I think this article gets things exactly right. Just an anecdote: I don't really watch Tucker Carlson any more, but I used to, even when I was left of center. The reasons were primarily because he was hilarious and would argue with crazy people such that I found myself agreeing with him on lots of things in his disputes (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8PvHQqQxgU). I remember he argued with some lunatic professor who thought that it was a great idea to prohibit white people from showing up to campus on certain days or something like that--his videos are just hilarious.
Just a couple of thoughts: I've not followed Tucker Carlson before around the start of this year, but I recall nothing about UFOs for example. I do recall the Moussa Diarra case. Thank you for clarifying that.
That said, of course he's an entertainer! How would someone in corporate media in today's environment get to first base if he wasn't?? He's giving the masses what they seem to want. Too bad it made the elites in and out of corporate media uncomfortable.
It doesn't follow from that, though, that Carlson's simply making crap up.
He appears to be telling the truth about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, for example. I have my own sources on that, such as this guy: https://thesaker.is/. Although for reasons unknown to me he locked his blog a couple of months ago (he keeps his identity and location under wraps for obvious reasons). What Carlson and other sources say boils down to one thing: mainstream corporate media is lying about the Russia-Ukraine war and have been from the get-go.
(1) The Russian invasion was not "unprovoked"; the two nations have been on collision course since the U.S. neocon-led coup in 2014, which overthrew a democratically-elected but Russia-friendly government and instilled a U.S./NATO friendly one. Vladimir Putin being a Russian nationalist who does not trust NATO (understandably, since NATO originally agreed not to move eastward to the Russian border and has violated every agreement it made), he was responding to both Ukraine's growing ideological proximity to NATO, its stated plans (earlier in Feb 2022) to obtain nukes which Moscow sees as an existential threat, and finally the Kyiv regime's brutal treatment of ethnic Russians in the breakaway regions in the Donbas.
(2) Ukraine is not "winning"; roughly 7 Ukrainians are being killed for every Russian.
(3) This is not really a war between those two but a proxy war between the U.S./NATO axis and Russia.
(4) Carlson has been ridiculed as a "conspiracy theorist" for claiming that there are secret biolabs in Ukraine, but if one actually listens to the segment, he was citing none other than arch-neocon Victoria Nuland, one of the primary architects of the 2014 coup, who let it slip that these labs exist. She was worried that the Russians would get their hands on them, or possibly just destroy them. We'll just have to stay tuned on that one.
And speaking of nukes, doesn't it seem weird -- I mean really, really *weird* -- that with two superpowers both having threatened that escalation could lead to the use of nuclear weapons -- that there is *no* antiwar movement to be seen anywhere?? I've seen almost nothing, anyway -- except for another Carlson segment on some black socialist group several of whose members were arrested for criticizing the Biden administration's Ukraine policies (???!!!). I recall Carlson asking whatever happened to the First Amendment, even for people we're likely to disagree with on nearly everything else?
Admittedly I'm not on any American campus anymore, haven't been for over 10 years now, but I read newsfeeds and surely, if there was any antiwar activity there, I'm sure I would have run across it by now. I guess they're too busy trying to figure out what gender they are. Like I said ... weird!
This is just one case where I would defend Carlson from his critics. It seems likely he has January 6 right as well, that it was not a "deadly insurrection against democracy," but I lack the space and the time to develop this point and would advise readers just to watch the segments based on the footage Carlson received from Speaker McCarthy. How much actual violence do you see?
Tucker's segments based on the Jan. 6 tapes are another good example. You can see videos in plenty of other places of the Jan. 6 rioters looking dangerous and breaking into the Capitol. Tucker plays a few clips where they are not being violent. That shows that not everyone was being violent 100% of the time--there were at least enough times when they weren't being violent that Tucker could find a few clips. That doesn't refute the existence of the footage where they were being violent.
