust happened but he says it was done as an active mercy, not because The Nazis hated Jews. Mercy being that they didn’t have the supplies to take care of them so they killed them so they would not have to starve to death It’s just absurd and light of all the evidence against that. If this guy actually believes that nonsense and it’s not a Nazi apologist, It shows how warped his worldview really is the awful nature of his morality and not a credible historian. I think a reason why Tucker invited this guy on the shows because Tucker Carlson is a huge fan of Pat Buchanan, who himself has indulged in Nazi apologism as well as historical world war II revisionism and wrote a book essentially defending Hitler’s actions by obscuring the nature of his ideology and blame Churchill for the war as well as FDR to a more limited extent. Pat Buchanan is a American PaleoConservative if you want A political background on the guy. Which in part explains Tucker Carlson’s political views. Pat also flirted with Holocaust denial and even defended captured Nazi fugitives who he said were being persecuted. Tucker seems to have this tendency to have these interviews with these controversial people not because they have important stuff to say, but just simply as a means of garnering publicity for himself.
Darryl Cooper didn’t say anything about the Holocaust. He was talking about the 1.5 million Soviets in German prison camps that died during the winter of 1941. They weren’t killed by the Germans but died from hunger, exposure and disease. They were not Jews.
No fan of Tucker – but you have to concede he’s more than a little like a right-wing version of you, JW.
Carlson certainly understands his core audience, but he’s not a coalition builder which is what he’d have to be to successfully run for the White House. To many people, Carlson is nothing more than a verbose oddball wearing a bow tie.
Good point. By contrast, nobody could say that Donald Trump is nothing more than a verbose oddball wearing a bow tie, because he wears a red tie rather than a bow tie.
He seemed fine to me when I listened to him. He doesn’t over reach and “speaks truth to power.
Tucker Carlson stopped wearing a bow tie 18 years ago in 2006.
He also has a worse and even more hysterical cackle than Kamala.
it certainly looks like a dress rehearsal.
It only looks like a dress rehearsal because politics has come to resemble entertainment, which is what Carlson is doing; it’s how he keeps his income up.
As the saying goes, the flak is heaviest when one is over the target, and so, Carlson must be framed as the next great boogeyman who must be destroyed, to use the word deployed by one Dem politician about that pesky Trump who refuses to die. This, of course, requires the ritual caricaturing of anyone who might lend Tucker an ear: “if there’s a uniform, it’s MAGA regalia, camo vests and Infowars Ts”
I must have missed the memo in not owning a single one of these apparently mandatory items. Meanwhile, the writer may want to check how many times Alex Jones has been right before reflexively dismissing someone he has clearly never researched on his own. This stuff is getting formulaic and all too predictable.
The number of times Alex Jones has been knowingly and shamefully wrong is self-discrediting. Sandy Hook is inexcusable, and his lizard people schtick was (is?) just insane. But Alex Jones somehow has your ear and earns your admiration. So does Carlson.
It makes no sense to challenge the intellectual bone fides of Billot while defending an outright huckster like Jones. Where’s your “original research”? Perhaps you’re referring to the algorithmic bubble Google provides.
But Alex Jones somehow has your ear and earns your admiration. So does Carlson
Putting words in people’s mouths is among the laziest and most obnoxious types of “argument”. I said Jones has been right about things. Because he has, 9/11 being among them. There was no mention of personal sentiment which you somehow managed to divine without evidence.
Why else would you bother to defend such a hoax-spouting profiteer? And how was he right about 9/11? Proof please. You attempt to hold me and others to standards of evidence and accuracy you don’t observe yourself, not even close.
*And claiming someone “has been right about many things” is a weirdly evasive defense. Only the most anomalous liar and fool would manage to be wrong about everything.
“I asked him whether it was morning or night and he correctly answered ‘morning’, so he’s right and truthful about some things, your honor”.
Noticing that he’s been right about some things is not defending him. It’s being able to live outside of a binary prism in which a person is all good or all bad. You should try it.
Let’s see: how many politicians, pundits, and medical professionals were wrong about covid itself, about the vaccine, about lockdowns and masks, about Ivermectin, and so forth. Does that make them wrong about everything they’ve ever said?
And typically, you close out with more stuff I never said. Shouldn’t you be in school instead of wasting adults’ time here?
What a punk reply. Every human we can examine face to face has been right about some things, and wrong about some too. Me and you as well. Not a binary prism, you cheap shot artist.
Are you claiming that 9/11 is proven to be an inside job? What specifically is true, or untrue, about vaccines?
Dare to make a direct claim, instead of throwing smoke and weak sparks around in place of arguments, like a kid with a pocketful of fireworks.
Or just pretend to dunk on me with an insult, like some self satisfied “edgelord”. Later.
How cute. You’ve shifted from making up shit I never said to sophomoric name-calling.
What specifically is true, or untrue, about vaccines? —-> In the case of the Covid jabs, it was untrue that taking them would prevent infection or transmission. Multiple officials gave serial assurances about efficacy, and many found themselves with the virus anyway.
