Jane Mayer’s New Yorkerreporting unmasks the dark money behind efforts to undermine faith in the American democratic process via endless audits of the 2020 election results. Many of the usual players, naturally, including the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Über-rich, right-wing “reactionaries” long to restore themselves to their rightful place in the firmament. As rulers.
As Greg Sargent notes, actually finding voter fraud unicorns is no longer their goal:
Instead, those making such accusations need to create just enough confusion to enable well-placed Republicans to say the actual outcome of a given election is fundamentally unknowable. The coin of the realm is not concocted proof; it’s manufactured uncertainty. This is what will lay the groundwork for attempting to overturn a future election.
As I have said for years, listen carefully for the weasel words in voting malfeasance stories circulated on the right. This or that perceived election discrepancy might be, may be, could be, possibly, or is potentially fraud. Precious few actuallies, with the notable exception of Bladen County, NC. Thus did a federal district judge dismiss as worthless Rudy Giuliani’s binderful of affidavits from people who saw something they thought meant something about which they knew nothing.
What matters to these saboteurs, Sargent writes, is the “manufacturing of fake reasons to keep alive baseless impressions of uncertainty, in the full knowledge that they are manufactured.” This is a dry run for 2022 and 2024, for “inventing new ways to say an outcome is unknowable, which would then justify efforts to resolve the outcome in some other way.”
This from people who know a zygote is a baby.
This week, neo-fascist Tucker Carlson is stroking the ego of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán in Budapest. “On paper,” writes Heather Cox Richardson, “Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by the prime minister.” That is where America’s kookocracy hopes to take this country:
Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”
No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012, his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to take power.
Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
Just as they pretend now to support this country’s founding documents and principles.
Currently, political patterns in America look much like those Orbán used to gather power into his own hands. Republican-dominated legislatures are passing new measures to suppress the vote, aided by the Big Lie that former president Trump did not lose the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters are focusing on the so-called “forensic audit” of Maricopa County in Arizona, paid for and conducted by Trump loyalists who insist that Trump actually won despite the repeated investigations that have proved the election was clean.
For Carlson to broadcast from Hungary at this time, says Richardson, seems to be “a deliberate demonstration of the Trump Republicans’ plans for our future.”
This appears to be quite a story and I’d imagine there’s even more to it than what they know.
Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.
The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.
The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiationof surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.Story continues below advertisement
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to the list and shared it with the news organizations, which did further research and analysis. Amnesty’s Security Lab did the forensic analyses on the smartphones.
The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials — including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list.
Among the journalists whose numbers appear on the list, which dates to 2016, are reporters working overseas for several leading news organizations, including a small number from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London and Al Jazeera in Qatar.
The targeting of the 37 smartphones would appear to conflict with the stated purpose of NSO’s licensing of the Pegasus spyware, which the company says is intended only for use in surveilling terrorists and major criminals. The evidence extracted from these smartphones, revealed here for the first time, calls into question pledges by the Israeli company to police its clients for human rights abuses.
The media consortium analyzed the list through interviews and forensic analysis of the phones, and by comparing details with previously reported information about NSO. Amnesty’s Security Lab examined 67 smartphones where attacks were suspected. Of those, 23 were successfully infected and 14 showed signs of attempted penetration.
For the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the phones had been replaced. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. However, unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty’s detective work. Three Android phones showed signs of targeting, such as Pegasus-linked SMS messages.
Amnesty shared backup copies of dataon four iPhones with Citizen Lab, which confirmed that they showed signs of Pegasus infection. Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that specializes in studying Pegasus, also conducted a peer review of Amnesty’s forensic methods and found them to be sound.Story continues below advertisement
NSO describes its customers as 60 intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies in 40 countries, although it will not confirm the identities of any of them, citing client confidentiality obligations. The consortium found many of the phone numbers in at least 10 country clusters, which were subjected to deeper analysis: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Citizen Lab also has found evidence that all 10 have been clients of NSO, according to Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow.
Forbidden Stories organized the media consortium’s investigation, titled the Pegasus Project, and Amnesty provided analysis and technical support but had no editorial input. Amnesty has openly criticized NSO’s spyware business and supported an unsuccessful lawsuit against the company in an Israeli court seeking to have its export license revoked. After the investigation began, several reporters in the consortium learned that they or their family members had been successfully attacked with Pegasus spyware.
The Guardian took a look at Tucker Carlson’s favorite right wing “populist”:
Viktor Orbán’s government has deployed a new weapon in its war on the media in Hungary, according to forensic analysis of several mobile devices, using some of the world’s most invasive spyware against investigative journalists and the circle of one of the country’s last remaining independent media owners…
The Pegasus project, a collaborative investigation run by the French nonprofit journalism organisation Forbidden Stories, has reviewed leaked records that suggest a wide range of people in Hungary were selected as potential targets before a possible hacking attempt with the sophisticated Pegasus spyware, sold by the Israeli company NSO Group. In a number of cases, forensic analysis confirmed devices had been infected with Pegasus.
The leaked data includes the phone numbers of people who appear to be targets of legitimate national security or criminal investigations.
