Tucker carlson

Tucker Carlson…unmasked

It’s a day that ends in -y, which means there is some execrably stupid dust-up involving Tucker Carlson. Have you heard about Justin 'Definitely Not A Psychopath' Baragona? He possesses 52,000 tweets, 'spends most of his waking hours consuming cable news' and has one of the internet’s creepier fake smiles. He’s also tweeted about Tucker Carlson 29 times just this month. Wow, he sounds well-adjusted! Justin was the perfect kind of addict to spearhead the newest Tucker outrage spasm. https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1386837979453399049   Wait, that’s it? Tucker doesn’t like kids wearing the Face Diaper of the Beast? Who cares? But in the hyperreality of Twitter, Carlson’s throwaway venom was treated like a criminal offense. https://twitter.

tucker carlson

Asa Hutchinson commits cable news seppuku

Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson came under fire early this week for vetoing a bill that would prohibit doctors from providing children suffering from gender dysphoria with hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries, or other treatments that would 'affirm' their 'identity'. The governor's response to this criticism was to pour gasoline all over himself and light a match. There are few good long-term studies on the use of hormone and puberty-blocking treatments for transgender youth, primarily because such drugs have only been used in the past on a short-term basis to treat conditions like precocious puberty. They were not intended to suppress puberty indefinitely. Research suggests, however, these treatments can lead to an increase in suicidal thoughts or depression.

The curious case of Matt Gaetz

From the moment Matt Gaetz blitzed into Washington in 2016 as a 34-year-old Trump ally, it was clear that the representative from Florida liked to live dangerously. He invited Holocaust doubter and general crazy person Charles Johnson to the State of the Union. He hired canceled Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, then, because that wasn’t risky enough, he potentially fudged House ethics rules to pay him. As a Florida state representative, Gaetz allegedly concocted a scoring system for sexual conquests in Tallahassee: lobbyists were one point, aides two, legislators three, married legislators six. (Gaetz denies any knowledge of the game.) In fall 2019, Gaetz white-knighted for Democrat Katie Hill after her bisexual menage à trois forced her out of Congress.

matt gaetz

The perplexing Powell defense

If you lay down with dogs you get fleas. If you make your bed with demented conspiracy theorists, you become mentally ill. This is the unfortunate position that certain sections of the American right have found themselves in following the presidential election last year. Lots of Americans had — and still have — suspicions about the massive surge in mail-in voting in November. It’s hard to blame them. The 2020 election was a very strange one on any number of fronts. But no sane person can possibly now deny that the Trump campaign, in its attempts to prove the election a fraud, engaged in and with some serious charlatanry.

powell

Tucker Carlson is the new Trump — because there is nobody else

'Tucker Carlson is the new Donald Trump.' So said CNN’s Brian Stelter on his Sunday program, Reliable Sources. Stelter was apparently handed his own TV show based on the principle that at least one CNN host ought to resemble the network’s target audience. Nevertheless, he is correct. Progressivism needs Tucker to be Trump, and so for the moment, he is. To work in cable in the age of Donald Trump was to live life on easy mode. For years, channels tried desperately to hook viewers with endless updates on missing white women, murdered white women or murdering white women. Suddenly, with Trump, none of that was needed. Every day brought a fresh outrage, a new ridiculous statement or tweet or national policy. The news cycle shrank from a week to a day to mere hours in some cases.

vice president tucker carlson

Taylor Lorenz and the media’s sacred cows

How sacred is a New York Times reporter? Is one required to kowtow in their presence, or merely bow? If one eats a Times reporter, does one become ritually impure? These critical questions are being settled right now in the clash over Times technology reporter and factually-challenged busybody Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz spent the bulk of lockdown season stalking the nascent Silicon Valley chat app Clubhouse. In July, she vowed to quit the app forever for not caring enough about ‘user safety’, i.e. protecting Lorenz from all criticism. But of course, like most addicts who pledge to quit, Lorenz’s promise was a farce, and she was soon back on the app.

