Category: Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Has Tucker Carlson Lost His Mind? (And Is This Kind of Insanity Contagious?)

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About three weeks ago, I found myself on the phone with my buddy Evan Sayet, who had become very concerned about the growing influence of a certain type of “Christian nationalist” rhetoric on the Right. We talked a long time about it, and my argument was that the size and influence of this specifically anti-Jewish crowd has been exaggerated.

Here’s the thing: I don’t watch or listen to podcasts. The written word is my métier, and I can read a lot faster than anyone can talk, so that spending even 30 minutes listening to somebody talk is to me a sort of torture, a painful waste of time. This is true without regard to whether I agree or disagree with what the person is saying.

All of which is to say that the problem which concerned Evan Sayet was basically invisible to me, and I was dismissive of his concern. Who cares what some fringe kooks are saying on podcasts? Imagine my chagrin, therefore, when the whole Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes thing blew up this week, with the exclamation mark being supplied by students at a Turning Point USA event asking anti-Israel questions of Vice President J.D. Vance. Then the president of the Heritage Foundation waded into the controversy, and suddenly everybody is talking about the problem that Evan Sayet was trying to alert me about just three weeks ago.

Canary, coal mine, some assembly required.

It is astonishing to me that Nick Fuentes has sufficient influence to cause this much trouble, or that he and others (Candace Owens is frequently mentioned in this context) have succeeded in spreading their Jew-hating nonsense so widely among young MAGA types that J.D. Vance found himself having to deal with it at a TPUSA event. The question of why Tucker Carlson has drifted in that direction in the two years since he left Fox News is also worth investigating. My guess is that Carlson is engaged in some sort of destructive vendetta against those he blames for his ouster from Fox News. Here’s the Wikipedia summary of that:

On the morning of Monday, April 24, 2023, Fox News dismissed Carlson and the executive producer of his evening show. It does not appear that Carlson received advance notice of his dismissal, given that on Friday, April 21, in what became his final show’s sign-off, he told his viewers that he would “be back on Monday” . . .
Fox did not provide a reason for Carlson’s termination. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Chairman of Fox Corporation Rupert Murdoch was responsible for the firing, and that a pending lawsuit from former Fox producer Abby Grossberg and Carlson’s coverage of the January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection both influenced the decision. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Carlson was dismissed due to private messages in which he criticized Fox’s management, using vulgar and offensive language.

A thirst for revenge can make someone do crazy things, and I don’t for a minute doubt that Tucker feels justified in viewing “mainstream conservatives” as less than honorable, considering how many of them didn’t take his side in the dispute with his former employer. So the split between Fox and Carlson had the effect of making Carlson feel that most conservatives are spineless wimps, leading him off into the Dark Side where paranoid mutterings about the “Israel lobby” are a permanent obsession — or that’s my theory, anyway. Your mileage may vary.

The aftermath of the past week’s drama is that a lot of people are now choosing sides in a grand internecine squabble on the Right, a Jets-versus-Sharks situation I lament. And I must ask: Cui bono?

Who benefits from this conflict? And is it possible that the participants in this fight are being manipulated by agents provocateurs? Is it paranoid to suspect that someone — China, Russia, Qatar, Iran, the CIA, whoever — has infiltrated the online Right in order to stir up chaos and conflict?

Put that thought aside for a moment and, if you have the stomach for it, watch the whole two-hour Carlson-Fuentes interview:

If you don’t feel like wasting two hours of your life, permit me to quote Dominic Green in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Carlson’s hosting of Mr. Fuentes on his podcast, which aired Oct. 27, was a watershed in the campaign to make racism cool again. Mr. Carlson has come a long way since the bow-tied folly of his neoconservative youth. After leaving Fox News in 2023, he went over the edge. He donned the plaid shirt of the people, rediscovered Christianity, cashed in on his legacy status as a ringmaster of the right, and reinvented himself as the second coming of Alex Jones. Mr. Carlson has interviewed a podcaster who thinks Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, raised discredited claims that Ashkenazi Jews are immune to Covid, and claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu openly tells Israelis, “I control the United States. I control Donald Trump.”
There is always a market for the circus, but Mr. Carlson has become one of the freaks. Though the sunshine of free speech remains the best antiseptic against poison, Mr. Carlson is more interested in the spotlight than serious debate. He “normalized” his guest with the gentlest of questioning, nodding along as Mr. Fuentes said the country can’t be held together unless “organized Jewry in America” is defeated. But there is nothing normal about Mr. Fuentes. He denies the facts of the Holocaust, opposes interracial marriage, seeks “total Aryan victory,” and urges the rule of a “Catholic Taliban.” He calls for “the death penalty” for an “occult element at the high levels of society, specifically among the Jews,” that is “suppressing” Christianity.