However, the records also include the numbers of at least 10 lawyers, an opposition politician and at least five journalists.
The phones of two journalists at the Hungarian Pegasus project partner, the investigative outlet Direkt36, were successfully infected with the spyware, including Szabolcs Panyi, a well-known reporter with a wide range of sources in diplomatic and national security circles.
Forensic analysis of his device by Amnesty International stated conclusively it had been repeatedly compromised by Pegasus during a seven-month period in 2019, with the infection often coming soon after comment requests made by Panyi to Hungarian government officials.
Pegasus enables the attacker to view all content on a phone, including messages from apps with end-to-end encryption, photographs and GPS location data. It can also turn the device into an audio or video recorder. NSO has claimed the spyware is only meant for use against serious criminals and terrorists.
Panyi thinks some in the Orbán government believe independent journalists are part of a conspiracy against them. “I think there’s widespread paranoia and they see much more in our motives and our networks than there actually is,” he said.
“We are not aware of any alleged data collection claimed by the request,” said a Hungarian government spokesperson in response to detailed questions about the targeting of Panyi and others.
NSO Group said it “does not have access to the data of its customers’ targets”, cast doubt on the significance of the leaked data and said it would “continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action”.
Previously, Orbán’s spokesperson Zoltán Kovács has publicly attacked Panyi, accusing him of “Orbánophobia and Hungarophobia” and describing him as “deep into political activism”.
Since Orbán became prime minister in 2010, Hungary has fallen from 23rd to 92nd in the World Press Freedom Index. Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders put Orbán on its Enemies of Press Freedom list, the first time an EU leader has featured.
Tucker loves the guy because he is in favor of the “traditional family” to be supported by the government so women will stay home and have more white children. (I’m not making that up.) Trump’s cult would love an American Orbán. He knows how to do what’s necessary to protect their “status.” Tucker does too.
I had just finished watching some clips of Tucker Carlson when I came upon this twitter thread. For some reason it all seemed familiar:
The images I found researching my new Nazi May Day piece are really mindblowing. First up: socialist imagery plastered in swastikas. Then: swastikas on top of maypoles. The Nazis phased the holiday from the first to the second in order to supplant socialism with Völkisch fascism
Workers holding tools and red flags — classic May Day, except they’re surrounding Hitler and the flags have swastikas on them
Meanwhile, the trade unions were banned and replaced by the German Labor Front, whose flag appropriated classic workers’ movement imagery and paired it with the swastika
You can read about what the hell was going on here
Read the whole piece if you get a chance. It’s just fascinating. The Nazis were totally blatant about co-opting the rhetoric and imagery of their enemy and turning it into their own propaganda.
Our homegrown neo-fascists aren’t quite as good at it, but listen to Tucker Carlson some time as he uses left wing language and complaints against the left. Check out his paeans to Elizabeth Warren’s book some time. It’s chilling the way he twists her intent into an Viktor Orbanesque white nationalist call for women to leave the workplace and have many more children so the country can be repopulated with “Real Americans.” He knows what he’s doing.
The “you will not replace us” chants in Charlottesville were based on the great replacement theory. The El Paso shooter, a 21-year-old white man who killed 22 people, mentioned it in his manifesto. The Christ Church shooter cited it. This is dark, dark stuff. https://t.co/8POmNXTbvd
TUCKER CARLSON (GUEST): I’m laughing because this is one of about ten stories that I know you have covered where the government shows preference to people who have shown absolute contempt for our customs, our laws, our system itself and they are being treated better than American citizens.
Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term “replacement.” If you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. They become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Lets just say it that’s true.
…
If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. So I don’t understand why — everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it.
You know the white replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting right question. I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?
The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote. They are diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do it. Why are we putting up with this?
[T]he “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.
Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)
In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.
At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:
Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.
And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:
[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has spent years telling his audience that white supremacists do not pose a serious threat to the public. Even as Americans motivated by racist ideologies committed acts of domestic terror — including the January 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol — he was quick to scoff, arguing that Democrats and the press were exaggerating the threat for political gain. So after FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress the exact opposite on Tuesday, Carlson was left with three choices — admit that he was wrong, lie about what happened, or ignore it. He chose the latter path, preferring to devote his show to issues he apparently considered more pressing, like the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss.
Wray, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2017, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that white supremacist ideology “is a persistent, evolving threat” and is “the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio, if you will, overall.” He also said that the number of arrests of such persons have nearly tripled since his first year in office.
The FBI director further described the January 6 attack as “domestic terrorism” and that “racially motivated violent extremism, specifically advocating for the superior[ity] of the white race” motivated some alleged participants. Wray acknowledged that those white supremacists had been instrumental in the attack, even as he explained that “militia violent extremists” represented the “biggest bucket” of alleged perpetrators. He also knocked down conspiracy theories that had circulated on Fox and are now prevalent among Republicans that anti-fascist activists were responsible for the violence that day.
