62 search results for "Carlson Orban"

… and created a bunch of jobs. Was it worth it?

There is a tendency among some on the left to reflexively adopt the enemy of my enemy is my friend concept when it comes to certain critiques of “neoliberalism” and the Democratic establishment. In my view it’s a lazy kind of thinking and I don’t pay much attention to it. That impulse was on display yesterday when The American Prospect published a lauditory piece on Tucker Carlson and the internet blew up. It was a very bad piece.

Today the magazine offered a response and it’s quite good:

On Tuesday afternoon, the Prospect posted an article about Tucker Carlson on its home page. Focusing almost solely on Carlson’s opposition to corporate globalism, it missed a very large forest for some very cherry-picked trees. It failed to note the roots of Carlson’s positions, in a broader sense failing to note that opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy is an element of both progressive and fascist politics, and hence, depending on whence it comes, not automatically worthy of celebration. The piece failed to take into account Carlson’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny, disdain for democracy, affinity for autocrats and autocracy, habitual lying, and demands to Fox management that they muzzle or fire reporters who had the chutzpah to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. It omitted the fact that Carlson had been second only to Donald Trump in building the neofascist right that threatens American democracy.

The Tucker Carlson who actually impacted American politics is the guy who promoted the “great replacement” theory, through which Democrats supposedly make war on white people by supporting immigration, and conspiracy theories about the deep state. Nothing Carlson offered to viewers was unique to the Republican tradition. Phyllis Schlafly was getting on television to talk about the globalist banker cabal and criticize establishment conservatives long before Tucker’s career began. Rush Limbaugh’s response to the utter failure of the Iraq War, which Tucker initially supported, was to suggest the “deep state” faked evidence of weapons of mass destruction to discredit President Bush. A feigned interest in the working class is nothing new for the GOP, but the left’s propensity to take such at face value is a concerning trend.

There is a distinct kind of credulousness masquerading as sophistication that is popular within some media circles, where the goal seems to be to inspire shock and awe within the center-left. Most of the time, it’s harmless, and sometimes even worthwhile. When it becomes dangerous is when that becomes the standard for political discourse. Tucker Carlson has said many things that challenge liberal orthodoxy, because racist and nationalist populists have a critique of liberalism just as progressive populists do. That doesn’t mean they have anything in common with you.

It reveals a certain disrespect for the opinions of the public to suggest that Carlson’s large audience makes him the working-class whisperer. Carlson’s anti-elitism is highly selective. It doesn’t include Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, or Donald Trump. In fact, Fox stood by him for years, giving him the backing of the Republican Party’s most powerful media organ and putting him, in that sense, firmly within the party establishment. When he’s criticized tech companies, it was only because they’ve occasionally banned white supremacists from their platforms. He’s anti–big business in the sense that Ron DeSantis is anti–big business: deregulating anything that would diminish its profits, but regulating any corporate expressions of social moderation.

Carlson has been second only to Donald Trump in building the neofascist right that threatens American democracy.

The left is generally capable of recognizing when centrists appropriate messages of solidarity and resistance to fit the needs of capital. Why, then, do some miss the fact that it routinely happens on the right?

Distinguishing between left and right populism, between progressive populism and fascism, should be one of the tasks that a left publication routinely undertakes. Both historically and today, fascism is a doctrine that elevates racial solidarity over laissez-faire capitalism. An approach that salutes Carlson for his economics could also engender a salute to Marine Le Pen, who, like the French left, has opposed French President Macron’s circumventing the parliament to raise the retirement age.

In the same vein, a survey of world economics in 1937 might note that only three nations had broken from the laissez-faire orthodoxy that was prolonging the Great Depression: the United States, through Roosevelt’s public-works and employment programs; Sweden, through similar programs as part of its commitment to planned full employment; and Germany, where Hitler’s commitment to building the autobahns and rearming the country for its coming wars significantly reduced the unemployment rate. It is, to put it very mildly, possible to document this semi-convergence of economic policies without hailing (or heiling) Hitler for his break with economic orthodoxy.

What Tuesday’s article failed to do was to report on something so obvious as, say, the reason why Carlson opposes U.S. support for Ukraine. It noted his opposition as something he shares with a portion of the American left; it praised Carlson for his anti-establishment chops. It neglected to note that what led him to this position was his proudly proclaimed affinity for the illiberal, gay-bashing, autocratic policies and practices of Putin and Carlson’s beloved Viktor Orban. (In his college yearbook, Carlson described himself as a member of the “Dan White Society,” which was a nonexistent organization but a way that Carlson could make a not-so-veiled tribute to Harvey Milk’s murderer.)

Carlson’s anti-intervention reasons are not those of the left-wing opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine, and any discussion of his stance requires a discussion of why he holds them. Historians note the very different set of beliefs that distinguished the pacifists and socialists who opposed our entry into World War II from the pro-German, Nazi fellow traveler Charles Lindbergh. A historian who wrote about that movement and didn’t delve into the wildly dissimilar motivations of its members wouldn’t be much of a historian.

To argue that the media celebrated Carlson’s firing because it couldn’t stand his critique of global corporatism is to miss the fact that many of the journalists who celebrated have been critiquing global corporatism for decades—a critique that has defined the Prospect from its inception to today. That critique, distinguishing left from fascist, was evident yesterday when we posted on our home page Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper’s weekly podcast, with the headline “Farewell to a Crypto-Nazi Blowhard.” That succinctly sums up who Tucker Carlson really is.

We need this Fox Dominion trial for the sake of democracy

Michael Tomasky makes the case:

Here’s an instructive and telling little exercise for you, one that I engaged in myself this past Sunday morning.

Head over to Google and search for “NBC defamation lawsuits by former employees.” And then, do the same with CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. You’ll find a few interesting incidents. A Native American employee sued NBC over discrimination at the 30 Rock workplace. The CBS affiliate in Dallas settled an age discrimination case brought by an on-air reporter.

After you’ve done that, go Google “Fox News defamation lawsuits by former employees”—and watch your computer explode. There’s the record $1 million fine Fox paid in 2021 over various #MeToo allegations from female employees. There’s the staggering $20 million Fox agreed to pay to Gretchen Carlson in 2016. There’s the far bigger $90 million settlement reached the next year concerning allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. There was the $15 million paid to a former female host who alleged pay discrimination. And these are just suits filed by Fox’s own employees; they don’t include other such settlements like the $100 million Fox paid out in the British phone-hacking scandal—the details of which, if one bothers to recall them, add up to an unbelievable breach for a “news organization” to have committed. (The short version goes something like this: News of the World hired “investigators” to hack the phones of celebrities, politicians, families of soldiers killed in war, and the family of a missing 13-year-old girl who was later found dead; they got caught, and the media feeding frenzy consumed the United Kingdom.)