Taylor Lorenz attends VidCon 2019

Dear Godfrey: real problems, woke answers

Toward the end of my latest YouTube livestream, I casually invited my subscribers to email me for a free life-enrichment consultation, subject to a moderate monthly donation to my PayPal account. Subsequently, my inbox has been literally inundated with more than several emails beseeching my guidance on every progressive topic under the sun. I’ve therefore decided it is my duty to reply to these poor souls, and simultaneously share my seemingly endless bounty of knowledge and wisdom with the readership of this publication. So without further ado, dear reader, let us delve into your humble Woke Life correspondent’s mailbox to discover who is fortuitous enough to receive my progressive instruction. From Devastated of ClevelandQ.

dear godfrey

You don’t have to be crazy to think the election was stolen. But it helps

These days are fraught. On November 3, Donald Trump won 71 million votes. He still lost. Now, the whole 2020 presidential election, taking place as it did during a pandemic, feels weird and wrong. The candidate who generated absolutely no visible enthusiasm got more than 78 million votes, more than any other presidential candidate in history. Do people really hate Trump that much? Maybe they do. But the mechanics of the election process — what happened in those mysterious hours between 3 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Wednesday — invite suspicion. Take those charts, which Trump has been tweeting, showing the late ‘data dumps’ of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan.

crazy stolen

Tony Bobulinski and implausible deniability

It turns out that the 2020 US presidential election is not between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as we have been told. It is not even between Donald Trump and The Committee, that shadow compact of left-wing actors who settle on Biden as the most acceptable face for their radical make-America-over agenda. Everyone who gives the matter a moment’s thought knows that a vote for Joe Biden is really just a proxy vote for Kamala Harris. But last night, Fox News aired an extraordinary interview that Tucker Carlson conducted with Tony Bobulinski, a former naval officer who had been tapped by the Bidens, Hunter and Joe’s brother Jim, to be CEO of a financial company they were attempting to put together. Watch it here (unless YouTube has taken it down).

tony bobulinski

The right after Trump

Two broad camps divide American conservatism today: those who get it, and those who don’t — the woke and unwoke, if I may borrow a lefty term but give it a slightly different meaning. For the right to have any shot at taming liberalism’s raging furies, woke conservatives must remain ascendant and consolidate the movement. President Trump was among the first to get it, in his own intuitive, messy way. The ambitious Missouri senator Josh Hawley is likewise woke. So are Attorney General Bill Barr and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But too many credentialed conservatives don’t get it. What’s the it conservatives need to get?

after trump right

The crumbling lawsuit against Fox News

The new lawsuit filed by two women against Fox News and several of its personalities is riddled with inaccuracies. This raises questions about the veracity of its claims. Jennifer Eckhart and Cathy Areu, a former Fox Business producer and frequent network guest, respectively, claim that they suffered sexual misconduct, harassment, and even rape at the hands of Ed Henry, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Howard Kurtz. The lawsuit immediately made waves in the mainstream media, where it was picked up by the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, CBS News, and other major outlets. It has been a top trending topic on Twitter since its filing. However, a review of several claims made in the suit reveals many basic inaccuracies.

fox news

Trumpism vs Trump

Politicos have spent years asking what would happen to the Republican party post-Trump. Establishment types prayed that he was an anomaly and that the party would return to ‘normal’ after his reign. Slightly more savvy observers worried that the Trump base would slip back toward the Democrats once they lost their champion and the GOP would have to rebuild a winning coalition. Both relied on an assumption that Trumpism cannot exist without Trump. That was wrong. Elitist politicians and the mainstream media have been so obsessed with denouncing Trump’s egregious character that his voters developed a reflexive tendency to defend the man rather than his policies. But nearly four years later, many Trump voters feel unsatisfied with his list of accomplishments.

Donald Trump

Conservatives talk about cancel culture too much

If you are on the right I suspect you have heard leftists saying something like this: ‘Thousands of people are dying from coronavirus, the Chinese and Indians are fighting, young black men are being killed on the streets and all conservatives can talk about is “cancel culture”. What is up with that?’Well, in the past few weeks there have been attempts, many successful, to force people out of their jobs for discussing social science studies and genetic research, for saying all lives matter, for questioning whether the killing of George Floyd was racially motivated, for publishing a US senator’s opinion piece, for making edgy jokes, for refusing to ‘walk around with a BLM sign’, for wearing blackface to a Halloween party two years ago et cetera.