Wray’s comments on the threat posed by violent white supremacists were consistent with his September congressional testimony, in which he said that among domestic terrorist attacks, “racially motivated violent extremists … have been responsible for the most lethal activity in the U.S.” Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report in October, finding that white supremacists had committed more lethal attacks than any other domestic extremist movement. Then-acting Secretary Chad Wolf wrote in that report that he was “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.”
While CNN and MSNBC aired much of Wray’s Tuesday testimony live, Fox largely ignored it so its hosts could focus more time on culture war nonsense. That’s a shame. Fox’s viewers would have benefited from hearing Wray’s presentation, which debunked a number of myths about the January 6 attacks propagated by the network as it sought to retain viewers by downplaying an assault on American democracy.
Carlson bears a particular responsibility in this case. His frequentparroting of white supremacisttalking points has made him belovedwithin that bigoted community and reportedly triggered distress within Fox’s own ranks. And for the last several years — particularly since January 6 — he’s been telling his audience that Democrats and the press have vastly exaggerated concerns about white supremacists as part of a conspiracy against them.
He doesn’t want that information to go out to his audience because it would prove him an ass. Here’s an excerpt of something I wrote about Carlson a couple of years ago, in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting:
Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter’s online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of Fox network’s stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.
Media Matters cataloged some of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the most vociferous anti-immigrant pundits on Fox News:
And USA Today analyzed the president’s speeches since 2017 and found that he has “used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. But for all of the degrading language he’s deployed against immigrants and people of color, Trump has failed to adopt a very specific term that seemed defined the thesis of the El Paso shooter’s screed: “replacement.” However, if you watched that video above, you’ll have noticed that it’s used frequently on Fox News, particularly by Carlson.
It stands to reason that Trump wouldn’t have picked that up. It’s much too cerebral for him. After all, he didn’t understand that when the Charlottesville Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” they were talking about his own beloved daughter and son-in-law. He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He’s simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it.
But the “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.
Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)
In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.
At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:
“Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.“
And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:
“[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.“
There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now.
This piece by Ben Jacobs in New York magazine observing that CPAC shows the Republican Party has finally morphed into a European-style far-right party is sharp. Whatever attachment it had to libertarianism or traditional conservatism it might have once had has now been consumed by white nationalism. Even by its own racist standards, it’s different.
Each day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem and countless speakers professed their love of country. Instead, it marked the further transition of the American right away from its libertarian roots to a more European model of populist politics. Government no longer was the enemy, but instead a tool to combat threats like big tech and “cancel culture.”
This political shift was most notable in what was not mentioned onstage. While the House of Representatives was passing a $1.9 trillion COVID bill that would, if enacted, be the most expensive piece of legislation in American history, there was little discussion of it or the national debt or a host of other former right wing bugaboos. When speaking onstage about the legislation, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was riled that spending in the legislation was misdirected in his view. He didn’t criticize the underlying cost but instead “waste” — like what he termed “a Silicon Valley subway,” a provision to extend a mass transit line from San Francisco through to San Jose.A nightly newsletter for the best of New YorkSIGN UP FOR ONE GREAT STORY
Instead, the focus was on the type of culture-war red meat that had been a staple of Trumpism. There were strident warnings about Marxism and Black Lives Matter, hardline stances set out on immigration and the rise of China and newfound zeal to combat and regulate social-media companies. Politicians took turns touting their willingness to take on the left as they all tried to tap into the “but he fights” ethos that fueled Trump’s rise.
This is not to say that libertarian tendencies disappeared. The mandate that all attendees at the event wear masks provoked ire among some attendees and required prominent signs and a reminder onstage. Speaker after speaker celebrated that they were in Florida, a state with relatively lax restrictions in place due to the coronavirus. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, heralded her state’s approach to COVID, saying proudly that she “never mandated masks” or “ordered a single business or church to close” to loud applause. More than 1 in 500 South Dakotans have died of COVID-19 in the past year and the state has the second highest rate of cases in the country. But as COVID restrictions have become a culture war battleground and mask-wearing a political signal almost as potent as a hybrid Subaru or a pair of cowboys, these attitudes seemed to be as much about “owning the libs” as libertarianism.
Another sign of the Europeanization of the American conservatism was the growing presence of the international far right at the conference — and even the looming specter of white nationalism. There were recorded video messages from Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, as well as hard-right politicians in Spain and Croatia. During breaks in the conference, a video from “samurai futurologist” Gemki Fuji repeatedly played proclaiming Trump to be “a real American samurai” while a right-wing South Korean politician claimed his country saw left-wing voter fraud too.
Perhaps most unsettling was the appearance of Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona on Saturday. Gosar, a hard right-wing backbencher who touted false claims of voter fraud before the assault on the Capitol on January 6, appeared on a panel on immigration less than 12 hours after appearing at a parallel but separate white-nationalist event sponsored by those who found CPAC full of squishy sellouts.
At that gathering, the six-term Arizona Republican’s speech was followed by remarks from a Holocaust denier who said America needed to protect its “white demographic core” and called the attack on the Capitol “awesome.” While onstage at CPAC, Gosar’s first remarks, without prompting, were “I want to tell you, I denounce . . . white racism” before shifting to the topic at hand.