These are the same people who called Ivermectin “horse dewormer,” ignoring a 50-year history of applications involving humans, including a Nobel Prize for a more recent use. Oh, and it turned out that the dewormer was quite effective against Covid. It just wasn’t profitable.
Are you claiming that 9/11 is proven to be an inside job? —-> No, I am not. Jones predicted it would occur: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/alex-jones-predict-9-11/
You can like that or dislike it, you can ascribe to broken clock or blind squirrel syndrome, but the fact remains with audio visual evidence behind it.
You went there first with the schoolboy crack and you know it.
Thanks for clarifying on the 9/11 front. I confess I’m not the expert Alex Jones enthusiast that you seem to be. I personally think he is not dumb, but someone with an at best very cloudy moral compass and a certain amount of major emotional and mental illness.
One final time: Every plausible human being that has ever lived has been right and wrong about some things. That’s axiomatic; a trite truism. What falls outside of the normal human right/wrong distribution is making conspiratorial claims you can’t provide evidence for and probably don’t believe yourself—I think Jones has done this repeatedly, and he has confessed that under oath when it comes to Sandy Hook. Despicable. That definitely taints his credibility on other matters. I guess if he was somehow wrong ONE-HUNDRED percent of the time, fewer otherwise reasonably intelligent people like you would listen to his act.
By the way, I think the CIA knew that some kind of major terrorist attack was likely imminent; the exact when and where matter a lot in such cases.
Many of the views you’ve just rattled off here, once pressed, do seem more sensible. What’s also well established about the vaccine, despite its disappointing failure to prevent contraction, is that comparatively few people who took the jab got very sick, and disproportionately even fewer died. Correct?
I enjoyed this article. The segment describing Fox News keeping Carlson in check was something that had not occurred to me, nor being an autodidact known. I will keep an eye out for Billot J’s articles in future.
It is good to see that Carlson is associating with such recognised political heavyweights as RFK Jr, Kid Rock, and Russell Brand.
Tucker Carlson has to interview someone, having interviewed thousands over his career. He’s a skilled interviewer, and doesn’t mind talking to people closer to the fringe. He even had a show on MSNBC years ago. He had an interview with JD Vance last Saturday. And of course with Vladimir Putin last February.
Tucker Carlson interviewed a friend of mine for his regular Tucker Carlson Tonight show, briefly, and then at length in his Tucker Carlson Today show that was only available on Fox Nation. My friend said he was an insightful interviewer but with an annoying bray of a laugh.
Ah yes, Vladimir Putin. That was “hard hitting”, wasn’t it?
No, the interview wasn’t hard hitting but it was interesting and helpful. There ought to be more of those. And action taken based on them. Why didn’t Joe Biden call up Vladimir Putin after that interview, as he was invited to do? Donald Trump would have.
Interesting that the New York Times also thinks div > p > a”>Tucker Carlson may be the future of the MAGA movement, though they did not specifically mention him aiming for the White House.
Anybody who gives credit to Alex Jones no longer has any credibility, IMO. And I’m saying this as a free speech absolutist – AJ had the right to say what he said (i.e. the government did not have the right to sanction him for that) but the aggrieved had all the right to sue the hell out of him and destroy his reputation. Carlson supporting him is not surprising. It is nothing but good, old fashioned hypocrisy, the “he is a goddam sonovabitch but he is OUR goddam sonovabitch” kind (a saying attributed to Nixon about some central American dictator). It is a mirror image the way Al Sharpton was treated by the left after Tawana Brawley.
Barf!
After his Putin and Darryl Cooper interviews further illuminated the nonsense this narcissist will oxygenate for a bit of Grifting the only redeeming quality is he’ll only really rip off those who probably deserve it.
Another of the rage amplifiers who’d sink in moments if ever had to solve a proper problem.
Tucker Carlson had the highest-rated show ever on cable news television. People like to watch him. What you see is what you get — there’s nothing grifting about it. And he’s a journalist, not a problem solver.
He’s not a journalist. He’s a publicist, both for conspiratorial twaddle and for himself.
you just described the entirety of the corporate media, which Carlson is not a part of. But, it’s okay; you do you.
Haha! As long as what you see is cynicism, gaslighting, and self-promotion.
People also like McDonalds and superhero movies. Sometimes I do too—but are they good?
Carlson’s vitriol is appropriate for Josh Shapiro, who has a dangerous visceral cultural loathing of Russia. Racism and personal hatred is a poor driver for American foreign policy. Josh is paying his own, personal historic enemies back by abusing US military power. The man is indeed very creepy.
So a state governor is now invested with the power to exact international historical payback? Huh.
Assuming your attack has merit: You seem to see no danger of excessive, visceral fondness for Russia, past or present.
And on what basis do you diagnose white on white “racism” against Russians?
Hay Russian troll, your solipsism is showing. Stop blaming other people for your nations awful behavior and take responsibility for your actions, and maybe then you might start to be respected as country. But collective self-criticism is not a Russian strong point and you always play the victim.