Tag: Tucker Carlson

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

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The week between Christmas and New Years is a sort of no-man’s land.  Everyone is recovering from the holiday and using it as a chance to catch their breath and look ahead to the next year.  And that goes for me too.  January is the launch of my book and I will be very busy trying to perform the marketing functions that I’ve been told are important for the success of the book launch.  So, on Monday I’ll be reading all of the information I’ve been sent and trying to fulfill all of these tasks correctly.

Now honestly, I don’t know how much relevance they’ll have for the success of the book but I’m giving it a shot so off I go.  I’m both excited and skeptical about the prospects of this launch being successful.  I don’t have a large digital footprint and I don’t see how enough people will hear about this book to make it a big splash.  And so, if it is a dud and only sells a few copies, I’ll chalk it up to experience and move on to other ways to amuse myself.  But if it’s a huge success I’ll claim that I knew from the beginning that I was a literary giant just waiting for the world to beat a path to my door and that from now on I’ll wear designer clothes and expensive sunglasses wherever I go.  Hmmm.

I’ve been paying some attention to what the pundits are saying about how the political situation will play out in 2026.  The Left is talking trash about anything and everything they can.  A friend asked me about the brouhaha that went on at the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) gathering recently where Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin demanded that Tucker Carlson and some other pundits apologize for talking to Nick Fuentes.  For those who don’t know him, Nick Fuentes is a young dissident who is decidedly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.  Carlson interviewed him much as he interviews many controversial figures.

My take on all this is I don’t think we need any more gatekeepers demanding people get cancelled because they have unpopular opinions.  Nick Fuentes and Ben Shapiro will never be able to sit down and discuss their differences.  So what?  Even if Fuentes is the devil himself, Tucker Carlson should be able to interview him without having to apologize and take some kind of loyalty pledge.  And I think Shapiro and his colleagues at the Daily Wire provide lots of insightful and entertaining content that I consume.  But acting as censors for other people on the Right is not one of their appointed offices.  After all, watching the Left act as woke judges and juries over everyone’s behavior and cancelling those they didn’t “approve of” was one of the things that got Donald Trump re-elected.  Freedom of speech is only important when it’s speech that someone else is trying to censor.  So regardless of whatever stupid things Nick Fuentes believes or even says, I’m not demanding anyone be cast out of the vast right-wing conspiracy just for interviewing him.

The Putin Interview

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I’ve previously read a transcript of Putin’s apologia for the Ukrainian war so I’m relatively familiar with his thesis.  Now without a doubt he frames it all to put Russia in the most sympathetic light and there are obvious chapters where he is painting some actions, like Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler over Poland, in a false light.  But I guess there are plenty of chapters of American history where one man’s patriotic battle is another man’s shameful massacre.

But what he does successfully demonstrate is that Kiev was the original home of the Rus, or as we call it now the Russian nation.  And that Ukraine has been an integral part of Russia for longer than the United States has been a nation.  And although countries do split and become separate nations the Ukraine contains millions of people who have always considered themselves Russians and who were disenfranchised by the government in Kiev when the anti-Russian coup took over in 2014.

It’s also clear that Putin believes that the history of Russia and the West since the fall of the Soviet Union is dotted with promises that were made by the West and broken whenever it was convenient.  And I have read many American accounts that confirm the specific assurances that the West gave to the Soviets and the Russians and their eventual abandonment.

With respect to what Putin wanted to say I think he succeeded in speaking his mind.  But from a communications perspective there are definite weaknesses in this event.  First of all, the interview was translated from Russian by an interpreter.  Secondly, the speech was two hours long.  In the third place, the first half hour was a Russian history lesson beginning around the year 800 AD and extending down to 1992 before it even began to touch on the relevant causes of the present war.

I mean I found it fascinating but I’m a weirdo who loves ancient history and was impressed how he wove in the ethnographic origins of the people currently inhabiting the various areas of Ukraine.  So, the propaganda value of Putin’s explanation of the origins of the war won’t reach the folks on TikTok with three second attention spans.

