Category Archives: Media

UPDATE V (5/11): TUCKER TODAY. GOOD NEWS BREAKING: Fix News Aka Faux New is FINISHED (Fires Tucker)

Free Speech, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Republicans, The Establishment, War

UPDATE V (5/11):

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.

GOOD NEWS BREAKING: Fix News aka Faux New is FINISHED.

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.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/page/2/
https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/

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.

In truth, Kelly back then did not get Trump’s America.
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2015/08/motormouth-megyn-kelly-and-the-mad-matriarchy/https://www.ilanamercer.com/2016/01/megyn-kelly-production/

Quick Comments: Tucker On Twatter & Prisoners in Russia; Kate’s Killer Curtsy, Kissinger Revives Realpolitik

Britain, Celebrity, COVID-19, Etiquette, Family, Foreign Policy, Media, Russia, War

The December 8th segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight was a celebrity circle jerk. Celebrity journos, NOT dissidents—for all are part of a well-backed, well-oiled power structure, none a powerless independent—bitched about not trending on Twatter, losing 40,000 followers here and there to shadowbans, all for posting mild, quasi-controversial tweets, such as “lockdowns are bad.”

On the matter of COVID, and for quite some time, Tucker has not had one truly impressive, independent medical thinker on his show. By which I mean the likes of Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Kelly Victory, Robert Malone, and inquiring, honest minds the likes of Dr. John Campbell of the UK and Suneel Dhand, MD.

Tucker’s resident expert, Dr. Marty Makary, epitomizes the mediocre mind in all his belated “findings” regarding COVID. Makary is no analytical thinker. He’s safe, yet our host congratulates him with regularity for his “bravery.” Preposterous.

It was almost 2 years ago that I shared an important item on LinkedIn posted by a highly credentialed researcher. She had been flabbergasted at having found no data on research to rule out the fact that the mRNA spike protein migrates well beyond the muscle, which is where vaccines are meant to remain—“muscle tissue also tends to keep vaccine reactions localized.” Instead, spike protein has been found throughout bodily tissue.

Two years hence, Tucker’s Marty Makary mentioned this phenomenon on Tucker Carlson Tonight. “Good morning Elijah,” as we’d say in Israel to a Johnny-come-lately. Everything the likes of Makary have to say about COVID is derivative and thus too late. Had I listened to the likes of Makary, I’d be vaccinated for that was his general recommendation. Naturally, I didn’t. There was no risk of that.

Another late, far more meaningful, awakening came from Henry Kissinger. The famous practitioner of Realpolitik in diplomacy finally piped up in favor of “achieving peace through negotiation” between Ukraine and Russia. Kissinger reminded his neocon readership at The Spectator, alas all too gingerly, that “Russia has made decisive contributions to the global equilibrium and to the balance of power for over half a millennium. Its historical role should not be degraded.” He “recommended establishing a ceasefire line along the borders existing where the war started…”

If the invasion of Ukraine commenced on 24 February, 2022, your columnist was first to resurrect the concept of Realpolitik on March 3, 2022, writing the following in “Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik And The West’s Failure.

Good old realpolitik is what Zelensky should have been practicing with his powerful neighbors and historic brethren, the Russians. This is precisely what President Joe Biden should be shamed into doing now: talk to Putin; thrash out a cease-fire, ASAP; haggle for the lives of the population under siege because led by imbeciles.

Realpolitik is practical politics, the art of getting along, differences and all, in a real world in which reality, including the differences between people and their political systems, is accepted and dealt with.

Contrary to proclamations, it is not a moral foreign policy that America practices but a moralistic one. Be like us or we’ll destroy you! Instead of realpolitik, Zelensky adopted America’s moralistic, impolitic, uppity manners. It took a war to get Zelensky to the negotiating table with Putin, where he ought to have been from the start.

Look, the US Uniparty is trying to effect regime change in Russia. Nevertheless, Mr. Carlson—and here again he falls short—seems to believe Americans have a right to travel to Russia and remain unharmed, even though we routinely malign that country as a whole, accuse it of being behind every malfunction in the US, and have imprisoned Russians visiting the US—young Maria Butina for example—accusing them of spying. Russia returns the favor. This is the natural order of things.

Finally, it looks like my favorite royal, Kate Middleton, is taking the mickey out of the monstrously crass Meghan Markle, and doing that with an effortless, graceful, traditional curtsy. In tilting that delicate ankle with a broad smile and good cheer, Kate put two Ugly and Evil attention seekers in their place.

Markle is a two-bit actress who takes pride in NOT BEING ABLE TO LEARN THE SIMPLEST OF ROUTINES: the curtsy.  We all know better. Markle is spiteful and nasty. She comes not to build a great family, but to destroy it—sow divisions, nurse grudges and veer from drama to drama, for that is how such a simple, cunning organism as she is maintains a level of arousal.

Try as Kate might to counter aggression against her person and family with class—there comes a time when a pointy Prada stiletto embedded in a squat behind, Markle’s, is the best option. The royals look weak–and worse. It’s time to make the pygmy nipping at their heels cease and desist.


LASTLY: David Vance and I will be live on our HARD TRUTH podcast, Tuesday, January 20, at about 12:45 Pacific Time.  Join us for a toast. Send questions in real time. 