I’m sure I could go on if I spent a full day looking. This is just the bounty plundered from 15 minutes of research. But I hope this all proves a point: All news organizations fight lawsuits from people irked by how they’re covered. Often these are nuisance suits trying to buy silence, like Donald’s Trump $475 million suit against CNN filed last October. Sometimes, sure—news organizations make errors. But there’s only one “news organization” in America that has serially settled lawsuits with its own employees—usually women—over allegations that are sometimes sickening (one former Fox employee said Roger Ailes blackmailed her into being his “sex slave” for two decades).

Fox has also settled an unusual number of suits with the people and organizations it has covered—and that brings us to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, opening Tuesday (the judge delayed it by a day) in a courtroom in Delaware. If there’s any justice in this world, this suit will prove in court once and for all what has been apparent for years: Fox is not a news organization in any normal sense of the word at all; it’s an ideological shakedown operation that knowingly peddles lies to advance a deeply reactionary, anti-democracy agenda with the goal of turning the United States into an Orbánesque illiberal pseudo-democracy, if not an outright Putinesque authoritarian state.

Does that sound a bit strong? It’s not. Think about what the Fox anchors and executives were doing, as we’ve learned from the pretrial documents that have been made public so far. Privately, they were acknowledging that Trump lost and Joe Biden won and that Trump was lying about the election. Publicly, as Rupert Murdoch admitted in a deposition, Fox hosts were going on the air and endorsing the lies.

In other words, Fox News was directly and strategically attacking democracy—a democratic outcome that its anchors and executives knew to be legitimate—for the sake of ratings and money. If Fox had had its way, Trump would have succeeded in overturning the election, and our democracy would be gone.

CEO Suzanne Scott didn’t just passively go along. She aggressively inserted herself into the news operation to insist that what little actual news gathering other people at Fox were doing must not continue. The infamous December 2, 2020, email from Scott to EVP Meade Cooper carried the subject heading “Fox News’ Eric Shawn Fact-Checks Trump’s ‘Dump’ Claims” and reads: “This has to stop now. I’m going to address this with you and Jay and Lowell tomorrow. This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding what is happening on these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”

That’s not just a smoking gun. That gun is still sizzling, two and a half years later. Before Scott’s email, Shawn had done two segments on his weekend show debunking various Trump claims—he said claims of a rigged ballot were “false and unsubstantiated,” and he asserted that Trump’s claims about massive vote dumping to help Biden were also untrue.

What Shawn was saying was true. He was doing journalism; delivering news. And that, not Maria Bartiromo’s propaganda, is what Scott ordered stopped. In addition to that, we know that in the aftermath of the election and Biden’s victory, Fox didn’t fire any of the anchors spreading poison and lies. It fired the two guys who ran the Decision Desk, which was the first to call Biden as the winner in Arizona, which was the crucial call that propelled him to victory. Fox fired the two people trying to do news. The people doing propaganda, it kept and protected, and most of them are still on the air.

Why Rupert Murdoch didn’t settle this suit like all the others boggles the mind. Because this chain of events will find him, possibly this week, in a place he’s spent decades trying to avoid—a courtroom, on a witness stand, under oath, answering hostile questions from smart lawyers. But he made his choice. He has a lot of fancy lawyers himself, and rich people find many sleazy ways to wriggle out of blame and responsibility. So I make no predictions here. But based on what we know publicly, it shouldn’t be too hard for a smart litigator to paint Murdoch into a grim corner where he has to end up admitting that his news organization knowingly aired lies for the sake of ratings.

And if these 12 Delawareans find Fox News culpable? That’s not the end. It’s a beginning. Because from that moment, we will be able to say, with a certainty we can’t quite claim now, that Fox News lies.

Sadly, it appears they are in serious settlement discussions today so who knows? But in a perfect world what Tomasky said would be the result of a trial verdict against Fox:

That certainty should set in motion its own series of events. For example: What will our country’s real news organizations do in response to such a verdict? NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and others should band together and say: We do not consider Fox News to be like us. It is not a news organization in the accepted sense of the term. Memo to the White House, Congress, or any media credential-granting institution: If you give Fox News media credentials for your event, none of us will cover it.

In addition, cable and satellite providers have to stop paying Fox News the carrying fees that are really Fox’s bread and butter, far more than ad revenue. Are you aware that you, reader, if you are a cable or satellite subscriber, pay Fox News about $20 a month? If the jury finds against Fox, pressure must mount for that to end as well.

A verdict against Fox rips down the veil. Nobody will have to pretend anymore. And we should make the demand of our real news organizations that they too stop pretending. Rupert’s Reign of Terror can be ended.

It’s hard to imagine but we can dream…

I know I’m probably paying way to much attention to Tucker Carlson lately but he’s an especially dangerous force in our politics and half the time he’s an Orbanesque white nationalist and the rest of the time he’s just nuts. I don’t know quite what to make of it but I feel instinctively that we shouldn’t look away. There’s something going on here and it’s not good.

Philip Bump looked at the numbers and it’s worth taking note:

In the right-wing media universe, the 500-pound gorilla is now and has long been Fox News. There have been challengers, certainly, including some robust ones. Breitbart’s effectiveness in pulling rhetoric from the fringe into the mainstream conversation about a decade ago, for example, and cable news start-ups like One America and Newsmax more recently. But Fox News has weathered such challenges through co-option, heft, institutional support and combinations of the three. So, when Republicans are asked where they get their news, they are most likely to say Fox.

And within the Fox News universe, the 500-pound gorilla is Tucker Carlson.

It used to be the case that the most-watched host on the network was Sean Hannity. His prime-time opinion show (using Fox’s gauzy differentiation from its purportedly objective news programming) was not only the top show on Fox but, from 2017 to 2020, the most-watched show on cable news overall.

But that was the era of Donald Trump, who operated in symbiosis with Hannity. After running neck-and-neck with Hannity in 2020, Carlson passed Hannity in annual average viewers the following year, a lead he held in 2022.

Carlson also generates more attention in general. In 2020, Carlson started generating more search interest on Google than Hannity, a lead he has maintained every month of President Biden’s tenure in office.

Carlson achieved this position in large part because he retains credibility as someone who wants to tear down the establishment. Hannity’s loyalty to Trump ensnared him in the new GOP firmament, leading the Fox host to line up behind Trump’s endorsed candidates for office and to reflexively defend the president (and former president) as needed. His effort to cater to his audience meant Trump loyalty. Carlson’s approach is different, picking up the rhetoric that propelled Trump to the White House — the entire system is corrupt and the elites are trying to destroy you — and deploying it against all comers.

His disparagement of the powers-that-be is often starkly — or obnoxiously — articulated in service of his us-vs.-them framework. He’s taken to describing a loosely aggregated group of international business and political leaders — the sorts of people who attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for example — as “lizard overlords.” On Wednesday night, he suggested that this vague group was for some reason trying to limit the ability of people to access cash, a discussion that occurred over on-screen text reading: “IT’S LOOKING MORE LIKELY THAT WE WILL SEE THE DAY WHEN OUR LIZARD OVERLORDS BAN CASH.”