Now, I do not like Green’s use of the phrase “make racism cool again” to describe this anti-Israel message because, among other things, the Left attacks Israel as being “racist” against Palestinians. But his listing of some of the more obnoxious things Fuentes said in this interview is at least helpful in understanding what the controversy is about. If you’re going to nod along amiably to stuff like that, maybe it’s time for you to log off the podcast and check into a psychiatric facility.

My friends, remain calm. Do not panic. Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Nick Fuentes/Candace Owens crowd is a million people, or two million, or even five million. Last year, Donald Trump got 77 million votes, so it’s not like this Jew-hating tail is large enough to wag the MAGA dog. On the other hand, given the closeness of the partisan divide — Trump’s national margin of victory was about 2 million votes, and it was very close in most of the “battleground” states — we have to contemplate whether the disaffection of even a few million MAGA voters might be enough to enable the Democrats to regain power.

Certainly we’re doomed if the Republican Party returns to being a neocon/uniparty swindle with an agenda of empty slogans, open borders and “forever wars.” Given a choice between Bushism and Trumpism, I choose Trumpism for the simple reason that Bushism has proven to be a losing formula, both in terms of politics and policy. But you’re not going to make me accept Jew-hating bile from my supposed MAGA “friends” anymore than I’m going to accept it from the pro-Hamas “progressives.”

How this controversy plays out over the next few weeks or months, I can’t predict, but I have been forced to start paying attention, at least.

Not a battle I wanted to fight, but not one I aim to lose, either.



 

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Project #Groundswell Memo, Number 17: What Conspiracy? Oh, That Conspiracy!

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It’s important, when prominent conservatives coordinate messaging, that your project inspire raging paranoid fear on the Left. Everyone whose involvement is not already a matter of public record should be careful neither to confirm nor deny their participation:

“Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington — including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner — has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell — including aides to congressional Republicans — cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders.

Certainly these “prominent conservatives in Washington” will disavow any claim that I ever attended their “hush-hush sessions” and, with no proof of such attendance, there can be no way to dispel the paranoid fantasies of deranged leftists that we’re all in on the plot.

Of course, we’re all in on it. Am I right?

No prominent conservative should ever deny that they’re part of this shadowy clandestine conspiracy, you see, because if you deny it, then obviously you aren’t really “prominent,” are you?

But a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse, IYKWIMAITYD.

 

25 May Gun March On The Mall

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by Smitty

Via Nice Deb comes news both of state capitol rallies tomorrow at 1000, and of a full-on rally being organized for May 25th at high noon.

This is encouraging. There has been a sad lack of large-scale rallies, for whatever reason. In my perfect world, we’d be down on the Mall 2-3 times a year, peacefully reminding our Ruling Class Overlords of an extra-Beltway existence.

Calling all Gun Owners and Patriots you are cordially invited to attend the first 2nd Amendment rally at The National Mall in Washington D.C. on Saturday May 25th 2013 at Noon Eastern Time (Tentatively Pending Sponsors). We are hoping to attract up to 10 Million Gun Owners/Patriots to the National Mall for a rally to show our support for the 2nd Amendment. The 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects and insures the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

Once we have secured the venue we will confirm the date and time. This is a grass roots endeavor so any national celebrities that would like to help please contact us at this e-mail address.

Let’s show up, tell #OccupyResoluteDesk what we think of his demagoguery in lieu of proper execution of his office, and leave the place more tidy than found.

“We’ll Fight Again Tomorrow”

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— by Wombat-socho


The post title, of course, is from Michelle Malkin’s morning after column, which was a bright torch amid the gloom of Obama’s victory. Indeed, conservatives must stand tall, resist the siren songs of “moderation” and “compromise” and continue to present America with a choice, not an echo. We must take note of things that went wrong, but keep in mind that there were things that went well; these are both summed up well by Dana Loesch. So, to echo Lenin, what is to be done?


We can start with Bill Quick’s angry post-mortem. As much as I respect Ed Morrissey, Bill is absolutely correct to savage him for the “messaging” nonsense he’s spouting, which is no different from the kind of crap we used to mock Thomas Frank for pooting forth. We’re dealing with people that would rather be hip than smart, and “fairness” has always been an easier sell than the fable of the Little Red Hen, especially if you’re one of the hipsters who wants their bread and circuses for free. Bill also makes the point that we were wrong about the polls and Nate Silver was right; our desire to believe that America was still a center-right nation blinded us to the ugly reality of the polls, and as happens every time you wish away bad news or unpleasant facts, they come back to bite you.


