Tucker Carlson and Fascism
Tucker Carlson is bluescreening. And when you're down there with him, you'll bluescreen too.
Tucker Carlson has a charming persona, a clownishness pleasingly coupled with a darkness that isn't necessarily obvious. He is squeaky but intense, confused yet raptly outraged, dumbly furrowed yet articulate; so humble as to be self-deprecating on sensitive matters like the denomination of his Christian upbringing, and then wholly serious when he tells you that the opposite of order is hate.
He is a bit of a clown, who just maybe, might be holding a knife in that hand behind his back. Is he? No, you silly goose, it's just a whoopie cushion. Full of mustard gas. Hahaha!
Let's look at a six-minute clip. We’re told this is from the last speech he gave at Heritage before he and Fox News cut ties.
Early in the clip, he describes how he started his Heritage foundation to help America by generating evidenced debate for the purposes of finding the best political outcomes. Competitive thinking, allowing the most helpful ideas to come out on top. Sounds great to me, and sounds like it went okay for him for a while.
... Until he got offended.
"There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement, with that mindset. Policy papers don't account for it at all. If you have people saying 'I have an idea: let's castrate the next generation. Let's sexually mutilate children,' I'm sorry, that's not a political debate. What? That has nothing to do with politics. What's the outcome we're desiring here?"
Tucker seems too offended to problem-solve anymore. He just can't think of any creative solutions.
"An androgynous population, are we arguing for that? I don't think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome. But the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that. What is that? Well, it's irrational [and theological]. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms."
Tucker is unprepared for leftist totalism, gobsmacked by 'woke' identity-communism, mindblown by the existence of human rights predation, depopulation agendas, normalized genital mutilation and ideologically corrupt takeovers of institutions. Who is James Lindsay? It seems Tucker has no idea. Tucker is drooling in shock at the preposterous claim that extreme leftists can be rationally comprehended, and we're having a great time drooling along with him.
If the extreme left can't be rationally comprehended, they definitely can't be rationally opposed, and so the opposition must not be subject to reason — But this a trap. It's the point in the story where we reach into the sewer to take back the paper boat and get grabbed. The truth is, extremism isn't the hardest thing to rationally oppose, it's the easiest. That is, if you want to. If you aren't seeking to generate some counter-extremism of your own instead.
"When people — or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people of all, which is the federal government, the largest organization in human history — decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, 'Hey, let's tear it down,' what you're watching is not a political movement, it's evil."
No. What you're watching is an evil political movement. This time around, it stands on a foundation of Marcuse's deconstruction-for-liberation, and Derrida's excision of meaning from language.
By conceptually separating evil from politics, and implicitly denying evil’s place alongside goodness within every human heart, Tucker is presenting us with a false dichotomy to bring cultural conflict outside the political discourse.
Yet, discourse is the only place political evil can be peacefully defeated. This is why Derrida sought to neutralize discourse. If you stop engaging in it, you're giving him exactly what he, and all his postmodernist commie buddies, wanted.
If the given political evil is unwilling to engage in discourse (and perhaps unwillingness to engage in discourse is in itself a definition of political evil), one must then engage in discourse with whoever is still listening, about what, and how much, to do about evil and abusive acts, without committing evil and abusive acts oneself in the process.
Maybe that's all Tucker means. I've liked him, and I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt here.
"If you want to know what's evil, and what's good, what are the characteristics of those? And by the way, I think the Athenians would have agreed with this; this is not just a Christian notion, it's kind of a widely agreed upon understanding of good and evil. What are its products? What do these two conditions produce?
"Well, good is characterized by order: calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it. Lack of conflict. Cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. And evil is characterized by their opposites: violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth."
The Athenians would have agreed with this? Aristotle? The Neoplatonists? I don't think so.
Good is characterized by balance, not order; likewise, evil is characterized by imbalance, and a product of imbalance is hate. Order is only the masculine force, and when out of balance will disrupt calmness, tranquility and peace. Chaos (disorder) is equally the feminine force, and the same balance considerations apply.
The Aristotelian Mean characterizes virtue as the mean between two extremes — for example, a balance between the extremes of chaos and order. Without a balance of chaos, order’s cleanliness becomes sterility; its tranquility becomes thoughtlessness; its peace becomes smothering, silencing and oppression.
Pause a moment. If order and hate are opposites, where does play fit in exactly? Where on the spectrum between order and hate do we find fun, creativity, expression and freedom? Where on that spectrum do we find a sense of humour, a joke? If good is characterized by lack of conflict, what is a debate?
Encroaching chaotic communist evil does need to be met with a dose of order, but presenting that order in a way that goes beyond the conventional political discourse is... fascism. Mustard gas! Wakka-wakka! *spins noisemaker*
"If you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes [violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth], what you're really advocating for is evil. That's just true. I'm not calling for a religious war, far from it. I'm merely calling for an acknowledgement of what you're watching."
Not that far from it. Tucker is "not calling for a religious war," he's just calling for the atmosphere that produces one. His basket of evil outcomes is a mixture of the consequences of an imbalance between order and chaos and the contributors to balance, all categorized in the spirit of using the consequences of balance to sell us solely order, order, order.
Tucker Carlson's response to the encroaching communist evil is, evidently, fascist evil. I think I've heard this song somewhere before. Maybe he'll keep on in this direction and we'll get to see the same old war repeat again, or maybe he'll notice the ways in which his Christian-driven dichotomies contravene the quanta and qualia of nature, and use his influence to seek peace.
"Those of us in our mid-fifties are caught in the past in the way that we think about this. One side's like [...] 'Let's have a debate about our ideas,' [but the other side doesn't] want a debate, those ideas don't produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force [Satanic evil] acting upon us."
If you're certain evil can't be reasoned with, how close are you to calling someone evil because it offends you to reason with him? Where is the evil housed when that happens? The evil is housed in you, and the scary part is that you don't even know it. That's how it wins — by convincing you that it doesn't exist, doesn’t operate in you.
I'm not keeping my hopes up, but:
The key is to refuse to engage in political discourse on evil's terms, but to still keep engaging in political discourse nonetheless. Let's debate amongst ourselves about what to do about evil and abuse, and have many sides of that debate, engaging with the proponents of evil (most of whom have been bamboozled) while leaving evils themselves relatively on the peripheral, except where they are to be justly prosecuted. Maybe that's what Tucker means, and if so, I hope he takes a moment to clarify his terms, because that's what constructive discourse needs most of all.
See past that furrow, Tucker. Take your ten minutes to say your prayers, and then take the rest of your moments to keep upholding your nation’s constitution, and the spirit of peace, balance, and reason. Antifa has been calling you a fascist for a long time because that’s what works for them, not for you. I hope you're talking to James Lindsay and his kind, so that my fears may be disposed of as paranoias.