Carlson has a track record of incorrect predictions (like his recent insistence that there would be violent protests after the release of video showing the police beating of Tyre Nichols), but he never allows that to encumber him.

This reflexive opposition to the elites in power, and his willingness to move individuals into and out of that group as it becomes useful, has led Carlson to some unusual positions. His autocratic sympathies are unsubtle; he’s offered fawning interviews to leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, people who contest the Western leaders Carlson disdains. He has explicitly rationalized the Russian invasion of Ukraine on multiple occasions, making his commentary a regular feature of state-run programming in Russia.

It’s hard to disentangle his support for Russia: Is it enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic approach to governance? Is it that Russia is fiercely committed to kneecapping the same group of Western elites as Carlson? The trigger isn’t obvious, but the effect is. Carlson is a nexus of skepticism about Ukraine, and that has drawn him closer to politicians on the right-most fringe of the Republican Party who echo or share his position. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who parlayed her large platform of support to ally closely with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), is a frequent Carlson guest and a vocal opponent of funding for Ukraine’s military.

This week, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, a member of that country’s Conservative Party, came to Washington. During an event Wednesday at the Atlantic Council about the war in Ukraine, Johnson called out Carlson specifically for both his position on the invasion — and for his grip on the American right.

“I’ve been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. Has anybody heard of somebody called — has anybody heard of Tucker Carlson?” Johnson joked in response to a question about responding to Russian aggression. “What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his — by his perspective.”

“I haven’t watched anything that he’s said,” Johnson continued. “But I I’m struck by how often this comes up. Some bad ideas are getting into — starting to infect some of the thinking around the world about what Putin stands for, what he believes in. It’s a disaster. He stands for war, aggression, systematic murder, rape and destruction. That’s what he stands for.”

Carlson, of course, seized upon the comments in his show later that night.

“Former British prime minister Boris Johnson rolled, sashayed into Washington yesterday,” Carlson began. He said that he’d invited Johnson on the program only to learn, a few hours beforehand, that Johnson was going to pass. Carlson framed this as: “Boris Johnson, reputed to be the smartest leader of any English-speaking country in the world, did not want to publicly defend his position on Ukraine. He was afraid to take questions about it.”

Then he showed a clip of Johnson’s comments.

“All these cowards in Washington are afraid of this show, Boris Johnson said derisively,” Carlson said. “Yet somehow he never mentioned that he is one of them.”

Carlson, understandably, framed this as being a function of timidity, instead of a function of dismissiveness. And to support the idea that Johnson was afraid, he suggested that Johnson was “trying to sell lawmakers on a new world war.”

“Millions would die in the war that Boris Johnson is promoting,” Carlson claimed at one point. “The public has a right to know. Why are we doing this before it starts? And as you can probably tell, it looks like it’s starting very soon.” He added that there’s “no popular support in this country or in any country in Europe for what Boris Johnson is now pushing.”

This is how it works. Carlson casts Johnson as part of The Elite and, specifically, as someone who wants a full-scale conflict between Russia and the West. There’s no validity to this; it’s just Carlson extrapolating out from a consensus position — we should support Ukraine militarily — to an imagined one.

He’s been offering similar warnings since the earliest days of the war. He or his guests warned that the conflict could lead to World War III on March 4, March 10, March 15, March 16, March 22, March 25 and March 28 of last year — and that was just March.

Johnson’s message was clear, even if off the cuff: There’s no reason to fear this guy. But Carlson’s response shows why so many people do. Carlson will claim that the worst possible thing will happen and that his opponents are participants in schemes that seek to ensure the worst possible outcomes for average Americans. He has invested years in stoking a sense among his viewers that wealthy political and business leaders are not only indifferent to them but actively hostile, and it’s trivial to simply slot new characters into this cabal. It’s a Ship of Theseus approach to fearmongering: The constituent elements aren’t even the point.

It’s made him the biggest force on the cable news channel that’s the biggest force in his political universe. And while Johnson is obviously right, it’s hard to imagine that his comments about Carlson will have the desired effect. Carlson’s talking to millions of people a night. Republicans are therefore more worried about what he might say than what Johnson already did.

Are they really worried? I don’t know. He hob-b=mobs with Trump and DeSantis has been on his show many, many times. Cui bono?

I’m fairly sure most of you don’t watch Fox News or other right wing media. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to . But I think it’s important to pass on at least some of what they’re doing so we know where Republican voters are getting some of this stuff. Here’s Tucker Carlson this week proposing that the US invade Canada:

Tucker Carlson on Thursday called for the U.S. to invade Canada and remove Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Fox News host claimed he meant it before saying he was talking himself “into a frenzy.” 

During Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Today,” Carlson referenced the arrests last year of anti-vax truckers in Canada. The demonstrators paralyzed commerce and won over extremists with their traffic-tying protests of COVID-19 safety measures. At the time, Carlson said the country had become a dictatorship because the government took action.

And now he suggested he’d like to do something about it.

“I’m completely in favor of a Bay of Pigs operation to liberate that country,” Carlson said. “Why should we stand back and let our biggest trading partner … why should we let it become Cuba? Like, why don’t we liberate it? We’re spending all this money to liberate Ukraine from the Russians. Why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau? And I mean it.”

The right-wing personality then laughed and said, “I’m just talking myself into a frenzy here.”

A Bay of Pigs operation? Sounds great. What could go wrong?

It’s tempting to think that Carlson is just joking or trolling at worst. But he’s really off the deep end in a dozen different ways and I don’t think people who watch him see him as a comedian. Here are just a few other example from the last week:

Those are just two. Here are a few more from Tuck and other Fox News hosts from this week.

I had always assumed that Carlson was joking most of the time, sticking it to the libs and tongue in cheek. But I don’t think that anymore. I think he’s truly drawn to the Viktor Orban ideology and is quite serious about pushing that agenda. I also think he’s hungry for big money, (That New York Times profile from a few months ago makes that clear.) But I’m increasingly convinced that he’s going nuts. I mean that in a purely clinical sense of the word. He’s unstable. Watch that video and hear his looney laughter. He does that all the time and it’s extremely creepy. I don’t think he can help it.

I guess the big question is what so many people see in this guy. They love to watch him and I don’t think it’s in a train wreck sort of way. They truly think he’s telling them something important. They believe him.

Tucker Carlson has a sick obsession with Ukraine. He even went after his erstwhile ally Lindsey Graham over it this week in an extremely crude fashion:

On Thursday, Carlson attacked Graham over his support for U.S. aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia, which invaded the country in February. The Fox News host’s remarks came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress.

Graham had said the war will end when President Vladimir Putin is no longer in power. Carlson said calling for regime change in Russia is wrongheaded.

“So, the other day Lindsey Graham came out–” Carlson began, taking a long pause “–the Republican from South Carolina, and said that he agreed with Joe Biden and Zelensky.”

