What Made Tucker Turn Against America?
What Made Tucker Turn Against America?
...and what does it tell us about Trump?
Happy Friday everyone. I wanted to take a break from our regularly scheduled legal programming to talk about Tucker Carlson, but it’s also about the general tenor of some voices on the Right.
D-Day was on Thursday, and this op-ed from Mitch McConnell (which is excellent)1 got me thinking:
Generations have taken pride in the triumph of the West’s wartime bravery and ingenuity, from the assembly lines to the front lines. We reflect less often on the fact that the world was plunged into war, and millions of innocents died, because European powers and the United States met the rise of a militant authoritarian with appeasement or naïve neglect in the first place.
We forget how influential isolationists persuaded millions of Americans that the fate of allies and partners mattered little to our own security and prosperity. We gloss over the powerful political forces that downplayed growing danger, resisted providing assistance to allies and partners, and tried to limit America’s ability to defend its national interests.
A thing that has continually nibbled at me over the past few years is the connection between the “America First” movement and Trumpian takeover of America’s (formerly) conservative Party. And I think it’s helpful to use Tucker Carlson as a vessel for understanding the shift.
Tucker was in the headlines recently because there were reports that he was starting a show in Russia. Given his recent shift towards overtly pro-Russian content propaganda, it didn’t come as a surprise to many. Tucker did respond and called the reports false, but the truth ended up being somewhere in the middle:
Independent news outlet Astra confirmed that the program features Russian-language dubbing of Carlson's American shows and is not original content for Russian viewers. In September 2023, Russia 24 aired a trailer for a show featuring Carlson without clarifying when it would be broadcast, the BBCreported. Carlson told The Financial Times that he knew nothing about it.
Neil Patel, CEO of the Tucker Carlson Network, denied claims in Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Astra that the airing of the episodes was part of a "joint project." "The Tucker Carlson Network has not done any deals with state media in any country. Whoever is currently pretending to be the old Newsweek brand2 would know that if they had checked with us before printing like news companies are supposed to do," he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
As with all things related to Tucker, it is hard to know whose story is actually true. After all, Tucker himself brazenly tells what he knows to be lies in order to deceive his audience. How did a Russian television station get their hands on a bunch of his content and air it on their platform (complete with Russian dubbing) without Tucker’s permission? It’s hard to see.
All that said, it’s really just a sideshow. Over the past few years, Tucker has shifted from a previously conservative (or arguably paleoconservative) viewpoint to one that is heavily focused on anti-Americanism. If you haven’t watched Tucker’s trek through the streets of Moscow, it’s worth peaking at. In it, Tucker wonders why Russia has clean streets and beautiful subways, whereas America is a third-world hellscape. For the record, here is my current view:
I am in the downtown area of one of America’s biggest cities, and things are looking OK. You can even spot the entrance to one of Denver’s newly Michelin-starred restaurants. I like it here. I certainly prefer it over Russia.
But it’s not just Tucker’s praise of Russia that unnerves me. For a while, Tucker has been shifting from “normal,” Trump-approved talking points (immigration is bad, tariffs are good, the FBI is out to get me) to things that sound like they were drawn up in the Kremlin (all vaccines are bad, Bashar al-Assad did not bomb his own people, the entire U.S. system is hopelessly corrupt and needs to be torn down). I’m trying to figure out what caused the shift.
There were two big stories recently that have also been nibbling at me. Earlier this week it was revealed that The Grayzone - an outlet that pushes pro-Hamas, pro-Iran, and pro-Russian talking points - received funding from Iran, and has connections to the Russian government. If you follow me on Twitter, you have maybe seen me sparring with one of their writers, Aaron Maté.3
Maté is one of a few formerly “lefty” or “progressive” writers who magically became pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump) when The Donald™ was accused of colluding with the Russians (add into this Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey). Maté and others repeatedly pushed a talking point that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf (or even at all), and continued to do so even after it was thoroughly debunked. Prior to that, Maté was pushing the (false) narrative that Assad did not use chemical weapons on his own people.
It was always kinda funny to me how Greenwald, Tracey, and Maté’s arguments always seemed to sync up with Russia’s narrative. LoL and behold, it turns out that Maté’s publication was being paid by America’s enemies to push their talking points. Is the same thing happening with Tucker?
With Tucker it makes less sense, mostly because he was born filthy rich, so he doesn’t have a need for money the same way that Greenwald, Tracey, and Maté do. But I read the Bible, and know that the correct recitation of 1 Timothy 6:10 is that the love of money is the root of all evil.4
What I think has pushed Tucker into his current trajectory was his pretty consistent desire to be a part of the media conversation within Washington. In a lot of ways, Tucker’s love of attention isn’t all that dissimilar from the love of money. Years ago, he was content to appear on MSNBC and CNN, but then switched a lot of his views once he was given a prime-time slot on Fox News. It was there that Tucker seemed to be able to anticipate where the (newly) pro-Trump GOP was going to shift. And for the most part, I think his instincts were spot on: His recitation of the “Great Replacement” theory was once viewed as shocking, but now it is echoed by the Speaker of the House, who is technically the most powerful Republican in government.
