The Carlson and Powell Saga

Tags

biden, dominion, Election 2020, kraken, sidney powell, trump, tucker carlson

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has gathered a dedicated following these past few years. Just a couple of weeks ago the 51 year old was widely regarded as the darling of both grassroot conservatives and the president himself. But whether he knew it or not, and despite a considerable overlap, his crowd was not as dedicated as the one he was about to provoke.

In a brief segment anyone interested in American politics will have seen by now, Carlson very gently cast doubt on the legitimacy of exotic claims by Sidney Powell, a late addition to the legal team Trump had charged with challenging the 2020 election result. These claims included speculations about an international communist plot to rob the president of victory by misusing voting technology; large accusations, then, whose revelation in court Powell insisted would be ‘Biblical’. Agreeing with her, Carlson remarked that they would count as the worst crime against American democracy in its history, if true.

Answering journalistic hunger, he had contacted Powell for comment, or for some foretaste of the evidence that was to be presented before a jury. But the attorney had rebuffed him, apparently angered by the request. Carlson related this rejection to his audience with the merest twinge of frustration, and then quite sensibly postponed the matter.

As I say, I do not know whether Carlson quite appreciated the nature of the reaction that was to follow, but it was coming either way. Twitter caught fire.

“You just ended your career, Tucker.”

“Tucker is deep state. Been saying this for years.”

“He was the last reason I was watching Fox. Guess the whole lot have sold-out. Buh-buy!”

Accusations of turncoatery and treason were thrown about with pitchfork enthusiasm. Viewers pledged never to watch the man’s show again, ending years of respect and admiration. The next video Carlson uploaded (on a different subject) received thousands of retaliatory downvotes. And even after another clip addressed the backlash, most refused to contemplate forgiveness.

“Apologise to Sidney!”

“Too little, too late, Friar-Tuck. Bye now!!”

“It isn’t just about you, young man! It’s about truth!”

Days later, the Trump legal team itself put daylight between their efforts and Ms Powell. Her claims were growing wilder by the hour, damaging the revisionist cause.

I haven’t seen many apologies to Carlson since then, though a few thousand are surely due; only some vindicated loyalists scolding those who too hastily turned their backs on him, and receiving few replies.

What, if anything, does this episode have to teach us?

For one, I’d say it confirms that the political right in America has as much of a problem with truth as the political left. Though, for some time, conservatives have delighted in watching the left violently divide itself into hostile factions of woke-corporatists and grassroots-realists – we might represent these two tendencies by personifying the former as Thomas Friedman and the latter as Matt Taibbi – the right now risks an equally disruptive tripartition of its ranks.

First, the Trump Fundamentalists – people for whom the man has replaced the agenda, or at least enjoys level billing with it; the exhilarated crowds at his rallies who adore his common wit, the way he draws blood from the detested liberal aristocracy. These crowds do not wish to hear contradictions of Trump’s narrative. They will boycott and oppose anything and anyone to protect it. Fox News is the most prominent entity to be gored so far. It won’t be the last.

Then there are the neo-cons, or corporate-internationalist right; cheerful war hawks, animated mostly by money and foreign policy. Think Marco Rubio, Charlie Kirk and what’s left of Lindsey Graham.

Thirdly, the Post-Trumpists; those who have reservations about the man, but hold fast to his principles; who want ‘Trumpism without Trump’. Prominent examples include Ann Coulter and (arguably) Pat Buchanan.

It would be bright-side thinking to believe these groups will soon settle their differences. Likelier, they will make for determined combatants in a jungle war of ideological succession; one that will absorb the energy of the Republican party for the foreseeable future.

Viewing the Powell dust-up in this light makes matters considerably clearer, though no less troubling. Foolishly or bravely, Tucker Carlson dared to deviate from the Trump line; and in doing so revealed a potentially crippling inflexibility.

Thumbing their noses at the old Republican mainstream, Trump Fundamentalists are already establishing a parallel media, manifesto and commentariat. QAnon, dark money, Satanism, George Soros, vaccines, 5G and electoral fraud are the central concerns – a far cry from the concrete disagreements over healthcare, immigration, and foreign policy that gave Trump his victory in 2016.

The Rubio-ist neoconservative faction will no doubt present its own case, making use of euphemisms for drone violence such as ‘ensuring stability’ or promoting ‘American leadership’; ultimately the same platform as Joe Biden, but with tokenistic dissent on healthcare and tax.

The Post-Trump deviation is the most interesting to me, and not just in an American context. Building on Trump’s victory over the corporate press, with its warped liberalism and mandatory denial of obvious truths; taking his better arguments further, tidying them up, separating the logic from the logician; walking back or denouncing his worst aspects; criticising his excesses; in other words, playing Khrushchev after the death of Stalin, seems to me plainly worthwhile.

What I fear will happen is that the right will shatter into fragments; incompatible factions, each with its own media, society and commentariat, drifting ever further apart, dividing and subdividing until no fight-ready unity is conceivable. Discord like this is ripe for exploitation.

If the ultra-loyalists and QAnonists are allowed to take the reins now, it will take years to dislodge them. Should Trumpism as a sentiment and set of ideas degenerate into the man’s whims and fantasies, any otherwise sturdy logic he rode to power on will be undermined.

Whatever the risks, a clash of conservative worldviews is sadly necessary.

I commend Tucker Carlson for not giving in completely to the wild panic engulfing the Trump right. He is doing a great service to conservatism, and to the goals the president promised originally to serve.