Some have speculated about the sexuality of Graham, who is a bachelor.

“And you don’t want to play shrink and wonder about, you know, what emptiness at the core of Lindsey Graham’s personal life causes him to identify so strongly with a country he’s not a citizen of,” Carlson declared. “Something’s going on there.”

I mean … that’s Fox News saying that, not some snarky blogger.

Greg Sargent took a deeper dive into Carlson’s Ukraine crusade and it’s disturbing:

After Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a rousing speech to U.S. lawmakers this week, Tucker Carlson unleashed a diatribe that put schoolyard sadists everywhere to shame. “No one’s ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before,” he seethed, slamming Zelensky as a “strip club” manager whose presence was “humiliating” to “the greatest country on Earth.”

Carlson’s attack on the Ukrainian president, whose olive green garb was meant to dramatize his country’s wartime plight, has sparked outrage because of its demeaning quality at a time of extraordinary duress for the Ukrainian people. But this episode deserves a deeper look than Carlson’s adolescent belittling usually merits.

Carlson’s rant carried a more hateful edge than usual, a kind of shrill fury. Perhaps that’s because Zelensky’s presence before Congress was far more humiliating to Carlson and his ideological comrades than to anyone else: It demonstrated how badly they misjudged Ukraine’s will to resist Russian conquest and the durability of the U.S. commitment to our beleaguered ally.

This represents the failure of a worldview, a strain of far-right authoritarian populism, that goes well beyond Ukraine. A whole lot of things have happened that — in Carlson’s mental universe — were not supposed to happen.

In his diatribe, Carlson depicted Zelensky as little more than a sleazy street thug who had come to “demand money” from Congress, telling his audiencethat thelawmakers “love him much more than they love you.” He exaggerated Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war, depicting Ukraine as the unreasonable party.

Carlson has long insisted that Ukrainians are “pawns” in the United States’ quest for “regime change” in Russia, predicting our warmongering would trigger nuclear catastrophe. He has trivialized the invasion as a faraway “border dispute,” and has scoffed that Democrats are hypnotizing Americans into feeling “hate” for Russia.

Carlson’s obvious bet has been that voters wouldn’t care about the conflict and would see little virtue in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Lawmakers would ultimately abandon the cause.

But Zelensky’s appearance itself forcefully repudiated all of this. It demonstrated that Ukrainian resistance is driven by its people’s own extraordinarily courageous commitment to self rule. It showed that U.S. support for Ukraine is unwavering. It displayed the success of President Biden’s careful balance, which has enabled Ukraine to regain substantial ground while avoiding direct U.S. escalation, refuting Carlson’s predictions otherwise.

There is an ideology behind all that wrongness, and Carlson has clearly laid it out. It tells Americans that Democratic elites prioritize Ukraine’s border over our own — they love Zelensky more than they love you. Thisconflation of the two borders, a widespread right-wing populist trope, encourages Americans to turn inward in multiple ways, washing our hands of responsibility for international allies and desperate migrants alike.

This worldview also rails against elite wokeness. Carlson frequently tells viewers that the same elites who want people to hate Russia and are obliterating the southern border are also brainwashing kids with anti-White racism.

As Cathy Young writes at the Bulwark, right-wing populist distaste for Zelensky is driven partly by Ukraine’s desire for integration with the liberal, secular, internationalism-minded West. That through-line links attacks on elite wokeness, pro-Ukraine sentiment and receptiveness to migration.

As a political argument, all this has proved pretty impotent.

Just before the midterm elections, Carlson wrongly predicted a “humiliating repudiation” for Democrats. Importantly, Carlson based this in part on Democrats’ wokeness and border policies, hubristically certain that voters would reject both.

The piece then lays out the record of Carlson’s electoral losses here and around the world and his assaults on the January 6th Committee and the Mar-a-Lago case. It’s almost as bad as Trump’s.

There have been a number of long form profiles of Carlson over the past year or so since he’s become the most popular cable news host in America. He hob nobs with all kinds of influential wingnuts and openly endorses the Victor Orban white nationalist ideology. And he’s apparently really obsessed with making money. So his motives all seem on the surface to be rational, if evil.

But I have to say that more and more I think there’s actually something wrong with him. Taking that kind of swipe at Graham doesn’t appear to me to be calculated, That’s the kind of thing a 13 year old says when they’re experiencing an emotional tidal wave. It’s possible that he thought it through as a way to tickle the pro-Putin, anti-gay, anti-RINO lizard brain but that’s a stretch. It sounds like he was just having a bit of a tantrum.

Not that it matters. He is a blight on American politics, a Father Coughlin for our times. He’s showing that there are no limits for him. He’s dangerous.

If you’d like to slip a little something into the Hullabaloo stocking to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can hit one of the buttons below. Happy Hollandaise!

This piece by JV Last about DeSantis’s latest stunt with the vaccines is excellent:

Short version: DeSantis made a series of announcements this week about how he’s going to go after the Deep Science Big Elites or whatever by:

Seeking a grand jury to potentially prosecute the manufacturers of COVID vaccines.
Investigating “cardiac-related deaths” linked to COVID vaccines.
Standing up a “Public Health Integrity Committee” to oversee the medical establishment.

In a minute we’ll talk about the merits of these ideas. But let’s start with the fact that none of these proposals will amount to anything. Which is perfectly in line with the DeSantis modus operandi: big, performative, shit-stirring uses of government power—that are quickly (and quietly) walked back, overturned, or abandoned.

Remember the Stop WOKE Act? It was DeSantis’s big anti-CRT-in-schools legislation. (This was back when CRT was the most important issue facing the republic.) It was stopped by the courts because it is flatly and obviously unconstitutional.

Remember when DeSantis punished Disney for opposing his Don’t Say Gay law by revoking the company’s Reedy Creek special tax district? Yeah, that’s going by the wayside because it wasn’t thought out and would wind up costing Florida taxpayers money. The face-saving climbdown spin seems to be that DeSantis is reconsidering because Disney has changed CEOs and it was the old CEO whom he wanted to punish.1

And how about DeSantis’s mass “voter fraud” arrests, which managed to round up a bunch of people who don’t look like they live in the Villages on trumped-up voter-fraud charges? Yeah, those cases are falling apart in court because they had no basis in law.

Oh—and don’t forget the DeSantis promise to ship immigrants out of Florida after his stunt sending asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard blew up in his face.

This is what he does. And his anti-vaccine programs are no different. No vaccine maker will be prosecuted in Florida. There will be no peer-reviewed research showing that the risks of vaccine side effects were greater than the benefits. A “Public Health Integrity Committee” will not interfere with the practice of medicine in Florida.

And that’s by design.

The impracticability of DeSantis’s abuses of power are a win-win situation for him with Republican voters. They’re the governing version of shitposting.

The MAGA nationalists get stroked by them. And by the time the abuse of power is countered, DeSantis has given them a tease in some other erogenous zone. He’s edging the MAGAs and they are into it.