Therefore, Tucker’s move into conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination arguments, and some flirtations with anti-semitism shouldn’t be all that surprising, since they are all part of the edgiest conservative content that grabs attention. We have seen both Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens begin to express anti-Semitic views, largely because they both know that the StormFront audience is now up for grabs. The general point is that conservative media is driven by a for-profit motive that places audience capture above actual truth. This makes it ripe for shady foreign influence.
This brings me to the other big story this week: The exposure of The Epoch Times as one giant griftopia. If you haven’t heard of the Epoch Times, there is a good chance one of your conservative relatives could explain it to you. After Fox News, they are the most-read conservative website, a fact that is probably shocking to a lot of “normy” Republicans in Washington. Jonathan V. Last has a good summary:
The Epoch Times was founded in 2000 as an arm of Falun Gong, the quasi-religious dissident Chinese meditation movement. The idea was to have an English-language paper in the United States that would criticize the Chinese government at a time when engagement was official U.S. policy and American businesses were pouring money into China.
Then, starting in 2016, the Epoch Times became a propaganda outlet for Donald Trump. This evolution made no sense.
Trump was and is openly friendly to the Chicoms. He admired the Tiananmen Square massacre. He told Xi Jinping that he had no problem with Xi putting ethnic/religious minorities into detention camps. He told a Republican senator that if China invaded Taiwan the United States would do nothing about it.
If you were an outlet founded to oppose China’s repression of minorities, then supporting Trump ran counter to your goals. Trump wanted a trade war with China. He had absolutely no interest in destabilizing, weakening, or containing China’s authoritarian government.
Last then gets to why the Epoch Times shifted towards Trumpism:
It was a fully operational flywheel: The Epoch Times took in money. It paid Fox to run advertisements to attract more money. Conservative
griftersactivists then paid the Epoch Times to get access to their readers, in order to hit them up for cash, too.Why would these people and institutions who were supposedly formed to fight the Chinese authoritarians become mouthpieces for a political movement that was expressly friendly to Chinese authoritarians?
Because there was money in it. A lot of money.
I think Last was a little too kind to strikeout grifters, because that aptly describes huge chunks of conservative media. And it’s not even the little outlets; does anyone remember the publicly released text messages from Fox News during the 2020 Election? A major reason for Fox News’ shift into election trutherism was because their audience was leaving for Newsmax:
It is the Charlie Kirk/Candace Owens/Tucker Carlson fight for audience capture in a microcosm. If you have to constantly one-up your competitor on Conservative Content™ then it’s hard to know when to stop, even if the Nazis are involved (in Fox News’ case, it was right up until they settled a defamation suit). Tucker has moved into that zone because he knows conservatives are seeking out that content.
It is the current problem with Marvel movies: To make the next bad guy from space seem worse than the previous big bad guy from space, you have to move to an even bigger bad guy from space, and then move the whole thing to space itself. And then you have to invent multiple universes so that you can have even more big bad guys from space.
Once you are in a cycle of constantly trying to convince your audience that the next bad guy is the biggest, you really just start to sputter because the audience loses interest. A dude wanted to end the entire universe and there is someone out there worse than him?
In the conservative media environment, it seems to be that every democratic candidate is a Communist and/or a Socialist who is bringing about America’s destruction, but then they get into office and are just…liberal. Tucker is smart enough to understand that this won’t hold a person’s attention forever, so now he is flirting with the Nazis. I suspect Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk are making the same calculation.
Thinking through all of this - The Grayzone’s funding and the revelations about the Epoch Times - I can’t help but wonder how much foreign influence is affecting conservative media. It is a fact that both the Chinese Communist Party and the Kremlin are favoring Trump this election, but it’s not because they think he will make “better deals” with them than Joe Biden. It’s mostly because they think Trump is the likeliest destabilizer of America that is currently available to them.
A thing I will never forget about the Russian collusion story is that while the Russians were clearly helping Trump in the 2016 election, they also were attempting to boost Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary (they did it again in 2020). They did so because they viewed the far-left as another potentially destabilizing force within American politics.
In a hot war, Russia and China would lose to the U.S., but they are both currently engaged in a sort of “cool war” with us because our existence and success as a free society is a huge impediment to their own goals (to wit, the re-formation of the Soviet Union and the domination of Taiwan).