Gosar is still an outlier at CPAC, but the annual event traditionally follows where conservative activists lead it, and the “new nationalism” of politicians like Josh Hawley has clearly replaced what Florida governor Ron DeSantis derided as “the failed Republican Establishment of yesteryear.” The party of Lincoln is looking more and more like the party of Le Pen.
They still use “libertarianism” as a cover for acting like jackasses. They scream “freedom” and blather on about liberty whenever they want to avoid being responsible and decent. The adolescent mind is often attracted to libertarianism and most of these people are suffering from arrested development.
But this article is correct. If you want to see exactly where the party is going, watch Tucker Carlson. He’s obviously studied Hungary’s right wing “populist” leader Viktor Orban.
Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)
In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.
At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:
Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.
And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:
[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.
There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now.
Update: Josh Hawley is the most perfect realization of this strain in US politics.
Well, that was a Fourth of July weekend for the books, wasn’t it? As a deadly pandemic continues to sweep through the country, resulting in an economic disaster, the president of the United States gave a couple of fiery speeches in which he barely mentioned any of that and instead declared war on half of America.
On Friday the 3rd, Donald Trump flew to Mount Rushmore to appear before a flock of adoring fans and deliver the message he intends to carry him through November. He declared that the country is under siege, not just by the “invisible enemy” COVID-19, or even the usual invading hordes of foreigners and terrorists storming the borders. He thundered:
Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.
The next night, back in Washington, he delivered a solemn promise to his small but devoted audience of specially invited guests on the White House lawn:
Trump's July 4 message to the nation: "We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing." pic.twitter.com/zh7wPYmT3z
He also repeatedly promised to unify the nation, presumably after all the left-wing fascists, Marxists, anarchists, agitators and looters have been vanquished. First things first.
If you liked his “American Carnage” inaugural address, you had to love this pair of angry declarations of war against fellow Americans on the day the country celebrates its freedom and independence. They certainly reeked of patriotism and love of country.
Actually, they just reeked. Reportedly they were the work of Trump’s senior adviser and dark passenger Stephen Miller, who is usually known for his odious demonization of immigrants. It seems he’s turned his evil talents to vilifying American citizens as well.
Of course, Miller had plenty of inspiration from the man himself. The president’s loathing for any American who doesn’t bathe him in glory and admiration has long been obvious. But lately he’s turned the volume up to 11 in the hopes that he can whip the culture war to fever pitch by persuading people that these enemies within are literally coming to kill them in their beds. We’ve known his feelings on these issues since he took out a full-page newspaper ad back in the 1980s headlined, “Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police.”
Trump has made a decision that he’s not going to talk about unarmed Black people who are killed by police and he’s certainly not going to discuss the pandemic that is still ravaging our nation while the rest of the developed world is returning to some version of normal. He’s decided instead to take up the lost cause of the Confederacy and Richard Nixon.
He’s been getting advice — from someone who has recently received what Trump no doubt considers the most impressive accolade the world has to offer:
“Tucker Carlson Tonight” finished the quarter as the highest-rated program in cable news history, tallying an average of 4.33 million viewers.
As you know, in Trump’s mind TV ratings are far more indicative of popularity than political polling, which he still doesn’t understand. And Tucker Carlson is killing it on Fox News with his white supremacist fear-mongering, night after night. That is bound to impress the president as a sign that it’s the winning formula.
Jonathan Swan of Axios has rounded up a few of the rhetorical parallels between Carlson’s recent monologues and Trump’s July 4 speech. Here’s a small sampling:
Carlson: “For more than a month, mobs of violent crazy people have roamed this country, terrorizing citizens and destroying things.”
Trump: “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
Carlson: “The education cartel, enforced on your children, enforces their demands.”
Trump: “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.”
Carlson: “The Cultural Revolution has come to the West.”
Trump: “Make no mistake: This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”
Carlson is definitely having a moment. Politico reports that those high ratings (even though they have cost him virtually all his advertisers) have Republican insiders buzzing that Carlson is a natural presidential contender for 2024. Apparently, they are assuming that, win or lose this fall, Trumpism is their future.
Carlson is far more savvy than Trump, as are a number of others who define themselves as right-wing populists and natural heirs to the house that Trump built. I’ve written about Carlson’s specific brand before, and it’s considerably more dangerous than anything Trump, with his George Wallace old-school Confederate-flavored racism, can come up with. Carlson is much more in line with the new right-wing populism of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, which is a sophisticated program that plays on the same fears and resentments as Trumpism but has deeper ideological roots and more serious authoritarian goals.
Pundits and commentators seem to be taken with the fact that Carlson often excoriates the Republican establishment and puts out curious feelers to certain ideas more commonly associated with the left, as if he were some new and unique brand of open-minded conservative. Apparently they forget that until Trump came along and “tamed” the GOP establishment, the Tea Party types had excoriated Republican leadership for years. Recall that then-House Speaker Paul Ryan was booed heavily at a Trump rally in 2016.