As for Team Normal, they look at his abuses of power and say,

“See? Nothing ever comes of it. The system holds. The guardrails work. And he probably doesn’t even mean it. He’s just doing this performative stuff for the rubes. If anything, these performances are good because they’re helping him detach the base from Trump!”

Might DeSantis actually mean it? Or, if he doesn’t mean it now, is it possible that humans are mimetic creatures and the principle of fake-it-until-you-make can be true for both good and evil?

These concerns are dismissed out of hand.

Gotta support the team, bruh.

And the COVID stuff? My God: More than a million Americans died from it. People still die from it every day. And DeSantis is playing games with this disease.

Yep. Team Normal is just as culpable. Whether Trump or DeSantis, the team comes first. And the team, my friends, is being coached by right wing loons and fascists.

The point about using the power of the state to shitpost and troll is a good one. It is the fundamental difference between Trump and DeSantis. For the former it’s all personal and he focuses his fire on individuals. They love to yell “lock her up” about the hated Clinton, for instance , or “Prosecute Fauci!” They need a face to hate. It’s Trump’s strength in a battle with DeSantis.

DeSantis uses the power of the state to go after the institutions and ideas that people like Tucker Carlson are targeting. It hasn’t worked out very well so far, but I think it is a portent of the future. This is where Trumpism is going — it’s American Orbanism.

And as Last concludes, it’s particularly odious:

The DeSantis stuff especially grinds my gears because he’s not shitposting on Twitter—he’s using the awesome power of the state to hurt real people. The alleged vote fraudsters? These were actual human beings with jobs and families. The asylum seekers from Venezuela he tricked into going to Martha’s Vineyard? They’re folks who braved unimaginable horrors to escape an ugly dictatorship.

And the COVID stuff? My God: More than a million Americans died from it. People still die from it every day. And DeSantis is playing games with this disease.

And, by the way, this doesn’t exactly help. It gives Team Normal and the members of the GOP who “just want to win” a way to rationalize DeSantis’ grotesque posturing: “see, he doesn’t really mean it.”

It’s Happy Hollandaise time at Hullabaloo! If you’d like to put a little something in the old stocking it would be most appreciated:

Michelangelo Signorele has a scoop. And it has the wingnuts hopping mad:

On his first Fox News broadcast following the November 19th mass shooting at Club Q, the LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs in which five people were murdered and at least 17 were injured, Tucker Carlson was undaunted, continuing his relentless smearing of LGBTQ people as “groomers” who are dangerous to children. 

After a perfunctory condemnation of the violence, Carlson pivoted back to railing against “drag time story hour for fifth graders” and “genital mutilation of minors” while a graphic image behind him blared, “STOP SEXUALIZING KIDS.”

The following night, Carlson promoted the grotesque view that the staff and patrons of Club Q — where a drag performance was scheduled on that Saturday night of the attack — had it all coming to them. He brought on a guest who said the shooting was “expected and predictable,” and that “it won’t stop until we end this evil agenda that is attacking children.”

Twisted enough. But even more shocking is the little-known fact that a gay man helped craft, mold and disseminate these bloodcurdling distortions and the horrendous demonization against his own community. 

A gay man supercharges Carlson’s promotion of Florida’s odious “don’t say gay” law, which stigmatizes queer kids, teachers and parents — a brutal campaign in which Carlson at one point said teachers who don’t comply “should get beaten up.” And a gay man empowers Carlson’s crusade against trans teens and and their parents, a crusade in which Carlson stated that hospitals should expect violent threats for providing gender-affirming care.

That gay man, Justin Wells, helped promulgate the kind of hate that leads to violence. A mass shooting that happened in the same kind of nightclub at which Wells, in years past, danced the night away in Miami Beach and elsewhere, liberating himself from the world outside and surely never imagining he’d be shot dead.

Now he’s aided the extremists who deny that sense of safety and liberation to every future generation of queer people.

Wells runs the entire Tucker Carlson operation, and is responsible for imprinting the Tucker Carlson brand, which is all about emboldening white heterosexual male grievance, furthering the racist conspiracy of  “replacement theory” and pushing an increasingly virulent anti-LGBTQ agenda. Wells is Senior Executive Producer of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and also holds the title of Vice President of Tucker Carlson Digital Products.

“He’s been promoted to a level that no other producer has been since, maybe, David Tabocoff at O’Reilly,” a former Fox employee told me, describing how Tabocoff, who was at Fox with Bill O’Reilly for 16 years, produced O’Reilly’s shows, all of his various specials and interviews, and oversaw his entire brand, including his merchandising. 

“I think that Justin has more power than Tabby [Tabacoff] ever had,” another Fox employee, a former producer, countered. “And there’s not another show that out-rates it. Influence-wise, everyone who’s conservative wants to be on Tucker.” Indeed, Wells has his own website, independent of Fox News’s site, JustinWells.com, something that surprised the former Fox News producer.

On the site, Wells touts his accomplishments: “Television Creator & Journalist. Senior Executive Producer & Vice President at Fox News Media.” It brims with photos meant to convey his power and importance: Wells, out on remotes with Carlson, helping to craft the story; Wells, shoulder-to-shoulder with military Special Forces in front of their Airbus chopper; and Wells, meeting with former President Donald Trump. The site describes Wells as “leading the Tucker Carlson Team across multiple platforms at Fox News Media,” and lays out the Carlson Fox empire he oversees.

Angelo Carusone, President and CEO of Media Matters, the media watchdog group that is laser-focused on Fox News and Carlson, observed, “It’s unlikely that any narrative would get broadcast by Tucker without significant buy-in from Justin.” In a clip highlighted by Media Matters in which Wells was interviewed by Carlson on Carlson’s show last year as Carlson’s Fox Nation documentaries began launching, Wells brags about the latitude Fox News executives give him: “They believe in what we’re doing and have since we launched ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’”

It’s beyond horrific to think a gay man has helped to shape and widely disseminate a message of hate against LGBTQ people. This story is not, however, about a warped closet case, tormented by self-loathing, hiding his true self while bashing those like him. And thus, this story is not an outing, which involves exposing someone who covers up their sexual orientation while publicly presenting as heterosexual — though it certainly may be a startling revelation to a great many. It is, rather, about connecting the dots regarding a reality that seems to have been hiding in plain sight.

Wells has been married to another man for almost 10 years, and they openly celebrated their wedding among family and friends. They live together in a residence they purchased in New York shortly after they married. And they also own a country home together, with both names on the deed.

I have reviewed the relevant marriage and property data, and have viewed evidence of their publicly sharing their wedding day with friends. (I’m not referencing this information, nor reporting Wells’ spouse’s name, to protect the spouse’s privacy.)