canceled cancel culture

Trump walks the recovery tightrope

President Trump’s decision to set the United States back on the path to work will be decried as mere politics, but it is the right decision. It is the task of politicians to consider the general welfare. This consideration sets the current emergency against the coming one, the need to reduce deaths from COVID-19 against the need to forestall the human cost of an economy in open-ended limbo. The data on COVID-19 remains insufficient and will probably remain so. The economic prognosis is, however, clearer, and we have the data too.The IMF is warning that a prolonged shutdown will lead to a Thirties’-style Depression.

recovery

Tucker Carlson: ‘We aren’t very good at talking about death’

The media has not covered itself in glory in its response to the coronavirus crisis, it’s fair to say. Yet one well-known journalist who really has excelled has been the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Not only was he one of the first major TV pundits in the world to take the threat of the virus seriously, he also intervened with Donald Trump by visiting the president at his house in Mar-a Lago to discuss the gravity of the situation. I caught up with my friend Tucker yesterday on my podcast, and we talked about the media’s failings, Trump’s response, how the Democrats are going to junk Joe Biden, and not killing iguanas. Most of all, we talked about death and the theological implications of this terrible problem.

tucker carlson

OK boomer, but you’re in danger

Last week my cousin started a group text with three other cousins, two childhood friends and myself, as a virtual support group during social distancing and a way to stay connected. At first it was basically for memes and relevant articles we found interesting or informative — but it wasn’t long before the group devolved into sharing screenshots and anecdotes of the frustrating conversations they were having with their boomer/silent generation parents and relatives. I’d been having similar, exasperating conversations with stubborn loved ones for weeks. I understand that facing your mortality is terrifying and often we react with one of the most powerful mechanisms the human psyche has in the face of fear and death — denial.

boomer

The pod delusion

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At a recent party, a mortgage-banker friend approached, asking me to come on his podcast. I politely declined. ‘What do I know about mortgage banking?’ I protested. ‘I don’t know my ARM from my Fannie Mae.’ I’ve never made my amigo for the sensitive type. His hobbies include drinking tequila like he’s in a worm-eating contest and getting in fistfights at professional sporting events. But he seemed wounded. ‘My podcast isn’t just about mortgage banking,’ he said, ‘it’s about spirituality.’ Here, I was briefly tempted, as I’m more in touch with spirituality than loan originations.

podcasts podcast pod

Tucker Carlson: Trump is a ‘truth elixir’ and Bill Kristol is a ‘Trotskyite’

On Wednesday, Cockburn stopped by ‘Sovereignty or Submission: Restoring National Identity in the Spirit of Liberty’, hosted by conservative publications American Greatness and The New Criterion at a private club in Washington.There, Cockburn heard a wide-ranging discussion about nation states and governance, featuring Spectator columnists Daniel McCarthy and Roger Kimball, as well as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk, National Review’s John O’Sullivan, and Hillsdale College and Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton.Over lunch, Tucker Carlson delivered a keynote speech on what he has learned since Trump’s election.

tucker carlson

The new nationalism is here

Peter Thiel. Tucker Carlson. John Bolton. What’s most striking about the trio headlining the National Conservatism Conference is that none of the three has ever been elected to anything.Bolton may be national security adviser, but judging by his recent exile to Outer Mongolia and his stymied efforts to force regime change in Iran, his influence is ebbing. He may be rejoining the civilian corps soon enough.So why is a major new conference so honoring these folks? The question could be inverted. Why aren’t we hearing from over 200 Republican members of Congress? Sen. Josh Hawley, a freshman, will close Tuesday night at the NCC, but his address seems to have been a late addition.

tucker carlson peter thiel

Fred Fleitz is the most confrontational person I’ve met in journalism

Fred Fleitz doesn’t like me. When I last saw national security adviser John Bolton’s former chief of staff, in January, he told me my journalism was ‘crap,’ that I was ‘crap,’ and that he ‘didn’t have anything to say’ to me. Fair enough. This was the second time I’d tangled with Fleitz, a career conservative, civil servant and intelligence officer. Our first interaction came before he became Bolton’s chief of staff in 2018. Fleitz had publicly condemned my profile of his ally and mentor, Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, controversial in his own right, has since been entirely decent to me. But Fleitz is both Gaffney and Bolton’s pitbull, and seems to have no time for less than obsequious journalists.

fred fleitz