Free-for-All

Writing for a periodical means having to return to certain topics periodically. There will always be another Super Bowl for the sportswriter to cover, another superhero movie for the suffering film critic to endure.

It’s no different with politics. There will always be another proto-fascist Tucker Carlson stunt to digest, another round of distressed “When did Tucker lose his mind?” speculation to consider. 

“I’ve known Tucker for 30+ years,” Jonah Goldberg tweeted on Tuesday about Carlson’s latest interview. “For most of that time, if I told him he’d become this guy one day, he’d have laughed, cursed me out, or punched me.” Fellow Dispatch-er Jamie Weinstein agreed: “It’s become a D.C. parlor game to discuss what’s happened to Tucker. … Lots of theories and plenty of signs where he was headed, but still no definitive answer.”

The occasion for their angst was Carlson’s lengthy chat with Darryl Cooper, whom Tucker described as possibly “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Their topic was World War II. In hyping the interview, Carlson promised to shed light on aspects of the conflict that are supposedly “forbidden” to discuss.

Can you guess where this is going?

Cooper did in fact go there, calling Winston Churchill “the chief villain” of the war and implying that the Holocaust was an on-the-fly response to Germany being overwhelmed by a POW problem. As the interview circulated online, critics began examining his social media account and … that too was what you would expect, replete with musings about Hitler’s efforts to find, and I quote, “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”

Who knew that a guy like Tucker prone to slobbering over shopping-cart technology in Vladimir Putin’s Russia might also be prone to promoting “pro-Nazi propaganda”?

I don’t think Carlson has lost his mind, or at least no more so than anyone who’s been politically radicalized has. He’s been engaged in a coherent, if despicable, ideological project for years. As far back as 2017, he was airing segments in Fox News prime time on the gypsy infiltration of America. He surrounded himself at the network with white-nationalist chuds. He’s become a committed postliberal. It was inevitable that he’d start pulling his chin one day about the supposed moral complexity of World War II.

There’s nothing unusual about populists Nazi-pilling themselves with historical revisionism in search of their next contrarian high. What’s unusual about Tucker is that he’s maintained a degree of national popularity and even mainstream acceptance as he goes about trying to make the world unsafe for democracy. 

How? He’s taking advantage of a leadership vacuum on the right.

The end of assignment editors.

“Right-wing media is in shambles,” podcaster Adam Johnson wrote this week. “[Roger] Ailes then [Rush] Limbaugh dying has left a total power vacuum. It’s an ideological Holy Roman Empire—natural news guys, Christian wackos, Joe Rogan adjacents, MAGA coin hustlers, weirdos who stalk trans people. There is no unifying narrative anymore.”

There’s truth to that, his disdain for “Christian wackos” aside. A decade ago it was no exaggeration to say that Limbaugh and Fox News, where Ailes presided, served as de facto assignment editors for populist right-wing media. Whatever the daily hobby horse was in their programming, that’s what talk radio and online commentators would be chattering about.

Who’s the assignment editor now?

Donald Trump? Occasionally the stars will align and he’ll hit on something that electrifies the right, like the “rigged election” argle-bargle after the 2020 election. But on an average day, he’s too scatterbrained to drive a consistent message. In fact, the narratives involving Trump that tend to unify the right are ones in which he’s a character, not the author. When the FBI searches Mar-a-Lago or some prosecutor drops a new indictment on him, suddenly everyone’s on the same page. Trump’s own reaction is largely irrelevant.

Right-wing talk radio still draws an enormous audience, but no one follows, say, Sean Hannity’s lead the way they followed Limbaugh’s. And while Fox remains influential, the network increasingly takes its cues from populist outlets rather than vice versa, as last year’s nearly billion-dollar defamation settlement demonstrated.

The populist monster that establishment right-wing media created is consuming the industry. Certain social-media users and conspiratorial blogs promoted by Trump now command as much attention from the grassroots right as more mainstream personalities do, like meth dealers luring away a coke peddler’s clientele with promises of stronger stuff. Populism has grown more democratic in its media tastes even as it’s grown more monarchical in its political tastes.