We can then look to Mark Levin, who called for Karl Rove to get off the stage, and linked to this Bloomberg article that openly mocked Rove as “Biggest Super-PAC Loser”. Stacy and others have been saying for years that the Establishment GOP and their consultant pilot fish need to be forcibly retired, and this massive failure on the part of the Establishment calls for not just retirement, but a wholesale application of wooden stakes and decapitations. This is the second Presidential election in a row that we have lost thanks to The Powers That Be anointing a “moderate, electable” candidate who was promptly painted as a soulless monster by the Democrats and the press (BIRM); in the end, they turned out not to be so electable after all. Worse, their much-vaunted ad spending didn’t buy us victory in the places we needed it the most, while Obama’s Operation Narwhal identified marginal voters and got them to the polls.


I think the conflict between the Washington Establishment and the TEA Party needs to come to a head, and we need to make sure the TEA Party wins. We need to build on those populist networks and rebuild local GOP party organizations from the ground up, allying with the Ron Paul libertarians to take power away from Washington and return it to Richmond, Austin, Nashville, Raleigh, Salt Lake City and the rest of the state capitals. We need conservative precinct captains and volunteer cadres who know the territory (and their neighbors) far better than any last-minute PAC-sponsored crew of door-knockers ever could. For too long, we’ve allowed the party of Main Street to be run from K Street, and now in this moment of defeat, we have a chance to reach out to the Stewart Adelsons and Bob Perrys and convince them that they can get more bang for their buck by supporting the little grassroots platoons instead of the big, plush headquarters that spent so much and accomplished so little.


This local emphasis also addresses the problem of culture change. We have a Kulturkampf on our hands and have had for decades, but we’re beginning to fight back effectively. This is another area where we have an advantage over liberals. On balance, we tend to be more polite and friendly, less snarky and prone to hectoring and preaching. We can use those advantages to reach out one on one to disaffected minorities and other people who are getting hosed by the seemingly endless misery of the Obama Depression. We may not change enough minds in two years, or even four, but we have to remember we’re playing the long game. It took the progressives most of the last century to get their hooks into education, entertainment, and news media, and it may take us just as long to take them back or (more likely) supplant them with schools and media of our own. That doesn’t mean we should give up; this is a #WAR, and we are all Breitbart’s soldiers in it.


Once we control the local parties, from townships to state committees, WE will be the ones deciding who the candidates are. We will have the ability to block another “moderate” like Mitt Romney or Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John from the nomination. We will take our government back at every level. It all starts with us, in our precincts and wards, building a political force of extraordinary magnitude, purging the Karl Roves and any other talking head who thinks they can control the party from a K Street office. It starts with you. It starts today.

A Poor Substitute For Live At Five

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— by Wombat-socho


I had every intention of getting up at the usual ungodly hour this morning and doing Tuesday’s Live At Five, but I underestimated how fatigued I’d be after eight hours of doorknocking for American Majority Action yesterday down in Prince William County. I slept right through the alarm and didn’t get up until 0900. It’s good and necessary work, though; every day this weekend, in spite of the occasionally drippy weather, yours truly and a couple dozen Hill staffers have been out pounding on doors, dropping literature, and otherwise doing our bit to win Virginia for Mitt Romney. This will be going on every weekend until the election, and in fact I’ll be putting in time during the week as well. Of course, we could always use more people, so if you happen to live in Northern Virginia – particularly in Fairfax and Prince William counties – and want to earn a little extra pocket money, drop office manager Chris Smith a line and let him know you’re interested.

Righteous Indignation Meets The Grand Master

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— by Wombat-socho


This post is about two very different people who took the same journey at very different times. One of them grew up in poverty, and one in the middle class. One went to a well-known private school with all expenses paid; other other had to scramble to get an appointment to one of the service academies. One goofed around on the fringes of Hollywood for a few years before finally finding his niche in the Wild West scene of the early internet; the other contracted a serious disease and was medically discharged into one of the worst economic downturns in American history. One of them was an unthinking member of the liberal herd until his father-in-law suggested he listen to a notorious talk-show host; the other dabbled in all manner of esoteric political and social cults before maturing as a “hard” libertarian. One died on the verge of launching a posthumous counterstrike against the Soviets’ memetic weapon; the other would go to his grave despairing that America would ever recover from its egalitarian socialist madness, even as his writings continued to inspire libertarians and conservatives alike.


