UPDATE (5/20): The number of views for this column’s companion Hard Truth podcast-–recorded 3 weeks back with my honorable, trustworthy podcast partner David Vance—is 32,000! Truth is timeless, especially when it’s predictive. You see, other popular podcasts have only just caught up with our insights. Namely that Fox News is doomed. (Chuckle. Hearty). Tucker and Trump were transformational. We hope against hope that RFK, Jr. will be too.
Excerpt:
THE GULF BETWEEN principles and practice, doxa and praxis, is eternal—all the more so when it comes to the politician.
When you think of a GOP candidate, in particular, you think of neither creed nor action, but, rather, of a list of talking points and policy positions to the exclusion of bedrock principles.
“God, groceries and gas” was how one gaseous hack smugly summed up what Americans need, to Sean Hannity of the near-defunct [chuckle] Fox News channel. That, and promises seldom kept.
Aside from a native intelligence, and to distinguish from his rotten party’s political plank—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., conversely, does articulate a creed that respects liberty. Whether he will act on this commendable worldview once in office is unknown.
As it emerged from the RFK, Jr., announcement for president, his worldview departs from that of the progressive Democrat Party’s, which he has decried as “the party of fear, war and censorship… neocons with woke bobble-heads.”
RFK, Jr’s philosophy of liberty, moreover, appears wedded to reality. He doesn’t jabber GOP-style about a return to small government and the passing of a balanced budget amendment.
Such totem Republican “small-government” words are as good as Orwellian News Speak in concealing the truth, as they are dumbly and dangerously unmoored from reality, and thus meaningless, mere reductive talking points.
With an accreting $31.8 trillion in national debt, and some $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities incurred by federal and state governments—the United States of America is beyond such asinine talk. There is no coming back from this kind of government gigantism; from such Federal Reserve and state-driven chicanery, with which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems familiar and to which he speaks knowledgeably.
Your columnist’s task over the decades has been to address reality, not to levitate in the arid arena of pure thought. Kennedy does the same. As does he appear to grasp that the natural law of the Constitution has been buried under piles of statute and administrative-law precedent. He knows this all too well, having spent his working life litigating against the Deep, Regulatory, Administrative, Security, Welfare-Warfare State. …
Tucker Carlson launches a new show on Twitter in the service of unfettered speech and a search for truth in 2023.
Just imagine what being a dissident from day one means (2002): It means you don’t even get a chance to speak your Truth over time to a large enough crowd, and only then get cancelled. Rather, you show up, begin writing in America and are cancelled almost from Day One.
“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES! (May 29, 2004): “So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while false …. prophets are called back for encores?”
The answer will not please admirers of the late James Burnham, who blame scheming elites for any popularly accepted project they dislike, be it unwarranted wars or welfare. Contrary to Burnham, elites, media included, can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please – not inform – the populace.
Fox News was able to create the perception of a parallel universe in Iraq replete with big (nuclear) bangs and miraculously materializing al-Qaida terrorists because its Hollywood-inspired vision resonated with viewers. The ratings provided proof. By popular demand, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times (This means you, Judith Miller) adopted a similar faux patriotism devoid of skepticism and serenely accepting of every silly White House claim.
UPDATE IV (5/5): Tucker Carlson was transformational.
Megyn Kelly no sooner left Fox News than she was forgotten once Tucker stepped into her stilettos.
And Ms. Kelly is smarter than Kayleigh McEnany (whose hard-to-spell names one has to cut-‘n-paste), or simpleton Lawrence Jones. As was Kelly more independent politically.
The other two are tools. Most all at FoxNew are tools, not nimble intellectually, which Tucker is.
If the likes of those two succeed in replacing the independent Tucker–then that’s all Boobus Americanus deserves
UPDATE III (4/26): Fix News is indeed finished. Joy! Two minutes of a cheerful Tucker Carlson
on Twitter, orienting The Idiocracy to what matters, nets more views—seven million to begin with—and climbing, than the sum of all concurrent programming on FauxNews, CNN, MSNBC. Unstoppable.
The Tucker segment is now, a few hours later, inching toward thirty million views!!!!
Rupert Murdoch will be remembered as the Money Man who fired Mr. Tucker Carlson.
Truth will out.
Fix News is finished. Joy! Two minutes of a cheerful @TuckerCarlson on Twitter, orienting The Idiocracy to what matters, nets more views, 7 million+ and climbing, than the sum of all concurrent programming on FauxNews, CNN, MSNBC. Unstoppablehttps://t.co/1c6KD1HI8P
They just fired their ONLY attraction, Tucker Carlson.
Deep State, aka Fox News, are synonyms.
Prediction: Tucker Carlson might join News Nation. It’s not a bad little outfit, and does decent reporting. This, for lack of better options, as the USA—the embodiment of freedom, we are lectured—has banned most other news sources.
As a writer who put in years of sustained antiwar writing against Genghis Bush and others of the neocon coterie—who burned (and consequently burnt-out) as hot as a Babylonian kiln against invasions backed 100 percent by Fix News and its blond war-porn flank—this mammoth event is a salve. Poetic justice. Fox News is finished, having cemented its bona fides as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, which it always was, until Tucker.
UPDATE: The intuitive and likely reason for the firing by Faux News of Tucker Carlson—their top rating host, and one of the highest-ranked cable news shows in the country—tracks with human nature:
Envy. The regression toward the mean, as we say in statistics. The quest in America for safe mediocrity.
“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans,” wrote my good friend CLYDE WILSON, professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the foremost scholar of JOHN C. CALHOUN.
In the responses from the mediocre media—and I flatter them—one sees nothing but schadenfreude (“joy derived from the misfortunes of others”).
UPDATE: Megyn Kelly is one of a handful to offer an intelligent analysis of the stupidity of Fix News. All other bobbleheads are pontificating about the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Or the sexual harassment libel. That’s not Tucker. Nonsense. Megyn Kelly was once very good. But in courage, intelligence, and anti-establishment instinct–she could not match or come close to Tucker. And she lost her perch to Tucker due to vanity. She opted to take a job with one of the biggest news networks, NBC, only to be dumped. And she came out against Trump for the silly reason of sexism and palled around with the Left, she now maligns.
“This will be good for Tucker.” Indeed. And as I point out: this will hasten the death rattle of the War Porn channel. “Tucker is about to dominate in whatever space he goes to.” “Tucker is a unicorn.” Also by Kelly’s telling, “Tucker is an avid reader and writer,” who doesn’t own a TV. He’s not a snowflake who crumbles at criticism, but the toxicity of his post affected him, says she.
…”The overtone window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized.
With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations, for example the self-induced ‘crisis’ on the south-western border—Republicans have normalized an open border, through which millions of impoverished people may flow, are flowing.
The range of responses issuing from GOP representatives consists in nauseating treacle about a ‘humanitarian disaster,’ a ‘crisis,’ and mumbo-jumbo about cartels-in-control: Blame the cartels for the choice made by American leaderships to shirk their constitutional duty to uphold the country’s territorial integrity. …
… the Mexican crime cartels are merely filling a power vacuum willfully created by American elected traitors. The last are guilty as sin for centrally orchestrating the invasion of their country and outlawing any effective defensive counter-action. The first are not to blame.