There are no more assignment editors. And because Trump himself doesn’t care about policy apart from a few nationalist obsessions like immigration, there’s not even a clear ideological vision for right-wing media to rally around.

So it’s a free-for-all. Anti-vaxxers, “manosphere” bros, crypto enthusiasts, Holocaust revisionists, plus the motley crew that Johnson identified. They’re all jockeying for audience share, hoping to fill the right’s intellectual power vacuum with their personal bugaboos. The analogy to the Holy Roman Empire is a clever one, but I tend to imagine what’s happening as a sort of populist Homestead Act: Trump took over the right, ousted the former ideological landowners, and encouraged anyone who wanted a piece of it to stake their claim, no matter how wacky they might be. All they had to do was swear allegiance to him.

The sudden promise of free ideological territory explains why all roads out of Crazy Town lead to MAGA. As if to illustrate the point, it wasn’t Tucker’s fascist agitprop that inspired Adam Johnson’s analysis; it was the backlash Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh drew from fellow populists after warning them of the risks of … drinking unpasteurized milk. Walsh found out the hard way that the Daily Wire’s political turf now abuts the intellectual homestead of “all-natural” freaks who think making milk safe for human consumption is some sort of elitist scam.

He offended his new neighbors. And thanks to Trump, they have as much of a claim to their territory on the right as he does.

The new three-legged stool.

So, no, Tucker Carlson hasn’t lost his mind. He’s rationally capitalizing on the ideological free-for-all that Trumpism and the flattening of populist media has created. He’s staking a claim for his own preferred ideology to be treated as respectably as The Daily Wire and the raw-milk nuts are.

I’d go so far as to say that he and his fellow travelers now represent one leg of a new three-legged stool.

The three-legged stool of Reaganism came up on Friday in a column about the future of the GOP. Fiscal responsibility, national-defense hawkishness, and social conservatism were pillars of the mainstream right for 35 years. But under Trump, the first is now long gone, the second is unlikely to survive his second term, and the third is in the process of being, er, aborted.

There’s a new stool, the first leg of which is represented by postliberal ideologues. That’s the Tucker faction, the group that wants to rip out the liberal Western order by the roots. Pluralism, feminism, democracy—it’s all got to go if Christian white men are to regain their pride of place as rulers of the West. Carlson seems to believe that his audience has been “programmed” to respect liberal values and can be reprogrammed to admire authoritarianism. All it takes is the right incentive structure.

Tucker’s game is to train his fans to believe that questioning their most basic moral and civic commitments is proof of courage and the key to accessing knowledge to which only the freest thinkers are privy. (That’s why he hyped the subject of Cooper’s revisionism as “forbidden.”) Are the Hells Angels just free spirits? Does Israel really respect Christians? Is Putin actually the villain in the Ukraine war? Was Hitler actually the villain in World War II?

He’s building a tolerance in his audience for ever more extreme forms of illiberalism by gradually upping the dose. He’s not stupid.

The second leg of the stool is conspiratorial contrarians of all stripes, people who have one or more kooky preoccupations they’re eager to share but who lack the sort of grand ideological ambition that Carlson and his wing have. Vaccine skeptics, raw-milk guzzlers, flat-earthers, colloidal-silver enthusiasts, you name it: Snake oil is welcome here. I’d place QAnoners in this category, although the conspiracy theory to which they subscribe is more overtly political than the others I mentioned.

These are people who feel they’ve uncovered some secret (“forbidden!”) truth covered up by elites and are very much open to the possibility that there are other secret truths to which they might be awakened. They’re perfect marks for radicals like Carlson—and of course for grifters who are eager to monetize them. 

Intellectual cross-pollination among this cohort probably explains why it’s rare to find an anti-vaxxer who isn’t skeptical of Ukraine and vice versa. Once you’ve thrown in with them, you’re forever at risk of damaging your populist credibility if you evince skepticism of any outre belief, which in turn creates sustained pressure toward full-spectrum paranoia. As Matt Walsh is discovering, you don’t order off the kook menu à la carte.