Re the Jan. 6 riots: I don't think those rioters were a threat to the government. They had no chance of overturning the election or carrying out a coup. I do think, however, that *Trump* made credible attempts to overturn the election, including his fake electors scheme and his attempt to get false vote tallies from Georgia. It just seems like these small-time rioters are taking the fall for Trump. Other people always take the fall for Trump's schemes.
Carlson did not deny there was violence. I understood him as saying that the reports of violence were exaggerated to the point of lies. If we can believe a separate hour-length documentary from The Epoch Times (which Carlson had nothing to do with), violence was initiated by the Capitol Police, not the protesters who got violent in retaliation. This aligns with the fact that two of the five deaths were caused by police violence, not the protests themselves.
Trump told his supporters to march to the Capitol, and he said to do so "peacefully and patriotically." This last is always carefully edited out of all the official reporting. (One thing you cannot do is trust corporate media outlets to report the truth. They lie regularly, by commission, omission, or diversion; their business model is "manufacturing consent" and has been for decades.) Trump never said to *enter* the Capitol. That was the doing of guys like Ray Epps, whose exact role in this thing remains a question mark, since surely we are entitled to ask, What did he think he was doing? Epps (who testified before the committee if I remember right) denies being an agent provocateur, working for the FBI, and the FBI denies this as well. Okay, fine, so what *is* his story? The Epoch Times
As for Trump's performance, all I will say is that until March 2020 when circumstances clearly outside his control erupted, the economy was in relatively good shape according to all the official measures. Unemployment was at record lows including for blacks and Hispanics. Inflation was nearly nonexistent. The situation at the border was under control even if he did not build the wall. Contrast this with the mess the loons presently in charge in D.C. have given us. Trump oversaw a fairly decent economy all the while defending himself from allegations of Russian collusion (more media lies about something that never happened). Trump did not start any new wars-of-choice, as I think we can be certain Hillary Clinton would have done (most likely in Syria). The reason he was hated by the powerful collection of entities in the intel community and the military-security complex generally, he collectively called the "deep state" which is as good a term as any.
(The same people who spent almost three years trying to delegitimize the results of 2016 now expect us to take their word for it that there was nothing "janky" about Election 2020.)
Re: Russia/Ukraine: My inference would be that the Biden administration is trying to weaken Putin by whatever means they can, because they see him as an enemy. It's that simple. The war is costing Putin, so they're content to see it continue, even if it is costing Ukraine more.
His claim that 7 Ukrainians are dying for every 1 Russian is literally based on a crude MSPAINT.EXE job done on one of the Teixeira documents, in a version that circulated on Russian Telegram channels simultaneously with the original unaltered version. He's an idiot with no ability to determine the truth of even the simplest most easily checkable claims.
I think this is a given. Obvious, even. It's interesting to explore, though, *why* Putin (and Russia generally) are seen as an enemy. Why this visceral, irrational hatred of another nation and its people. It's not simply a legacy of the cold war.
Russia is a Christian Orthodox nation. The fact that the Soviets spent 70 years trying, sometimes brutally, to eradicate the prevailing Orthodoxy without success testifies to that faith's staying power. Russia is a traditional society with a traditional family and social structure. The bulk of its populations are lily-white. They reject the gender-fluidity nonsense that has swept the Anglo world. Putin, finally, is a Russian nationalist, not a globalist. One of the rationales for the invasion was to end the brutalizing of ethnic Russians in the Donbas. In short, Russia and its leadership is everything the Anglo world is not, and vice versa. Moreover, and finally, the Kremlin sees NATO expansion (doing the bidding of the Anglo empire) as an existential threat. And not without reason. They are aware that there are lunatics on our side who want global dominance, who cannot accept a multipolar world.
Ah yes. War crimes, massacring and raping civilians, suppressing free speech, decriminalising domestic abuse are all fine because muh “Tr@D!” and because [insert Donbas genocide bullshit that can be easily debunked with a basic google search].
Well if that is what you want… then I kindly suggest a one way ticket to Russia.