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I’ve also spoken with individuals who knew Wells in years past, including former Fox News colleagues and members of NLGJA, the association of LGBTQ journalists, a well-known and highly-public organization to which Wells apparently was once a member and a group whose events he most definitely attended over a decade ago. (These people spoke only without attribution because they are either former Fox employees who signed non-disclosure agreements or work for other news organizations, or both.)

Contacted for a response, neither Wells nor his representative offered a statement.

Wells, a veteran Fox News producer who cut his teeth at Fox as a field producer on Greta Van Susteren’s “On the Record” from 2008 until 2016, not only launched “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as Carlson’s executive producer, heading the program’s team in 2016; he became indispensable and in 2018 was given the loftier title of Senior Executive Producer. And as Carlson further pushed white nationalism, attacked transgender people and embraced Hungary’s authoritarian leader Victor Orban, Wells, in 2021, was named a Vice President at Fox News, in charge of all Carlson product that airs on Fox News TV as well as on Fox’s streaming network, Fox Nation.

Wells’ Twitter feed shows how he ramped up Twitter activity in early 2021, after years of relative dormancy after Van Susteren’s show ended, around the time of his promotion to VP and the launching of the Carlson Fox Nation projects. Twitter is also a place where far-right conservatives lobby Wells for coveted coverage on Carlson’s show, and where some even complain when they don’t get it.

Dinesh D’Souza @DineshDSouza

If you want to see how abusively @TuckerCarlson and his @FoxNews team deal with people, read this thread. It’s an exchange between me and Tucker’s executive producer @justinbwells1:16 PM ∙ May 13, 202212,986Likes4,555Retweets

In an exchange he tweeted out earlier this year, far-right conservative Dinesh D’Sousa, who made the bonkers election denial documentary “2000 Mules”, quoted a response he received from Wells as he tried to promote the film: “Dinish. Justin Wells here. VP and EP of everything in the Tucker world. I just want you to know that I/we won’t forget your little stunt today. If you want to decide how much time to give content on the most watched show in America–then I suggest you produce one in the future.”

Before joining Fox News 14 years ago, Wells, as his Linkedin page describes, worked in news at several local TV stations, mostly in Florida. He’d grown up in St. Petersburg, and worked for stations in Tampa, Miami and West Palm Beach. Colleagues remember him out on the gay nightclub and bar scene on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach with his boyfriend of the time, also a TV journalist.

They both became involved in NLGJA, attending events and traveling to conferences, though the boyfriend was, according to these people, more involved. NLGJA, like many such groups, provides networking and connection, and a social life of gatherings and parties. (I’ve attended and spoken at NLGJA events on and off over the years; I have no recollection of having met or known of Wells or his then-boyfriend.)

“I always felt Justin was a little more buttoned up. Timid. Not quite as outgoing as [the boyfriend],” a member of NLGJA remembers, noting how it suited them as a couple. “It’s one of those things where I just saw them as a unit.”

Even after joining Fox in 2008, Wells apparently stayed involved in NLGJA at least for a little while, before breaking up with his long-time boyfriend. But he’s not had any involvement with the group for years, and certainly not since joining Carlson’s show. Some of those who knew Wells in years past are baffled.

A former Fox producer who socialized with Wells and his then-boyfriend remembers a “quiet dude, unassuming,” adding, “if you would have told me in 2008 [when we knew one another] that Justin would be the executive producer of the number one right-wing TV show in America, I would have said you’re out of your mind.”

“It really blows my mind that he — who he is as a person and what he does as a job — it’s beyond the scope,” said another former Fox employee who knew Wells, distinguishing between those working for someone like Carlson and others working at Fox.

“I don’t know if he’s just completely blinded by the money. It’s mind-boggling.” he said.

But not everyone is shocked. “It’s a very clear manifestation of someone who showed their true colors,” said a person in the industry who is highly respected, and who knew Wells for many years. This individual is referring to Wells sharing Carlson’s broader far-right views. “I’m not at all surprised. They are two peas in a pod. Simpatico.”

Still, it’s quite stunning that Wells would work for Carlson, who has a well-known history of visceral homophobia. That’s something that came to light again last year when it became known that Carlson had offered a tribute to Dan White, the assassin of San Francisco supervisor and gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk, in his college yearbook back in 1991, as well as to the late vociferously anti-gay Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who whipped up homophobia during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

I wrote about those jarring revelations when they surfaced last year, as well as about what I dubbed Carlson’s “pathological obsession with homosexuality” throughout his career. Carlson has expressed revulsion at homosexuality, and in one incident he reveled in a violent response. In a TV interview in 2007 he described having smashed a man’s head “against the stall” in a public rest room, after the man “bothered” him.

After an uproar, Carlson claimed the following day he was “assaulted” by the man, implying it was an act of self-defense. But in fact, according his own description, it was not: Carlson said he’d left the rest room after the man had “bothered” him, and then went back with a friend, explaining that they then “grabbed” the man and “hit him against the stall with his head.”

Given these sentiments and incidents, some might think it’s bizarre that Carlson would even want a gay man such as Wells around him. But Carlson also has always reveled in having members of minority groups he bashes standing up for him and against the group, sort of like trophies — much as Trump famously touted “Where’s my African-American?” at a rally, and used his friendship with Kanye West in the past as a way to claim he wasn’t racist. It’s certainly a power trip, having the loyalty of that individual and helping to legitimize pushing hate against the group.

In that respect, Wells, as a gay man, only emboldens Carlson further. He gives him permission to launch the ugly attacks and helps Carlson validate, for himself (and likely for executives at Fox News), the vitriol he espouses. That makes Justin Wells’ presence as the powerful gay man behind Tucker Carlson all the more newsworthy. And all the more dangerous.

Wow …

The right gets weirder

Digby posted Friday on Graham Gallagher’s observations at TNR of how the right has grown not just righter but weirder. From testicle tanning to vaccine hesitancy, the fringiest of the right (including Tucker Carlson) have embraced “pseudoscience, tantric spiritualism, and self-help.”

I’ve long described the left’s embrace of New Age spirituality as a reaction to feeling adrift in a world stripped of myths that supply meaning, as an attempt to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons. As usual, the right is a couple of decades late to the party.

Thus has the right moved from wearing their patriotism on the sleeves (figuratively) to outright rejection of Americanness (except as a cheap flag pin) and embrace of rule by strongmen if not full-on, medieval-style monarchy. Peasants want democracy, not aristocrats.

Allen West, the kookie former Texas Republican Party chair, has joined a self-styled Knights Templar, for heaven’s sake. The real ones disbanded in 1312, Gallagher writes.

“John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote,” Gallagher observes:

Perhaps the most pernicious element of right-wing weirdness occurs at the intersection of standard traditionalist opposition to equal gender roles and an online youth subculture that has sought to make women’s disempowerment trendy. The idea of the “trad wife”—women who embrace subservient roles as homemakers and mothers, eschewing political leadership and careers—stands, like many of the weird right’s shibboleths, at the crossroads of internet meme, sociological critique, and political program. Trad wives are a pastiche of the idyll of the 1950s housewife and the imagined premodern agrarian mother, realities that only fully existed in advertisements and storybooks. They usually espouse complete submissiveness to husbands and a totalizing dedication to raising children.