 

WATCH: Tucker Cancels GOP, So Should You: ‘Republicans Have Done Nothing To Defend YOU’

Conservatism, Constitution, COVID-19, Crime, Cultural Marxism, Democrats, Elections, IMMIGRATION, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Race, Racism, Republicans, The Establishment

WATCH HARD TRUTH: “Tucker Cancels GOP, So Should You: ‘Republicans Have Done Nothing To Defend YOU’”

In his June 20, 2020 J’accuse, Tucker Carlson, for all practical purposes, cancelled the Republican Party:

“Property was looted, people were beaten and killed and Republicans joined the side doing the looting, beating and killing. President of the Heritage Foundation and think tanks on the right climbed into … law enforcement and ordinary Americans, calling them racists, ignoring the damage done to their property and person.”

Jack Kerwick has been anatomizing ConOink establishment failures for over a decade:

“in  the country bequeathed to us by the generation that, in the midst of a smallpox epidemic, fought and defeated the most powerful empire in the world in order to be a self-governing union of sovereign states—subjected itself to a nationwide internment. The United State of America became the Interned States of America as the Constitution of the Old Republic was indefinitely revoked, the economy crushed, and ‘the little platoons’—as Burke referred to those buffers between the individual and the State, those forms of community constitutive of civil society and in the absence of which human flourishing would be impossible—were radically undermined. … And all of this occurred in a country with a Republican President, a Republican-controlled Senate, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees, and a majority of whose state legislatures and governors are Republican.”

HARD TRUTH’S David Vance and myself speak to Jack about the irreparably hopeless Republican Racket. RIP, GOP.

WATCH: “Tucker Cancels GOP, So Should You: ‘Republicans Have Done Nothing To Defend YOU.’

SUBSCRIBE.

 Also on Odysee and BitChute if those platforms float your boat

 

UPDATED (3/23/022): Tucker Carlson’s Producers Rewarding Retread Reformed Neocon Tools Like Sohrab Ahmari

Argument, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Media, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, War

On the one hand, Tucker Carlson and his oft-worthy guests make the case that America’s catastrophic institutional rot (MY EXTENSIVELY DEVELOPED TERM, no theirs) is a consequence of there being no adverse consequences attached to being dead-wrong all the time.

On the other hand, the show has a tendency to reward reformed neocons such as newcomer Sohrab Ahmari, who peddles retread banalities (or stuff the Old Right—myself included—had espoused decades ago, and from the get-go, in the case of the Globe and Mail commentary below: September 19, 2002).

Rewarding conveniently reformed, politically pleasing mediocrities makes the practitioner part of the institutional rot.

PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (Ilana Mercer, May 29, 2004) spoke to this repulsive specter:

So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?

I got to thinking about the neoconservative talking twits. They’ve been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.
Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens (undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom seem to have conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – they all grabbed the administration’s bluff and ran with it. Like the good Trotskyites many of them were, once they tasted blood, they writhed like sharks. Compounding their scent-impaired bloodhound act was their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities – they insisted our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.
Their innumerable errors and flagrant hubris did not prevent the neoconservatives from managing to marginalize their competitors on the Right: the intrepid Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative; the quixotic Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. of LewRockwell.com, and Antiwar.com. (Plus this column, of course). Unfortunately for America, there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that these prescients did not foretell well in advance.

….the opportunity costs associated with consumption of toxic punditry are low or non-existent.

If you didn’t have the cerebral wherewithal to be against the war on Iraq in 2002, you don’t have anything original to contribute on foreign policy and anti-war or Just War thinking now.

Younger offenders can be found agitating against Iran, or scribbling inanities for the War Street Journal and other neoconservative outlets such as Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and Foreign Policy, where Sohrab Ahmari would put out irredeemable and unforgivable content such as “The Costs of Containment.”

It’s one thing to have made a mistake as Tucker Carlson had done regarding the Iraq war of aggression. Carlson apologized profusely and humbly about his Iraq error. Moreover, Carlson had never been the consummate philosophical neocon; which Sohrab Ahmari is. According to the Militarist Monitor,

“the neocons’ favorite Iranian,” Sohrab Ahmari has been a vocal advocate of U.S.-imposed regime change in his native Iran, which he left as a teenager. Rosenberg likened Ahmari to Ahmed Chalabi, the formerly exiled Iraqi politician who curried favor with U.S. neoconservatives ahead of the Iraq War and lent an Iraqi name to the list of those supporting the U.S. invasion.[3]

I’ve watched the likes of Sohrab Ahmari work their magic in the malfunctioning media for decades. I also understand fully that Tucker Carlson has a producer, for he himself cannot research each such well-promoted phony who is resurrecting a career on the solid anti-war arguments of the dissident Old, paleolibertarian and paleoconservative Right.

* Image: Truth-teller on Twitter.

And in defense of The Tuck against mediocrity Claire Lehmann, who generated the non sequitur below: Tucker Carlson doesn’t support the Russian invasion! From the fact he argues unpopular truths–it doesn’t follow that Tucker is not a populist. Most immutable truth is unpopular. Popularity does not equal populism. This woman can’t even define the terms of debate.