Everything about this is hopelessly confused nonsense. I urge you to go and make some wrong Metaculus predictions so it will be harder for you to wiggle out of how wrong you were later.
"In any discussion of geopolitics," Jon Pilger, one of the few remaining investigative journalists who is honest said recently, "history has to be part of one's analysis.... There has to be a basic knowledge of it, to understand why things are happening, or what is likely to happen." Do you even have a clue about the history of that part of the world? Prove it! These days, when some bozo keyboard commando calls me an "idiot" I figure I've said *something* right. So maybe it's 5, 4, or just 3 Ukrainians falling for every Russian. Who knows? Who cares? Only a real idiot thinks a corrupt, backward nation like Ukraine can go up against the Russian army. The reason Biden (or his handlers) have thrown hundreds of billions down that rathole, money that could be better spent at home (or given back to the taxpayers)!
I have yet to see an answer to a question I raised, about the fundamental *weirdness* of the fact that antiwar sentiment right now seems limited to a handful of writers of various ideological perspectives all of whom have been driven out of corporations and forced to go independent. Some are here on Substack (Glenn Greenwald, for example). Carlson is just the latest. All are likely treading lightly, lest they inadvertently (or on purpose) expose something that really pisses off "our" overlords and they end up like Julian Assange.
Thus as Pilger also said, "Almost nothing you read in the Western daily press about the war in Ukraine is to be trusted."
One final remark. The people I feel sorriest for are the common Ukrainian people. They did not ask for any of this. They did not ask for the Western neocon-led coup (2014) that hijacked their country and put it on collision course with Russia. They did not ask to have their towns destroyed and their lives upended by what resulted.
That said, I am not participating further in this conversation.
I think when it comes to the supposed GRT there is a lot of Motte/Bailey on both sides.
But I think the Left is particularly dishonest here: there's "No One is Illegal", sanctuary cities/states, policies specifically designed to stifle ICE, drivers licenses and even voting for noncitizens, plus the way all these policies are pursued but hidden or denied when brought to light.
I guess my point is: If all your beliefs and policies clearly point in one direction—de facto open borders or at least the proposition that we are morally obligated to open our borders to the poor and brown—but then you deny that this will create massive demographic and social change, and also that these new immigrants won't prefer the party that enabled their arrival and oppose the party that didn't, this just reeks of dishonesty to me.
I get that this all still doesn't quite add up to "GRT" in the literal sense—of course there's no back room of bigshots orchestrating this, and of course the Dems never explictly state "we want to open the borders to increase our voter rolls"—but there are many roads that can lead to the same place, and if the general idea (sans the more extreme demagoguery and nutpicking) gets us to the same result, I think there is an essential truth and factual reality here.
And now that even the slightest quibble to mass immigration is met by the usual shrieks of Racist Nazi Bigot! it makes it even more difficult to have a sensible discussion about any of this, and as our politics now mostly resembles a cafeteria food fight, I think the Dems are even more gung ho about mass immigration as another way to wound their blood enemies, the Deplorables.
My sense has been that Carlson is appealing because he is his best when he is in critical mode. He can attack both both "liberals" and "conservatives" with humorous, often well-deserved, scorn. He is clearly at his weakest when promoting his own pet theories, where he often goes off the deep end.
I had a dream the other night and in the dream I came upon the realization of something really significant. I then walked into a restaurant and sat down at a table with two other people and Michael Huemer. I began talking about this realization and all the while Michael had his eyes glued to his phone. Wondering why he wasn't paying attention to what I was saying I leaned over to look at what he was watching. He was watching a rerun of that old television show 'CHiPs'. I got up from the table and walked away. It then occured to me that the realization I had was dumb. True dream.
> My best guess is that he’s confusing someone’s asserting the uncontroversial parts of the theory with their asserting the controversial part.
This right here is like 50% of conservative discourse – make an absurd accusation implicating large numbers of specific people in some kind of convoluted and consciously evil plot, get called on it, then find even one person vaguely on the left who say something that vaguely kind of sounds partially compatible with the accusation and treat that statement as final proof.