That paragraph stood out because I’d just seen this TikTok video by Rebecca Larsen. She warns conservative women that their perceptions of being superior to others blinds them to the fact that conservative men with their manly tanned testicles view them as inferiors, as accessories.

There was more:

Trad wife aesthetics are partly a result of right-wing influencers’ embrace of traditionalist religious attitudes. The embrace of traditionalist Catholicism and the rise of integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule—who espouses a quasi-theocracy that even the conservative stalwart George Will has said is “un-American”—are critical pieces of the aesthetic and moral revanchism now in vogue on the right.

The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources. Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in. Mr. West may still make the usual overtures to Americana in press releases, but the Knights Templar (so far as I know) never made it to Texas.

That idealization of the European right has led not just to the fetishization of historical monarchism—cheerled by figures like the reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin—but to more immediate fascination with contemporary autocrats, especially Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

It was just Thursday that I reminded yet again:

The royalist strain is as persistent in American culture and politics as the paranoid style. Loyalists made up about 20 percent of the population during the Revolution. That figure reflects a similar proportion of those sentiments extant today.

Conservatives keep confirming that assessment. The only thing American about them beside their boasting is their birth certificates.

As the right mainstreams its bizarre counter-culture is it becoming too weird for America?

I think this guy may be on to something. For all the talk about the left and its allegedly counter-productive embrace of tolerance, check out what the right is signing on to these days.

An inkling of the Republican Party’s shocking underperformance in the midterms could be seen in a literal, not figurative, crusade. Allen West, former congressman and Texas Republican Party chairman, decided in September that the time was ripe to join the Knights Templar, the infamous sect of medieval soldier-monks. Photographed standing in a white robe emblazoned with a red cross draped jauntily over his tuxedo, West—a close ally of Donald Trump—tweeted that he had taken “an oath to protect the Christians in the Holy Land.”

The real Knights Templar, of course, were dissolved in 1312. The organization West joined is an American-based “chivalric order” that grants its members “knighthood” and, aside from its name, shares nothing with the actual Knights Templar.

West’s bizarre fascination with the imagery of medieval Europe does not exist in a vacuum: The right is getting weirder. That might begin to cost Republicans elections in years to come and undermine their own appeals to American patriotism in a way policy extremism alone could not. American voters see the political parties as equally extreme in policy, ignoring evidence that Republicans have moved right much faster than Democrats have moved left. However, a party fixated on genital sunning, seed oils, Catholic integralism, European aristocracy, and occultism can alienate voters not because of its positions but because of how it presents them—and itself. Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites, there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.

This is a different—though parallel—phenomenon from the often raucous, conspiratorial personality cult that surrounds Donald Trump and his devoted base. This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy.

The ascendant weird right will likely struggle to sell its deeply anti-patriotic vision to many voters. In these segments of the mostly young, online-influenced American right, the optimistic vision espoused by Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” has been discarded. The elite educated right has moved even beyond the overt pessimism of Donald Trump’s “American carnage”—now disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance is commonplace. Fed by an endless outrage cycle and a motivated and well-resourced donor class willing to pour money into increasingly reactionary think tanks like the avowedly anti-democratic Claremont Institute, right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms. Today, the right has shed its American and conservative roots and seeks a radical shift—a national “refounding.” Indeed, leading right-wing intellectuals like John Daniel Davidson have said that “the conservative project has failed” and that people like them constitute the educated vanguard of a “revolutionary moment.”

As we can now see—with even greater clarity—in the wake of the election, American voters respond poorly to a toxic brew of pessimism; the promise of radical cultural transformation; and the imposition of foreign ideas, values, and aesthetics. Nine in 10 Americans believe that being “truly American” involves respecting “American political institutions and laws,” the Public Religion Research Institute found last year. Americans consistently affirm that liberty, equality, and progress—the core values of republicanism and the Enlightenment—are ones they try to live by. While the content and meaning of those values have always been contested terrain, opposing them is a nonstarter.

The weird elite right risks losing these “normie” (as it calls them) Americans as it embraces what is fundamentally a niche subculture. The toxic far-right ideas that percolate in online youth communities and among cloistered college-educated young Republicans have not remained there—increasingly they have spilled out to influence policy and may have been deciding factors in close races this year.

John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat, founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The country, he said, had “suffered” from women’s suffrage. He narrowly lost his bid. Blake Masters and J.D. Vance—two Republican candidates for Senate funded in part by tech billionaire and new-right linchpin Peter Thiel—have embraced new-right ideas and actively courted the “weird right.” Vance has questioned whether women should leave violent marriages; Masters has praised domestic terrorist Theodore Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, argued against legal access to contraception, and openly said that democracy is a smokescreen for the masses “stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.” (Americans on balance like democracy; legal contraception is almost universally popular; and Kaczynski’s unpopularity is so widely assumed that pollsters rarely ask about him.) Masters, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost his bid to unseat Mark Kelly, and Vance badly underperformed in his blood-red home state.

The most outwardly visible element of the extremely online weird right is its often nonsensical lifestyle and consumption habits. The subculture has not only embraced vaccine hesitancy—once primarily a creature of the left—but also fringe health and dietary practices that recall the wildest excesses of 1960s new age spiritualism. The claims are varied and, to differing degrees, absurd: Real men don’t eat soybeans; seed oils are dangerous; meat substitutes will turn men into women and also are made from bugs (they aren’t); the best diet is all-meat. This is no mere online phenomenon: Representative Ronnie Jackson of Texas has stated that if one eats artificially cultured meat, “you’ll turn into a SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT.”

These trends are partly the result of declining social trust among conservatives. Loss of trust, in this case, manifests as hardening the body as a site of personal control. Health, arguably, is not the point—rather, expressing gender identity is. This is certainly true of “testicular tanning,” the belief that exposing the testicles to direct sunlight boosts testosterone (and therefore “manliness”), an idea that blends pseudoscience, tantric spiritualism, and self-help. Even this has not remained confined to the internet: Tucker Carlson has discussed it seriously.

Perhaps the most pernicious element of right-wing weirdness occurs at the intersection of standard traditionalist opposition to equal gender roles and an online youth subculture that has sought to make women’s disempowerment trendy. The idea of the “trad wife”—women who embrace subservient roles as homemakers and mothers, eschewing political leadership and careers—stands, like many of the weird right’s shibboleths, at the crossroads of internet meme, sociological critique, and political program. Trad wives are a pastiche of the idyll of the 1950s housewife and the imagined premodern agrarian mother, realities that only fully existed in advertisements and storybooks. They usually espouse complete submissiveness to husbands and a totalizing dedication to raising children.