As for Carlson’s supposed populism, he’s simply stoking the same white grievances that Trump does, but simply has a better understanding of how to wrap economics into it. It’s a shtick that works for him as a cable news host. It seems that many people in the Republican Party have now decided that the only people they trust to run the country are TV celebrities, so that makes Carlson an early favorite to carry the Trump banner.
There’s one highly intriguing wrinkle in this scenario: What if Donald Trump loses this fall and decides he wants to take another run at it in 2024? He’ll be the same age then as Joe Biden is now, and it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t seize the opportunity to bilk his cult followers out of as much money as possible over the next four years to prepare for a rematch. I don’t think anyone’s going to be allowed to run with Trumpism until Trump himself is finished with it.
We know what Trump is capable of. But Tucker Carlson already looks like one of the nastiest pieces of work in American politics for a long time — and he’s not technically in politics quite yet. A primary battle between them would be brutal.
CARLSON: It was a nearly perfect party line vote, every single Republican voted against it, all but two Democrats voted in favor of it.
Adam Schiff, meanwhile, the congressman from Burbank, was ecstatic. Schiff has spent years obsessing over impeachment like it was a young Jodie Foster. Colleagues say he has pictures of impeachment taped to the walls of his bedroom. He’s believed to have written in steamy, unhinged letters with his own body fluids. So, for Schiff, today’s vote was thrilling, in ways that only a court-appointed psychiatrist could fully appreciate.
He thinks he’s being cute, of course, because Schiff gave the mobster version of Trump’s Zelensky call.
But this twisted fantasy says a lot more about Tucker Carlson than it does about Schiff. A lot more. But then he’s known for that sort of thing:
SCARBOROUGH: Wait, hold on a second. Dan, hold on a second. I don’t mean to take over, but have you been bothered in public restrooms, Dan? Because I know I haven’t.
CARLSON: I have. I’ve been bothered in Georgetown Park. When I was in high school.
ABRAMS: Really?
CARLSON: Yes.
SCARBOROUGH: Wow.
CARLSON: And let me just say, I think —
SCARBOROUGH: That’s something.
CARLSON: — people should knock that off. I’m not anti-gay in the slightest, but that’s really common, and the gay rights groups ought to disavow that kind of crap because, you know, that actually does bother people who didn’t ask for being bothered. So yeah, I think it’s outrageous that he did that.
SCARBOROUGH: Hey, Tucker?
CARLSON: You know what I mean? It’s insane!
SCARBOROUGH: Was he the guy in Georgetown, Tucker?
CARLSON: No, actually. I got that — my point is — let me just say —
ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.
CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the — you know, and grabbed him, and — and —
ABRAMS: And did what?
CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!
[laughter]
CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I’m the least anti-gay right-winger you’ll ever meet —
[laughter]
CARLSON: — but I do think doing this in men’s rooms appears to be common. It’s totally wrong, and they should knock it off. I mean that. I think it’s — I can’t bring my son to the men’s room at the park where he plays soccer because of all these creepy guys hanging around in there. I actually think it’s a problem. I’m sorry.
That was back in 2007 when Carlson was still on MSNBC. I would bet a million dollars if I had it that the head-bashing incident never happened.
He’s recently developed an even more oleaginous style, adopting the neofascist POV of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But he’s always had a very active, weirdly sexualized, imagination. This latest is more gross than usual — but then, so is he.
Farhad Manjoo of the NY Times infiltrates my nightmares. He pictures the natural heir to Trumpism and it’s much worse than Trump:
Come, take a stroll with me through my recurrent nightmare: It’s the sweltering summer of 2029, and the man in charge is Tucker Carlson — that is, President Tucker Carlson, the one-time Fox News talker turned righteous, white nationalist economic populist, now in his triumphant second term, after having defeated the incumbent Joseph “Recession Joe” Biden back in 2024.
Like Trump, President Carlson spends his first term refashioning America along racial lines. But unlike Trump, whose one term is now regarded by much of the right as a best-forgotten political disaster, Carlson advances an ethnonationalist populism that succeeds in a wild, frightening fashion. His secret: competence, a commitment to true political realignment, and a brutal online political machine that represents the full flowering of the tactics and ideology first displayed during 2014’s Gamergate movement.
Where Trump was a chaotic, undisciplined narcissist, the Carlson who wins in 2024 is a canny political strategist who makes good on Trump’s forgotten promise to embrace anti-corporate economic policies. On paper, parts of Carlson’s agenda seem ripped from the former liberal firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren (now in exile in Toronto): His chief enemies are Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, the megacorporations owned and staffed by wealthy liberals.
It’s a winning electoral formula: A large minority of Americans are willing to forgive Carlson’s authoritarian, nativist impulses if they see it as part of a war against the out-of-touch, culture-destroying corporations that are automating our jobs; killing every other industry; and exercising complete control over what we watch, read, listen to, buy and believe. And in America, thanks to the Electoral College, winning over a large minority is good enough to regularly win the presidency.
