Tucker Carlson and the Beer Hall Putz: The logical conclusion of the “redpill” mentality that’s increasingly prevalent on the right. (Cathy Young, Sep 09, 2024, The Bulwark)
In the Free Press, Sohrab Ahmari (attempting to don a new centrist hat in his latest political pivot) describes Carlson’s praise of Cooper as a manifestation of the “Barbarian Right,” more or less overtly racist and preoccupied with racial hierarchies. The “Barbarian Right,” writes Ahmari, is characterized by the conviction that one is championing facts and ideas suppressed by the establishment—things they don’t want you to think and to know. Its distinctive features also include “revulsion for the mildly egalitarian conservatism that took hold across the West in the postwar period,” a conservatism that accepted the civil rights movement and that “marginalized Jew-haters.” Indeed, Ahmari notes, Carlson’s interview of Cooper shows “how far the Barbarian Right will go in seeking to delegitimize the actually existing American order.”
It’s an accurate observation, but the rot goes beyond the hardcore racialist right. The “redpill” mentality which holds that everything you’ve been told by the “establishment” and the “elites” is a lie—and of which World War II revisionism and Holocaust denial are arguably the logical conclusion—has become fairly standard in right-wing and “heterodox” circles. So has distaste for the “actually existing” American and Western order. Here’s a startling example: In July 2021, Tablet, the Jewish online magazine which in the past several years has increasingly drifted from pluralistic centrism toward nationalist/populist conservatism, published an article, based on its author’s viral Twitter thread, in defense of Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lie. Its argument: Whatever the evidence with regard to alleged election fraud, Trump supporters have every reason to believe, especially after Russiagate, that “the Regime” and its subservient media are rotten through and through and cannot be trusted. Its author? None other than Darryl Cooper.
The rush to condemn Carlson’s promotion of Cooper by many people to the right of center, from the Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon to radio host Erick Erickson to Ahmari and others at the Free Press to National Review authors and editors has been laudable. But some of this pushback had overtones of alarm at the fact that trends these same outlets and authors had condoned and even normalized had now crossed a red line. In a Newsweek column, conservative writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis acknowledged as much:
It is on those of us who have, for too long, closed our eyes to the madness among our own ranks, to ensure this chaos of conspiracy does not spread to the mainstream, any more than it already has.
And indeed, for a long time, many of Carlson’s current detractors, not only “closed [their] eyes” to his peddling of conspiracy theories and bigotry but engaged in active apologetics for it. As I noted in The Bulwark more than a year ago after Carlson was booted by Fox News, Weiss wrote a fairly appreciative post about him at the time—acknowledging that she found his views on Ukraine and immigration repugnant, but also stressing “how important he was (and is)” and praising him for challenging COVID lockdowns and telling the truth about Black Lives Matter riots and “the alliance between Big Tech and the government.”
No one is just a little bit Identitarian.