I am, of course, speaking of Andrew Breitbart and Robert Heinlein. Both of them made the journey from socialism to conservatism, or at least to libertarianism, and while the details in both cases make for interesting reading, the point of this post is to show that both of them left important gifts to the conservative movement. I got the first volume of Heinlein’s biography Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century two years ago as a Christmas gift for my Kindle, and while you should definitely read its account of Heinlein’s part in the internecine struggles of the California Democratic Party during the Depression, what I really want to point you at is his 1946 political tactics manual, Take Back Your Government. There are two versions of this book on the market right now; Baen has an e-book based on the 1992 edition which includes incomplete notes and a forward by Jerry Pournelle* and the 2012 edition of Take Back Your Government, which as Heinlein’s biographer William H. Patterson explains is the original 1946 edition. I personally prefer the 1992 edition because there have been quite a few technological changes since 1946, and Pournelle makes a noble attempt to take note of them. In any event, Heinlein’s book, originally titled How To Be A Politician, has everything you need to know about building a political organization from the ground up, starting at the precinct level and ending with the election of your candidate to Richmond or Washington or wherever it is you’re trying to send Bulldog T. Goodfellow. It is retail, street-level politics; it is all about the going out and knocking on doors and getting to know your neighbors so you know who needs a reminder or a lift to the polls on election day, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. At a time when we are trying to tear the controls of the GOP away from the Establishment, it could not possibly be more useful.


On the other hand, Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation is an attitude adjuster; it distills much of the territory previously covered in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism down to a couple of easily-digestible chapters, and carries on from there to sound a call to arms. There is not so much of the nuts and bolts of New Media culture warfare in here, although there are plenty of examples to follow; instead, I think Breitbart is shooting for an adjustment to your headspace that will better enable you to deal with the kind of rhetorical, solipsistic lies and horseshit flung by the Left every day of the week against people who dare to think and act differently from the New Leftist Dispensation. Read both. Use both. Go forth and kick ass. You have a nation to save, one precinct at a time.


*No blame attaches to Dr. Pournelle; they wanted the book out in time for Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign and didn’t give him enough lead time.


UPDATE: Bill Quick links, but misses the point. Part of it is because I stupidly forgot to attach my tagline to the post, so he thinks this is Stacy’s opinion, but the other part is because I’m talking about tools. The comparison of Breitbart and Heinlein is just an introduction.

CPAC 2012: Extremely Controversial!

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Grover Norquist (right) interviewed on WMAL radio
by Brian Wilson and Mary Katharine Ham

WASHINGTON, D.C.
It is inevitable: Every year, left-wingers find something on the CPAC agenda that they can “expose” as controversial, so as to suggest that the entire conference is irredeemably tainted through this guilt-by-association method:

Following speeches from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Michele Bachmann, CPAC is hosting the panel “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity” with Peter Brimelow, the founder and head of VDARE.com.

Shock! Horror! Because Brimelow and his Web site have been labeled a “hate group” by . . . the Southern Poverty Law Center! And if you know anything at all about SPLC, you’re laughing at the designation, because they have deployed the “hate” designation so promiscuously in the past 15 years as to destroy their own credibility.

Peter Brimelow is no more a hatemonger than I am, although we’ve both been smeared as such by SPLC, as have, inter alia, the Family Research Counci, the American Family Association, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The list of the defamed is long. In 2003, the SPLC published a report in which they named such respectable organizations and individuals as the American Enterprise Institute and David Horowitz as part of a right-wing conspiracy to “mainstream” extremist views.

Being denounced by the SPLC is like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for conservatives: You’re nobody in the movement until you’ve been labeled a dangerous extremist by those bozos. Here are a few photos of my radical, far-right friends at CPAC:

Notorious extremist John Hawkins of Right Wing News and extremely notorious Tiffiny Ruegner of TheTeaParty.net.

Extremely controversial Pete Dingledey and controversial extremist Joseph Farah of World Net Daily.

Radical right-winger Joel Mowbray of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and right-wing radical Elicia Huffaker of Cain Solutions.

Obviously, these people are all very dangerous — a hate crime waiting to happen. And they must be relentlessly exposed as known accomplices!

Stacy McCain Still Shines

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by Smitty

Marco Rubio is a GOP celebrity whose nod would be a real help in the Florida primary. Legal Insurrection points out that:

Neither Romney nor Newt deserve credit for helping launch Rubio.
That credit goes to the folks at Not One Red Cent and a handful of other bloggers who started backing Rubio in 2009, when no one believed.

And who was the original Not One Red Cent blogger? That would be the Rodney Dangerfield Of Our Dextrosphere, Stacy. If you catch up with Stacy in Florida, offer him some encouragement. Sure, being the RDOOD is a thankless job, so he should be well acquainted with the underside of the bus, but that doesn’t mean that the occasional bit of linkage, re-tweeting, or even tip-jar hitting would be unwelcome.

He may not always be right, but he’s never boring.