Obviously I am making all of this up. But my premonition is based on months of research — this is what you might call an educated nightmare. My education: Carlson’s own nightly Fox News show, which I’ve been watching obsessively since January. I began tuning in because Carlson — who, with nearly three million viewers a night, is the second most popular host on cable, after Sean Hannity — has become one of the most fascinatingly terrifying men in conservative media.
There are two things that terrify and fascinate me about Carlson. First, unlike most Republican lawmakers today, Carlson is sketching an economic vision of a post-Trump America that departs in key ways from Trumpism, especially in its muscular anti-corporate, populist zeal.
In January, in a commentary that went viral on the right, Carlson excoriated American political leaders for their commitment to empty capitalism: “For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer,” he said. “They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.”
He regularly criticizes the tech giants, whom he argues are censoring his and his followers’ views. But he also hates corporations more generally for what he calls their attempts to influence culture and politics (including by boycotting his show): His critics, he said in May, “believe democracy is when a tiny group of rich people imposes its values on everyone else by force.”
In June, Carlson praised Elizabeth Warren’s plan for “economic patriotism”: “Many of Warren’s policy prescriptions make obvious sense,” he said, wondering why Republicans, including Trump, didn’t join her vision. “What if the Republican leadership here in Washington had bothered to learn the lessons of the 2016 election?”
The second thing that scares me about Carlson is his racism, which is both more extreme and more cannily packaged for a digital audience than is Trump’s.
While Trump is a creature of cable television, Carlson’s segments look like extended YouTube clips, and they’re designed to play to an audience that is extremely online. His critics and white supremacists themselves point out that, more than anyone else on television, Carlson functions as a kind of laundromat for white identity movements: Several times a week, he’ll lift ideas, story lines and troll-based narratives directly from the fetid swamp of online hatred. Then he’ll clean these theories up and wrap them in a bow for his mainstream audience, usually to advance an overarching idea that he mentions constantly: that, thanks to an “invasion” of immigrants, white people in America and Europe face economic and cultural calamity, and that the political, corporate and media establishments are abetting their destruction.
“No one covers white identity more consistently than Tucker,” said Madeline Peltz, who watches Carlson’s show every night as a researcher for Media Matters for America, a liberal advocacy group that tracks conservative outlets. “I cannot remember a single episode in the last two years that didn’t include these ideas.”
I’d known all this before I started watching, but actually watching blew my mind: Carlson’s propaganda was so constant, and the sleight of hand with which he inserted barely sanitized racist theories into his broadcast so swift, that I began to see the outlines of my nightmare — that Trump was only a prelude, and that even if he loses next year, someone far more sophisticated than our current president could come along to push digitally mediated politics in an even darker direction.
Carlson — who talks often with Trump, and was reportedly instrumental in advising Trump against attacking Iran in June — recently disclaimed any interest in running for president. He has been a nimble shape-shifter over the course of his career (a decade ago, he was a libertarian), so it’s possible that his latest critiques of capitalism are just an act.
But he may also have noticed that there are lots of conservative voters in America who don’t care for the Republican Party’s giveaways to corporations. Hence the outlines of a political vision: Carlson is aiming to mix a lefty-sounding economic agenda with a white nationalist-inspired cultural agenda — and to muddy the marriage by arguing that his and his followers’ ideas are being stifled by the tech giants that he’s fighting.
This is Carlson’s entire schtick. He uses the cover of capitalist hardship to advance theories of white oppression, often while summoning further harassment of his critics. He’s taking it to television, five nights a week. And where it ends up could be hellish.
I’ve been writing this for a while. Carlson represents something very threatening to our system. Very. But Manjoo fails to make the important connection that explains where Carlson sits in the political ecosystem. I wrote this back in Februar, and this in June about Carlson’s sneaky patriarchal neo-fascism. This was the latest, from about a month ago:
After several days of controversy over his insistence that white supremacy in America is a hoax, Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson is tired. He announced on Wednesday night that he’d be going fishing for a few days. Fox News insists that this was a scheduled vacation but as CNN’s Oliver Darcy notes, Fox News hosts who start dumpster fires often “take a few days off” when advertisers’ customers feel they’ve gone too far and the boys in the boardroom start to feel too much heat. In the case of Bill O’Reilly, he abruptly went away on “vacation” one day and never returned.
It’s unknown whether Carlson will be back next week. According to the Hollywood Reporter, after he said last December that immigrants made America “dirtier” he lost 26 sponsors. They speculate that he won’t lose his job over this latest controversy because his show now depends upon smaller direct-marketing companies which are unlikely to flee. We’ll know soon enough.
But it’s possible that part of the reason he was sent off to the woods is something that goes beyond his insistence that White Supremacy is a hoax. As much as people are rightly laying responsibility for much of the philosophy and rhetoric that clearly motivated the El Paso killer at the feet of the president, it’s important to remember where Trump gets many of his talking points: Fox News.
Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter’s online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of the network’s stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.
Media Matters cataloged some of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the most vociferous anti-immigrant pundits on Fox News:
And USA Today analyzed the president’s speeches since 2017 and found that he has “used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. But for all of the degrading language he’s deployed against immigrants and people of color, Trump has failed to adopt a very specific term that seemed defined the thesis of the El Paso shooter’s screed: “replacement.” However, if you watched that video above, you’ll have noticed that it’s used frequently on Fox News, particularly by Carlson.