By removing women from the labor market and circumscribing women’s social roles, the movement offers the illusion of sanctuary from modern woes and economic demands. It goes beyond simply reacting to perceived leftist excesses and embraces a sociopolitical program that would, if enacted, essentially remove the ability of American women to determine the course of their own lives—making them, once again, primarily subservient to and dependent upon male breadwinners. Millions of Americans are stay-at-home parents; most would likely be ill suited to the trad wife’s world. The aesthetics of trad wives are intertwined with darker impulses on the activist right toward a state that legally mandates specific gender roles—a form of recontainment that traps women in marriages and bars them from basic autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Women’s and reproductive rights are areas where meme-infused weirdness and actual policy align to set the right against most American voters. When right-wing writers like National Review’s Nate Hochman argue that no-fault divorce was “a tragic mistake” (a view shared by numerous other far-right figures), he is not only embracing a position outside the bounds of conventional American life but one that is deeply politically unpopular, opposed by at least four-fifths of Americans. The activist right’s legal alternative is “covenant marriage,” which allows divorce only under extreme circumstances like felony conviction or child abuse. Covenant marriage has recently made its way into the Texas Republican Party’s official platform as a replacement for existing marriage law.

Trad wife aesthetics are partly a result of right-wing influencers’ embrace of traditionalist religious attitudes. The embrace of traditionalist Catholicism and the rise of integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule—who espouses a quasi-theocracy that even the conservative stalwart George Will has said is “un-American”—are critical pieces of the aesthetic and moral revanchism now in vogue on the right.

The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources. Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in. Mr. West may still make the usual overtures to Americana in press releases, but the Knights Templar (so far as I know) never made it to Texas.

That idealization of the European right has led not just to the fetishization of historical monarchism—cheerled by figures like the reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin—but to more immediate fascination with contemporary autocrats, especially Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

One such admirer is Nick Fuentes, a prominent activist among college Republicans and also a white supremacist and antisemite who has become cozy with some congressional Republicans. Fuentes has praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “We continue to support czar Putin in the war effort,” Fuentes said, saying Putin would “liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States.” In this narrative, Putin’s invasion is a component of a broader war against American influence and democratic values—a goal shared by Orbán’s government, which has promoted “illiberal democracy,” decried “race-mixing,” crushed freedom of speech, and curtailed LGBTQ rights. Naturally, the Conservative Political Action Conference was held in Hungary earlier this year.

Among Americans more generally, the right-wing embrace of Putin is dismally unpopular: Just 6 percent U.S. adults have a positive opinion of the Russian president, the Pew Research Center found this year. Meanwhile, the “MAGACommunism” movement has combined American nationalism with praise for another authoritarian leader despised by most Americans, China’s Xi Jinping.

An awful lot of people do think the left is nothing but old hippies, drag queens and Black panthers which still freaks them out. The truth is that the left does have plenty of old liberals, LGBTQ people and Black activists and most Americans are fine with that. These are not ideas from outer space. They’re been percolating in American society for many decades and most people are familiar with it. Transgender issues are fairly new for most people but anyone who has kids sees that among the young it’s no big deal and are coming to accept that too.

The right on the other hand is …. this:

America has always had a fringe and they have always been plenty weird, right and left. But the mainstream of either side has never as openly embraced it as the right is today. As I wrote about below, Nick Fuentes — a real live Nazi who marched in Charlottesville and is an outright Holocaust denier had dinner with Donald Trump on Tuesday, along side Kanye West, noted antisemite and certified freak.

The mainstream media has an obligation to point this stuff out. I don’t know if it will get any more traction than their little pout that the Biden’s didn’t allow them to cover their granddaughter’s wedding so they could shout questions at Hunter Biden during the ceremony.

It’s working

The reason we know it’s working is because of the GOP reaction to the attack on Pelosi’s husband. Or rather the lackadaisical response. Donald Trump has not said a word. But he did re-post this on his Truth Social feed yesterday:

Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the current moment:

Autocrats and those who wish to join their ranks know that polarization is rarely enough to get people to commit unprecedented acts. To encourage political violence and exceptional measures — harming Pelosi or Capitol rioters chanting that they wanted to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence — you need to get people to feel like they are facing an existential threat. Survivalism goes beyond the “us or them in power” of polarization to a state of “it’s us or them, and only one of us will survive the encounter.” Its extreme rhetoric deliberately evokes fear and dread at losing something irreplaceable, at the obliteration of America.

Yes, polarization is on the rise around the world, thanks to disaffection with liberal democracy, rising economic inequality and social media’s exposure of billions to disinformation. But when illiberal politicians and their media allies move to destroy democracy, the creation of enemies and the fomenting of hostility enter a different phase. Political opponents are depicted as existential threats who must be stopped by any means possible.

One typical move, as practiced by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other authoritarians, is to designate pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations, investigative journalists and opposition politicians as “terrorists.” Another is to demonize those who hold different opinions about politics. With polarization, you move further apart but can still “agree to disagree.” That’s not an option in the survivalist universe. A political opponent becomes an enemy who threatens your freedoms and way of life. As dialogue disappears, violence becomes more likely.

In the U.S., Jan. 6 further radicalized the Republican Party and broke taboos about the use of violence against police and lawmakers. Trump’s speech was part of a concerted effort to make armed insurrection seem not just acceptable, but also patriotic — a way to save the country from the massive fraud he claimed without evidence was perpetrated by Joe Biden. The propaganda worked: A survey by the American Enterprise Institute conducted a month after the attack on the Capitol found that 39% of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.”

Keeping people in a state of fear and agitation about losing everything is essential to strongman strategy.

Survivalism is also central to many Republican messaging campaigns around immigration and the dire consequences of demographic change. The “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that white people will be extinguished in terms of birth and status in a minority-majority state, is now a mainstream belief among Republican lawmakers and media figures. Tucker Carlson, host of Fox News’ highest-rated show, has featured it in more than 400 episodes.

Survivalist fears related to population trends also motivate prominent Republicans. Conservative Political Action Conference Chairman Matt Schlapp, while hosting a conference that had a keynote address by Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, hailed the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade as a solution to America’s “population problem” — the argument being that abortion bans mean more white births. Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., called the same ruling “a historic victory for white life.”

That “us or them” mindset can encourage actions like the May 14 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which a white gunman who fatally shot 10 Black people intended to kill as many of “them” as possible. Similar motivations were cited in mass shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018 and El Paso, Texas, in 2019 (as well as shootings in Norway and New Zealand).

Polarization may earn headlines, but it does not in itself prompt a turn to action. An NBC News poll that tells us “70% agree with the statement that America is so polarized that it can no longer solve major issues facing the country” stops short of spelling out what may come next.

Keeping people in a state of fear and agitation about losing everything is essential to strongman strategy. It prepares the masses to accept violence as a means of solving problems — from elections that don’t go well for their party to living with a changing democratic reality. Where survivalism takes root, political violence can follow.