So, if you wanted to ask me what a foreign influence campaign in America looked like, it would be one that does serious, material harm to Americans:
Vaccines are bad.
You cannot trust anyone in government, ever.
There is no real truth.
The media is lying to you.
You cannot even trust the food you eat.
You cannot even trust the water you drink.
In other words, it looks like boosting R.F.K., Jr., and Qanon. I know what you’re thinking: Some of this stuff can just be American quirkiness and I don’t have to get all Joe McCarthy to explain all of the grifting. That might be true, but you should also read this piece, which keeps me up at night. To summarize it quickly, online influencers are being paid to spout misinformation, but it’s worse than that:
Mirko normally ignores offers from brands asking him to advertise their products to his more than 1.5 million subscribers. But the sponsorship offer he received in May this year was unlike any other.
An influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay him to promote what it said was leaked information that suggested the death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.
The information provided wasn't true.
Yes, vaccine disinformation in America isn’t new, but here is the kicker:
Fazze is a part of AdNow, which is a digital marketing company, registered in both Russia and the UK.
The BBC has made multiple attempts to contact AdNow by phone, email and even a letter couriered to their Moscow headquarters, but they have not responded (my emphasis).
We don’t have to speculate about whether or not the Russians are deliberately spreading vaccine disinformation (or paying people to do it) because we already have evidence of them doing so. I always go back to this line from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in 2016:
Russia is attacking us with a broad, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign “designed to sow discord in American politics and society.” Let it sink in. And let’s not single them out either:
The next time you see one of your college friends do a post about trusting their “natural immunity” going forward or drinking raw milk, you should actively wonder where they heard that stuff, and who paid the people they were listening to, to say it. If your parents suddenly have anti-Ukraine views that they didn’t have previously, you should ask them where they heard that stuff, and then wonder if someone in conservative media got paid to say it.
To tie all of this back to Trump, I think the reason both Russia and China have focused on supporting him and doing everything they can to oppose Biden is because a President Trump = a weaker America. And the quickest way you get to a President Trump is rampant disinformation, fake news, and a distrust in institutions.
Conservative media is already there, but there is some evidence that China’s influence scheme through TikTok is having an effect: In polls, some young voters want to fundamentally upend American democracy (which they do not feel is working for them) and see Trump as the “change” agent that will do it.
They might be right, just not in the way they think.
Should-Reads:
David French has a piece on how his own church canceled him.
This piece from The Root on Clarence Thomas receiving ~$4 million in gifts since 2015 is a good summary (and commentary) on the scandal.
I delayed the Jackal to address this, because it is in the legal wheelhouse of discussions we have here. But it truly is shocking that Thomas has accepted this much money while serving on the Supreme Court. The only defense I ever hear of his behavior is that there is no way to “buy” Thomas, since he was conservative to begin with. I struggle to come up with another scenario where this would even be a defense. Sure, Thomas is a conservative, but his acceptance of these gifts sent a message to GOP donors: If you keep these cases coming, you will know how I come down. To call it problematic is to put it lightly. I was not born yesterday and do not think Thomas is actually going to resign, but if I were the Biden Administration, I would communicate to him that he should and if he does, they will replace him with another conservative justice. But that’s all a pipe dream.
Cocktail Time Again.
This is a Jamaican BBQ Margarita. Before I give you the recipe, I am going to push you to buy the book where it’s from, The Aviary’s Summer Cocktails book. It was given to me by a friend and it is the best cocktail book I have. The recipes are for larger parties (think 6-8 servings each), so you use a food scale to get all your ingredients together in large batches. It sounds daunting at first, but it actually makes way more sense.
Seriously, buy the book. This margarita is obviously different from a traditional one, but it is incredibly complex and deep. What I’m about to give you is the one I have broken down into a single serving:
1.25 oz Tequila
.50 oz Pineapple Liqueur
.50 oz Agave
.25 oz Allspice Dram
1/3 oz Mezcal
3/4 oz lime juice
Shake and serve over a big cube. In fact, the book has a recipe for pineapple/mezcal ice cubes, that are delicious, but if you want that, you’ll have to buy the book.
I’ll be back next week, but then I’ll take a break for Juneteenth/Father’s Day weekend. And then we are getting close to the Fourth of July. Bask in summer, which is fast approaching.
Even if you are not a fan, it’s worth reading!
I have said this a few times in the Jackal, but just a little reminder that Newsweek was purchased by a cult leader and isn’t the same publication as it was in the 20th Century.
He has a ´thingy on the e, but Substack apparently won't let me add that!
Some translations now have it as the root of “all kinds of evil,” but I like the King James Version here. In Darby’s translation it’s “the root of every evil,” which also hammers it home.