But one thing it did do was demonstrate to anyone with a brain that Vladimir Putin is a highly intelligent individual who believes that he has taken the only reasonable course available to him to defend his people from attack by the West.

Parenthetically, I was evaluating the style and substance of the words and ideas that Putin used; both the history lesson which is clearly something that he has worked over previously and his extemporaneous answers to some of the interrupting questions that Tucker Carlson asked along the way.

One of the interrupting questions in particular elicited a very interesting response.  When Carlson asked Putin whether the fracturing of the monopolar world, we lived under during the American hegemony meant that the two hemispheres would diverge, Putin amusingly noted that the human brain has two hemispheres that have separate functions but that unless they work together the mind becomes severely dysfunctional.  This struck me to be the response of a very lively intellect.

In general, I got the impression of a man who is a realist that has seen some of the worst disasters befall his country.  But at the same time, he appears to be an optimist about the future.  It’s an interesting combination.

I don’t completely discount the possibility that the whole performance was a cynical charade disguising an evil monster whose real intent is to conquer the world.  But I wouldn’t pick that as the more likely choice.  I think what we saw was pretty close to who Putin is.

And as leaders go, he’s a lot more interesting and formidable than someone like Joe Biden or Justin Trudeau.  I suspect that Putin will be remembered as being an important leader whereas Biden will be declared a disaster in American leadership.

Another thing that I noted is how strange Tucker Carlson looks while listening to interviews.  His expression is extremely strained.  But I give him full marks for setting up this discussion.  I hope he sets up a permanent news and opinion service.  I’d happily pay a reasonable fee to follow it.  Kudos Tucker.

Tucker Answers the Questions

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Some Swiss guy named Urs Gehriger interviewed Tucker Carlson.  There’s a change of pace!  Being a Carlson fanboy of sorts I found the interview fairly interesting.  There were no big surprises but the questions and answers were fairly satisfying.

One of my favorite quotes is toward the very end of the interview:

Weltwoche: In general, what gives you hope in a rather worrisome time, looking into the future? 

Carlson: That the stakes have suddenly gotten so high that smart people are rethinking their assumptions. I see it all around me. I see people all around me asking themselves, “I used to believe this. Is it still true? Was it ever true? What is the truth?” People are focused on questions of truth and falsehood, I think, much more deeply than they ever have been, and that’s a good thing.

I also see an awakening of spiritual awareness and religious faith in the United States that I think is great. Not everyone is reaching the same conclusions that I’m reaching, but that’s okay. It’s better than thinking that Amazon’s going to make you happy, because Amazon is not going to make you happy, actually. That’s not true. That’s a lie. And more and more people seem to be concluding that it’s a lie, and I think that’s a great thing.

That Tucker Carlson thinks there are “smart people” who are rethinking their positions on important issues might give me some cause for hope.  He has access to some of the movers and shakers and maybe there really is a change going on among the elites.  I haven’t seen any proof of that.  In fact, the exact opposite seems to be the case.  The term “doubling down” seems to be the order of the decade.  But maybe he can see that starting to happen.  At least it leaves a sliver of hope.

Tucker Interviews Argentina’s Milei

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Milei is believed to be favored to win the Argentinian presidency next month.  Why is this interesting?  Because Milei is a libertarian economist and an enemy of the Left.  Argentina is an economic basket case with hyperinflation and a socialist government that guarantees that things will never get better.  But maybe things have become so dysfunctional that even the cradle to grave socialists know that something has to change.

Leave it to Tucker to find someone interesting to talk to.  This guy even has a Trump-like haircut!  It’s a half hour long so there is that.  What I find interesting is that revolt against the Left is springing up in multiple places at once.  Maybe it’s a case of when things can’t go on, they won’t go on.  Or maybe this is just the death rattle of freedom.

Is Tucker Carlson Going to Interview Vladimir Putin?

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Now that’s an interesting idea.  Next thing you know he’ll have a debate between Putin and Biden on his show.  Now that would be fun.

Tucker Seems to Be Moving Forward With His Plans

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PublicSq is an anti-woke company and seems to be a perfect fit for Tucker’s audience.