Elon Musk belongs in this group after he let his fondness for edgelord contrarianism turn Twitter into a megaphone for bigots. “Very interesting” and “worth watching” is how he described Tucker’s descent into Nazi revisionism on Tuesday.

The third leg of the stool is the anti-anti-Trump partisans who disdain the first two groups but not quite enough to disabuse them of their belief that being governed by the worst Republican is preferable to being governed by the best Democrat. This group will do its best to paper over differences with the other two and to turn a blind eye to their excesses whenever possible—and when it isn’t possible, they’ll suddenly sound surprised, even aghast, at what cretins like Carlson have become.

Creeping fascism on the right has been a-creepin’ since at least 2016. If you’re shocked, shocked to find that there’s gambling going on in here in 2024, it can only be because you went out of your way for tribal reasons not to notice. My fondest wish is that this third leg of the stool will break in November and send Trump down to defeat. Given what its members have been willing to overlook and excuse to reach this point, however, no one should be optimistic. 

Trump himself is an amalgam of all three legs of the stool on which he sits. He was a conspiratorial contrarian before he entered politics. He’s always admired ruthlessness of authoritarians. And he’s leveraged Republican partisanship to the hilt to keep the right on his side in conflicts with Democrats over his most reprehensible behavior.

Inside the tent.

All movements have their share of kooks. Before Trump, there was Ron Paul. Until a few weeks ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to spoil the GOP’s chances in November by hoovering up a meaningful share of the right’s considerable crank contingent.

Sometimes the kookery even reaches Congress. One of the many populists who scolded (and in some cases berated) Walsh for scoffing at the virtues of raw milk was Thomas Massie, the Republican representative from Kentucky.

What’s different about Trump’s movement is that the kooks aren’t just treated respectfully by the leader; they’re valued friends and advisers in some cases. They wield real influence.

Who was it that was given the honor of addressing the nation shortly before Trump himself at this year’s Republican convention? Who was it that prevailed upon Trump to choose J.D. Vance over Doug Burgum as his running mate? Who is it that’s currently scheduled to host Vance for an event on September 21 in, of all places, the most important swing state in America? 

That’s Tucker Carlson, of course. His politics are somehow too obnoxious for Fox News but not too obnoxious for the head of a major political party who stands a 50-50 shot at being president next year.

Carlson is so mainstream on the right that I doubt Vance would dare insult him by canceling on him this month for having promoted a Nazi apologist. Again: A staunch populist like Vance doesn’t get to pick and choose which crank beliefs he respects. Either he respects all of them or he’s deemed a coward prone to letting “the establishment” bully him into adopting conventional wisdom—an especially damning perception for a modern Republican politician. After all, a vice president who would sneer at someone for calling Churchill “the chief villain” in World War II might also be moved to sneer at them for refusing to vaccinate their children.

Anyone with a serious moral objection to Carlson’s influence over Trump and Vance abandoned the right some time ago, I suspect. Postliberals love him; conspiratorial contrarians have no issue with him; and anti-anti-Trumpers who’ve lasted this long have surely made peace by now with the fact that the Buchananites and Birchers are in charge. There will be no Buckley-esque expulsion of the fringe by Reaganites this time, they must realize. If anyone’s going to be expelled as a drag on the movement, it’s the Buckleyites themselves.

They should have the basic dignity to renounce an organization that can no longer muster meaningful outrage at Tucker Carlson, as Jonah and Steve Hayes once did. But I suppose if they were capable of that sort of dignity, the stool propping up Trump’s ample political girth would have collapsed long ago.

Realistically, all we can hope for is that Harris and her party hang Trump’s affiliation with Carlson around his neck, starting with calling public attention to the Vance event on September 21. (If you want “weird,” granting interviews to a guy who wants to relitigate Nazi Germany is weird.) Trump will never do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing, but sometimes he’ll do the right thing—or make a gesture toward doing it—when the wrong thing begins to cost him politically.

The right will not be shamed into caring that fascist propagandists are in orbit around the Republican nominee for president, but swing voters are a different story, I hope.