Obviously motivated reasoning of the exact same sort that exists on the left is the major factor here, but I think we are kind of lying to ourselves if we don't acknowledge that differences in intelligence and reasoning capacity increasingly play a role. Rightists genuinely have a great deal of trouble evaluating even simple pieces of evidence. They routinely accept claims that they want to be true without doing the most elementary checks. For example, I have heard many rightists tout a supposed damning admission by the writers of a 2020 anti-Trump position that nobody cared about at the time; the very first time I heard that story, I simply read its first paragraph, then checked the petition and found that they were unambiguously lying about what it had said in the first place. You could understand if this were just a manipulative tactic but the truth is that they are just unbelievably gullible. Even if you could get them to admit it's a lie, they would refuse to accept that they and not some other group of people somewhere are the marks of the lie. They would believe they are really in on the con, like they did with Trump.
Imagine an alternate reality in which immigrants and their descendants are reliable Republican voters. In this case, do you think Democrats would maintain their principled open borders policy? I seriously doubt it.
We know the following:
1. The white population is dwindling in America due to a low birth rate.
2. There is a large influx of legal and illegal immigrants, mostly non-white Mexicans and Central Americans.
3. These immigrants and their descendants are pretty reliable Democrat voters. The result, if this continues, will be a permanent Democrat advantage.
4. Democrat politicians have publicly stated that they are aware of 1-3 and are happy that this is happening.
5. Democrats, when in power, have reduced immigration enforcement to allow more immigrants to enter the country.
It is true, as far as I'm aware, that no Democrat has publicly stated explicitly that their intent is to entrench their own power by opening the borders. It is possible that Democrats are principled open borders advocates, and it is purely coincidental that open borders serves their electoral interests. But it seems pretty unlikely. And if it is true that many Democrats are privately motivated by a desire to entrench their own power, as seems likely, I think this counts as GRT being true.
Let's start with this: Increased immigration totally fits with the rest of what the left believes in. Now, in addition, let's say they notice that it also might result in their gaining more political power. What are they supposed to do -- *reject* this policy that they think is independently great, just because it also benefits them?
Is that what the Republicans would do? No sir.
The Republicans are trying to stop immigration. That also fits, let's say, with the rest of their beliefs. In addition, stopping immigration would benefit *them* politically. Why don't we then get to accuse the Republicans of underhanded manipulation?
Both sides support a policy that (a) fits with their ideology, and (b) benefits them politically.
The counterfactual speculation that Democrats would support less immigration if immigrants tended to support Republicans is exactly parallel to the (equally plausible) speculation that Republicans would support *more* immigration if immigrants tended to support Republicans.
I agree with all of this. I was only trying to argue that the GRT is essentially true. I agree that Republicans are no more principled than Democrats, and I think they would immediately switch their position on immigration if they thought it would benefit them politically.
There is a deeply unfortunate belief in American life that otherwise justifiable reforms are somehow tainted if they are introduced in a normal partisan political context where tactical advantage is a factor, instead of by wise, clean, nonpartisan Good Government Advocates, on an extremely sanitized interpretation of the Progressive Era model.
I think you are right about some of this but you could do a little more research or you might be rightly accused of being the pot calling the kettle black. Try starting with the ones you admitted were only glancingly researched.
Is there a reason you don't hyperlink more? It sort of interferes with the flow to see random links written out, and it's especially bad if one is listening to the article on the podcast app, because it just pronounces the link as if it were a word?
it really seems democrats are more open minded than conservatives, ie a democrat is more likely to watch conservative tv than vice versa, which, if true, is deeply ironic because it gives more money to republican demagogues.
Also when it comes to television and politics I think it’s a pretty good idea to assume government figures and these kind of entertainment journalists often don’t believe what they say they believe.
Just take a look at any biography of any politician, they generally roughly believe in the things their side believes in but often they don’t believe the specifics.
