Tucker is a national treasure. That said... especially post-Fox, I worry that he is prone to descending into contrarianism-for-contrarianism's-sake, leading him to entertain or even endorse some loony ideas. (To state the obvious, this tendency is also evident in some of the loonier Unz.com contributors.)
I completely recognize that the Establishment is not trustworthy, and yet, that's not a warrant to endorse "whatever is the opposite of the Conventional Wisdom."
This was also Douthat's assessment: "The newer (and especially, younger) right is defined by a politics of suspicion — a deep distrust of all institutions; a comfort with outsider forms of knowledge and conspiratorial theories; a hostility toward official mouthpieces and corporate-governmental alliances; a skepticism about American empire and a pessimism about the American future — that used to be much more the province of the left."
“I love by the way that people on my side — I’ll just admit it, on the Right — have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear bombs on civilians,” Carlson said on the latest episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast. “Like, are you joking? That’s just prima facie evil. If you can’t — ‘Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings’ — no. It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. It’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of exercise to justify, like, ‘Oh no, it’s really good because someone else could get’ — how about, no? How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening.”
For starters, the Allies were not the ones to trigger the prisoner’s dilemma that culminated with the deployment of the Little Boy and the Fat Man. It was the Germans who began the atomic arms race with the Nazis’ discovery of nuclear fission, and thanks to the Nazis, it was Jewish emigres from Nazi-controlled territories like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard who ran to warn the West and help the Allies develop our own atomic bomb. Contrary to Carlson’s canard here, there is no counterfactual in which the Allies initiated nuclear weapons development unprompted, nor was merely destroying the Axis progress on their program in Central Europe a possibility.
Tucker is a national treasure. That said... especially post-Fox, I worry that he is prone to descending into contrarianism-for-contrarianism's-sake, leading him to entertain or even endorse some loony ideas. (To state the obvious, this tendency is also evident in some of the loonier Unz.com contributors.)
I completely recognize that the Establishment is not trustworthy, and yet, that's not a warrant to endorse "whatever is the opposite of the Conventional Wisdom."
This was also Douthat's assessment: "The newer (and especially, younger) right is defined by a politics of suspicion — a deep distrust of all institutions; a comfort with outsider forms of knowledge and conspiratorial theories; a hostility toward official mouthpieces and corporate-governmental alliances; a skepticism about American empire and a pessimism about the American future — that used to be much more the province of the left."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/opinion/tucker-carlson-fox-news-audience.html
“I love by the way that people on my side — I’ll just admit it, on the Right — have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear bombs on civilians,” Carlson said on the latest episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast. “Like, are you joking? That’s just prima facie evil. If you can’t — ‘Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings’ — no. It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. It’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of exercise to justify, like, ‘Oh no, it’s really good because someone else could get’ — how about, no? How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening.”
For starters, the Allies were not the ones to trigger the prisoner’s dilemma that culminated with the deployment of the Little Boy and the Fat Man. It was the Germans who began the atomic arms race with the Nazis’ discovery of nuclear fission, and thanks to the Nazis, it was Jewish emigres from Nazi-controlled territories like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard who ran to warn the West and help the Allies develop our own atomic bomb. Contrary to Carlson’s canard here, there is no counterfactual in which the Allies initiated nuclear weapons development unprompted, nor was merely destroying the Axis progress on their program in Central Europe a possibility.