David

One Week on Parler

Tags

2020 election, Ann Coulter, biden, Israel, n word, parler, trump, Twitter

There is a need for platforms like Parler, the free-speech friendly Twitter alternative recently pulled into the media spotlight for hosting disenfranchised Trump supporters.

There is obviously a limit to what can be said on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and probably even WordPress. Sophisticated algorithmic mechanisms already exist to filter out content featuring contentious words; not only deliberately unpleasant terms like ‘n*gger’ or ‘k*ke’, but also controversial or misused ones like ‘Zionist’, ‘globalist’, among others; the aim being to provide a safe, friendly space that people of all stripes can use for work or pleasure.

But as these platforms have grown, so has their political and strategic value; and with politics comes passion, and with passion inevitable offence. Donald Trump, whose social media accounts are both an asset and a liability to the websites hosting them, has attracted a flood of both pro- and anti-MAGA voices to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in recent years, ruining them for some, improving them for others. Now, for the former at least, after a contested and fraught election, the official effort to regulate information has become intolerable. Migratory waves to Parler flow thick and fast.

Entirely out of curiosity, I signed up for an account last week. This is a kind of review.

As I mentioned, Parler is modelled on Twitter, and has a similar concept. You broadcast your opinions, post links, pictures, etc. and other people react to them – liking them, commenting on them, or ‘echoing’ them, which is the same thing as retweeting. Like Twitter, you have a username and an @-name; you collect followers, and can receive private messages. On first glance, the only obvious difference – apart from the content of the posts – is the colour scheme, which is paper white and cherry red.

The content is certainly different. Not surprisingly, but still strikingly. The atmosphere is like that of a political club.

As soon as the account had been activated, my automatic ‘hello’ post received automated comments and welcome messages from various official pro-Trump accounts. I was invited to ‘Stop the Steal’ and pledge my support by texting ‘Trump’ to a (now familiar) mobile number.

I decided to explore just how committed the platform was to freedom of speech. I typed the ‘n word’ (though rather more explicitly) into the search bar above the news feed. Sure enough, the word was present – in usernames, bios, posts and memes. There was a user called ‘Certified N*ggerologist’, for example; another called ‘n*gger1488’, and so on. I then tried ‘Zionist’, expecting – foolishly, it turned out – to find a wealth of anti-Semitic and conspiratorial sentiment. But though there were examples of this, the majority of hits were older American Trump supporters proudly self-identifying as supporters of Israel. The difference between this place and 4chan’s /pol/ became clearer.

Looking around at the users, the majority of which were American seniors, I felt a definite sense of unease and out-of-place-ness. There was truth to be found, yes – and even genuine insight; but also a constant, nagging contradiction. Here was freedom of speech expressed as marching uniformity. Something seemed to have gone wrong.

Parler is far from a cult forum. It was certainly never designed to be one. But the automatic messages I received from the Trump campaign at the beginning of my experiment, together with the insularity of the userbase, do not bode well for its promise of greater ideological variety.

On Twitter, the right is persecuted by the left. Liberal users routinely report conservative accounts, paying Stasi-like attention to the language of any post they disagree with. On Parler, at least presently, it appears the right has made a Twitter for itself, flipping the tables. Here it is liberal users who are swarmed and berated (though, notably, not reported).

You would be correct to point out this may only be temporary. Parler is a Trump app at the moment because Trump supporters are the people taking advantage of it; but nothing is preventing left-wing or middle-ground users migrating there as well. A free speech forum will be what users make of it. No more. No less.

My concern is that the owners of Parler are already comfortable with the idea that Trump loyalists are (and will always be) its bread and butter. I am worried that the app will remain a ‘Twitter for MAGA people’ – a safe space where they can agree with each other in peace, protected from opposing views.

***

Donald Trump is the not the arguments he made on the campaign trail, nor the energies conjured up or released by his movement. He is an odd person, with absurd idiosyncrasies. It is vitally important that the cause of truth, no matter how much the president has done for it, does not become the cause of Trump. Truth is eternal and perfect. Trump is temporary and flawed.

One of the most disturbing impressions Parler made on me is the idea that for millions of otherwise balanced people, a meaningful distinction between Trump and truth no longer exists. For such people, if Trump goes down, truth will follow. If Trump wins, truth triumphs likewise. Any evidence or argument against Trump is untrue by definition, and by the same logic, any argument for him is unquestionable fact.

I am confident that if the president suddenly switched places with Biden on any issue, even a sacred cause of the right, a good number of his supporters would follow him regardless. Criticism of his defection would be ‘fake news’, blasphemy, heresy. The divine mystery of the president’s ‘4D chess’ would be deemed beyond the ignorant critic’s intellectual capacity.

Consider the plight of the long-suffering paleoconservative Ann Coulter, who has done more than most to support Trump when it counts. For nearly four years now, the New York columnist has been trying to separate the causes of Trump’s election from the character of the man himself. For Coulter, immigration, elitism and future demographics were the underlying factors of the Great Revolt of 2016, not the quirks and talents of Trump alone.

She continues to receive great vitriol for this claim: “What happened to you, Ann?” – “I used to be a fan. Sad you’ve sold out to the fake news media!” Etc.

But Coulter, like a small number of others, criticises Trump from the right, and with a greater goal in mind – the preservation of a first-world America. Trump could reign for another thirty years and not save the country she values; because Trump is not the goal. And the goal matters more.

David