It stands to reason that Trump wouldn’t have picked that up. It’s much too cerebral for him. After all, he didn’t understand that when the Charlottesville Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” they were talking about his own beloved daughter and son-in-law. He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He’s simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it.
But the “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.
Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)
In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.
At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:
Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.
And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:
[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.
There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now. The results speak for themselves:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson played something of a trick on his audience on Wednesday night. He read off a series of economic policy ideas to his viewers, making clear that he was quoting someone else. “Politicians love to say they care about American jobs, but for decades, those same politicians have cited free-market principles and refuse to intervene in markets on behalf of American workers,” said Carlson, moving on to other proposals.
Then he presented the “reveal”: “Republicans in Congress can’t promise to protect American industries. They wouldn’t dare to do that,” said Carlson. “It might violate some principle of Austrian economics. … Instead, the words you just heard are from — and brace yourself here — Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,” said the host. The praise got even more enthusiastic: “Yesterday, Warren released what she calls her plan for economic patriotism. Amazingly, that’s pretty much what it is, economic patriotism. There’s not a word about identity politics in the document,” he said.
Hear ye, hear ye! Tucker Carlson just endorsed the economic policies of a current Democratic presidential candidate! Publicity has followed this watershed, with CNN writing,” Fox host unexpectedly praises Elizabeth Warren.” Other outlets covered the moment as well. It’s a coup for the glib cable-news host, who gets to project himself as a tribe-spanning iconoclast interested only in the truth, sound policies and fairness to all.
The problem is, Carlson leaves behind a trail of transcripts, which tell a consistent story about how the host views Democrats.
Back in February, for instance, Carlson highlighted a proposal by progressive Democrats opposing hikes in funding for immigration enforcement. He riffed, “In other words, it is virtuous to protect others; it is wrong to protect ourselves and our own children. What’s the name for that attitude? Well, self-hatred would be one. Should people who hate the country be in charge of it?”
That same month, he characterized Democratic policies on infrastructure and climate change as follows: “I think these policies are designed to destroy the country. I think they are being advocated by people who hate the country, and I think the aim is really clear. If you love the country, you would not propose this.”
Back in May 2018, he uncorked this diatribe:
In the last year-and-a-half, the Democratic Party has doubled down on every behavior that got Trump elected in the first place. They routinely vilify tens of millions of Americans based on how they look, they prefer illegal immigrants to US citizens. At this point, they don’t even hide that preference. They’re open about it.
In schools and sports and the military, they denounce the idea of biological differences between men and women. That’s something that every culture from Ancient Egypt till about 20 minutes ago understood perfectly well because it’s demonstrable. They don’t recognize it anymore. … Whatever else he’s done, Trump has driven the Democratic Party off the deep end. They not only hate him, but the country that elected him and it’s starting to show in the polls.
So there’s a good reason Carlson would instruct his viewers to “brace” themselves before hearing that a prominent Democrat had penned a reasonable proposal for economic patriotism. How could a member of a party that hates this country propose something so worthwhile?
Given the static, we asked Carlson whether he would be changing his assessment of America-hating Democrats. We’ll update this post if we hear back on that front.
In January, Carlson stirred a think piece or two when he unfurled an extended critique of Republican orthodoxy on the economy. He waxed wistful about “a country where normal people with an average education, who grew up no place special, can get married and have happy kids and repeat unto the generations, a country that actually cares about families, the building block of everything,” said Carlson. “What would it take to get a country like that? Leaders who want it. For now, those leaders will have to be Republicans. There’s no option at this point. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it.”
Now along comes Warren with a plan that — at least in Carlson’s opinion — just might shore up the American family. “All that really matters is your family,” said Carlson on an April program.
It might make sense, then, that Carlson would throw his support behind Warren. Sense is scarce in these precincts, however. “This is far from an endorsement of Elizabeth Warren, whom I couldn’t vote for because she’s so far out on the social issues. It would be wrong to vote for her, in my view,” said Carlson. Perhaps a more compelling explanation came last week, when Carlson complained that Warren was “nasty.”
Carlson is channeling Viktor Orban, the neo-fascist Hungarian dictator. He too says lots of populist economic stuff. With the same goals. My post from last February:
Tucker Carlson recently made a bit of a splash by adopting a sort of right-wing populism that a fair number of progressives found intriguing. I’ve been watching Carlson for a very long time and I don’t see anything but malicious trolling in virtually anything he does so I’m not the best judge of his “ideas.” Maybe this is the first time he’s ever been sincere about anything in his life, but I doubt it.
I know you said you’re not trying to advocate specific policies, so let’s be a little more abstract. What type of society would you view as ideal, in terms of how a human being should be able to live from birth until death? What should the function of government should be in nurturing that human and protecting them from harm?
This is all a fairly delicate balance between freedom and coercion and central planning and organic growth. All the intentions that are inherent in life and certainly that are inherent in policy. OK, so there’s never any kind of bumper sticker that solves the problems. What I’m arguing for is a reorientation of the way we think about this stuff.