 

Asking the Hard Questions

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I watched Tucker Carlson’s interview of Mike Pence in Iowa.  It was extremely hard to watch.  In fact, I turned it off more than a few times because it was just too painful to watch this man say one stupid thing after another.  But stupid doesn’t really capture it.  It was as if he were lying and yet unaware of just how poorly he was lying.  When he talked about the 2020 election, he said that the voting irregularities would have had no impact on the outcome of the election.  And then he claimed that changes that have been instituted have strengthened election integrity.  I refuse to believe he’s that stupid.  I think he’s just lying and when he makes his case that’s exactly what it seems to be, a very poor liar.  When Tucker presses him on the various weak points in his story it’s like a little kid who has been caught doing something wrong and you ask him about it and you can almost see the wheels turning as he makes up a pathetic story that is patently absurd.

And then came the coup de grace.  While Pence is complaining about Joe Biden not getting Abrams tanks to Ukraine fast enough, Tucker asks whether with all the terrible problems that now plague our country; crime, drugs, violence, inflation; shouldn’t Pence be more worried about those things than Ukraine’s access to more American weapons.  And Pence’s answer was, “It’s not my concern, it’s not my concern.”  Now he tried to bury this answer by claiming that as president he’d handle both domestic and foreign policy issues simultaneously.  But all that anyone will ever remember is that he said that crime and homelessness and suicide and fentanyl overdoses and inflation were not his concern.

Well, Mike Pence will never be the Republican candidate for president.  My question is, with his breathtakingly awful communication skills, how was he ever a successful politician?  I’m aware that being vice president doesn’t require much in the way of talent.  But he did manage to become the governor of Indiana.  Is the bar that low in Indiana that a man without any discernible rhetorical abilities could become governor?  I’m going to give Pence the benefit of the doubt and that he used to be a very honest man and that in Indiana an honest man can accomplish a lot.  And that what we see now is what happens when a simple man is thrown into the cesspool that is Washington DC and tries to swim with the rats there.  Inevitably he gets eaten alive.

I watched Tucker’s interviews with the other candidates too.  Asa Hutchinson was equally hopeless as Carlson hammered him over his veto of a ban on pediatric transitioning and also on his tepid response to closing the southern border to drugs and illegal immigration.  So, what I see is that Tucker is acting as the voice of the normal Americans who are fed up with the GOP establishment candidates.  What he is doing is preventing the candidates from giving their lame rah-rah speeches and instead addressing the very painful fact that they don’t have solutions for the most pressing problems in America today.  In fact, he exposes the fact that they want to make believe that these problems don’t exist.  Or if they aren’t allowed to ignore them, then they just handwave them away as, “We’ll put our top men on that.”

Mike Pence is hopeless.  Asa Hutchinson is hopeless.  Nikki Haley is hopeless.  But even the candidates who make some sense like DeSantis and Trump can’t answer the most important question, “What are we gonna do if and probably when the Democrats steal the election in 2024?  That’s what we should be talking about with the men who want to be president.  And they should be talking to the red state governors about the contingencies that they should already be putting in place.  We’ve been occupied for over three years now by a rogue regime.  Enormous damage has already been done.  Taking concrete steps to begin reversing the damage and protecting people is long overdue.

So, good for Tucker for asking some hard questions.  But I think the harder questions remain to be answered.  That’s the debate that still needs to take place.  Maybe Tucker can work on that.

Tucker’s First Twitter Commentary

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Tucker’s first opinion piece on Twitter dropped today.  It started out talking about the media pretending that Russia blew up their own dam in Ukraine just like they pretended that Russia blew up the NordStream pipeline.  Then he used this as a jumping off point to show how the media feeds the American public the talking points that the regime wants promulgated and ignores anything that isn’t sanctioned.  As a case in point he mentioned the recent UFO story.  And to drive the point home he compared it to the way information was handled in the Soviet Union.

It was a nice coherent ten minute piece.  It goes without saying there isn’t an opinion piece on any of the cable or broadcast news shows that I would listen to for ten minutes because it would be too painful.

Well done Tucker.  Keep it coming.  And well done Elon.  Without you there would be no place this could be seen.