Formulation of policy needs to begin with a clear-sighted picture of what the goal is: What do we seek to achieve by doing this? What’s the final stage of awesomeness we’re hoping to get to? In the final stage, in my opinion, it is a society in which most families — which is to say married couples with children — can subsist and thrive to some extent on one income, because one thing that no one ever mentions, which is a defining factor in people’s lives, is raising your kids, and people kind of want to do that themselves.
There’s been a huge debate over how much money we should give people to hire someone else, usually from another country, to raise our kids. Without even weighing in on that debate. I would just make the obvious point, which is that we’re falling pretty far short of where most people would like to be, which is how can parents stay at home and raise the children? If you allowed people the freedom to do that, if you said, I’m going to give you enough money so that when you have kids, a parent can stay home and raise them while they’re little? My sense is that an awful lot of people will take advantage of that. An awful lot.
Like everything, it would be a trade-off. I mean, there are certain perks that you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home. I mean, I get it. OK, but I’m just saying if the average person has the choice, I sincerely believe that a very large number of people would take that option, and I think they should be allowed to. By the way, I’m with Elizabeth Warren on this. She wrote a whole fucking book about it. She wrote a whole book on this called “The Two-Income Trap,” and she made the case that when our society changed in such a way that it took two incomes to support a family, everybody got poorer and less happy. I agree with that.
“There are certain perks you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home.” Yes indeed. It’s called financial independence which is what freed women from having to stay married for economic reasons. But whatever. No biggie, right?
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called for larger Hungarian families to combat the country’s low birth rate and shrinking labor force.
In exchange for all the baby-making, he’s willing to provide financial benefits and programs for women. Benefits include loan expansion programs, subsidies for cars, and for women with four or more children, no required income tax.
“In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the West to this is migration. They want as many migrants to enter as they are missing kids, so that the numbers will add up,” Orbán said in his annual state of the nation address. “We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”
Orbán and his wife have five children.
The World’s Marco Werman sat down with Kim Lane Scheppelle, an expert on Hungary and a professor at Princeton University, to chat about the motives behind Orbán’s latest pro-baby policy (this is not the first time) and how women fit into Hungarian society.
What do you make of Orbán’s announcement over the weekend that women with four or more children won’t have to pay income taxes? What’s that about?
Orbán has backed himself into a corner and he’s using a way to get out of that corner that we’ve seen before. So the corner he’s in is that Hungary really has a failing economic model. His policies have driven, some say, up to a million Hungarians out of the country and yet he’s also come down very hard against any form of immigration. So, the question is: “How [can] Hungary maintain a labor force if it’s losing its population?” And his answer is: “Let’s get women to have more kids so that there will be Hungarians to actually hold up the economy.” Now, it’s all very familiar because Orbán has a terrible track record on women and so the idea that women are going to bail him out of this problem is something that I think is familiar to a lot of us who watched him in action for a long time. So, women are going to bear the burden of Orbán’s failed economic policies.
I mean, it’s obviously oppressive for women. Is Orbán also trying to create kind of, Hungarian human facts on the ground, kind of an anti-immigrant policy?
Yes. Well, this is part of his policy to shore up Hungary for the Hungarians. I mean Hungary, like many of the countries in Eastern Europe and, for that matter, like many advanced democracies around the world, is having a declining birthrate. And if they don’t have immigration or some other way of bolstering the population numbers, they’re going to be a declining country and now that Orbán has come out so strongly against immigration, this is his way back. One thing I think it’s important to say about Orbán and his policies about women is that he’s long been an advocate of big families. He himself has a big family. This is something that very much comes with the territory of Hungarian nationalism. And right now, the group in Hungary that has the largest families are the Roma minority who have really taken a hit under the Orbán government. So it’ll be interesting to see whether his policy really applies universally or whether it applies only to the Hungarians.
How does Hungary’s treatment of women in 2019 compare to the Communist era?
Well, in the Communist era, of course, women were recruited into the workforce and were actually promoted at much higher levels than they are now. So, in some ways, the Communist era was a golden age for women. Now, it was a golden age and it wasn’t — since it was so awful for everybody — having a great fate in a golden age means that you’re not so well-off. So, you know women were overwhelmingly all of the all of the judges, all of the doctors, some professions that we think of as relatively prestigious professions were actually completely dominated by women during the Communist time. Now, of course, they were dominated by women because they weren’t such high-status professions then. But still, women have really had a lot of education and a history of great accomplishment in Hungary. The post-Communist period saw women really getting knocked back into very traditional roles.
Job ads started being highly gendered. So, you know there would be an advertisement for a manager and it would literally say “we want a man for the job” or “secretaries with flirtatious abilities.” And those would be jobs for women. So this kind of segregation of men and women has happened throughout the post-Communist time and Viktor Orbán’s party has simply made that worse.
Right-wing “populists” are snakes and progressives should beware of being seduced by their alleged economic determinist rhetoric into ignoring their underlying agenda.
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