I just had to repost this due to a mistake with the email notification system. Sorry if your comments/likes got deleted.
I think this article gets things exactly right. Just an anecdote: I don't really watch Tucker Carlson any more, but I used to, even when I was left of center. The reasons were primarily because he was hilarious and would argue with crazy people such that I found myself agreeing with him on lots of things in his disputes (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8PvHQqQxgU). I remember he argued with some lunatic professor who thought that it was a great idea to prohibit white people from showing up to campus on certain days or something like that--his videos are just hilarious.
Just a couple of thoughts: I've not followed Tucker Carlson before around the start of this year, but I recall nothing about UFOs for example. I do recall the Moussa Diarra case. Thank you for clarifying that.
That said, of course he's an entertainer! How would someone in corporate media in today's environment get to first base if he wasn't?? He's giving the masses what they seem to want. Too bad it made the elites in and out of corporate media uncomfortable.
It doesn't follow from that, though, that Carlson's simply making crap up.
He appears to be telling the truth about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, for example. I have my own sources on that, such as this guy: https://thesaker.is/. Although for reasons unknown to me he locked his blog a couple of months ago (he keeps his identity and location under wraps for obvious reasons). What Carlson and other sources say boils down to one thing: mainstream corporate media is lying about the Russia-Ukraine war and have been from the get-go.
(1) The Russian invasion was not "unprovoked"; the two nations have been on collision course since the U.S. neocon-led coup in 2014, which overthrew a democratically-elected but Russia-friendly government and instilled a U.S./NATO friendly one. Vladimir Putin being a Russian nationalist who does not trust NATO (understandably, since NATO originally agreed not to move eastward to the Russian border and has violated every agreement it made), he was responding to both Ukraine's growing ideological proximity to NATO, its stated plans (earlier in Feb 2022) to obtain nukes which Moscow sees as an existential threat, and finally the Kyiv regime's brutal treatment of ethnic Russians in the breakaway regions in the Donbas.
(2) Ukraine is not "winning"; roughly 7 Ukrainians are being killed for every Russian.
(3) This is not really a war between those two but a proxy war between the U.S./NATO axis and Russia.
(4) Carlson has been ridiculed as a "conspiracy theorist" for claiming that there are secret biolabs in Ukraine, but if one actually listens to the segment, he was citing none other than arch-neocon Victoria Nuland, one of the primary architects of the 2014 coup, who let it slip that these labs exist. She was worried that the Russians would get their hands on them, or possibly just destroy them. We'll just have to stay tuned on that one.
And speaking of nukes, doesn't it seem weird -- I mean really, really *weird* -- that with two superpowers both having threatened that escalation could lead to the use of nuclear weapons -- that there is *no* antiwar movement to be seen anywhere?? I've seen almost nothing, anyway -- except for another Carlson segment on some black socialist group several of whose members were arrested for criticizing the Biden administration's Ukraine policies (???!!!). I recall Carlson asking whatever happened to the First Amendment, even for people we're likely to disagree with on nearly everything else?
Admittedly I'm not on any American campus anymore, haven't been for over 10 years now, but I read newsfeeds and surely, if there was any antiwar activity there, I'm sure I would have run across it by now. I guess they're too busy trying to figure out what gender they are. Like I said ... weird!
This is just one case where I would defend Carlson from his critics. It seems likely he has January 6 right as well, that it was not a "deadly insurrection against democracy," but I lack the space and the time to develop this point and would advise readers just to watch the segments based on the footage Carlson received from Speaker McCarthy. How much actual violence do you see?
Tucker's segments based on the Jan. 6 tapes are another good example. You can see videos in plenty of other places of the Jan. 6 rioters looking dangerous and breaking into the Capitol. Tucker plays a few clips where they are not being violent. That shows that not everyone was being violent 100% of the time--there were at least enough times when they weren't being violent that Tucker could find a few clips. That doesn't refute the existence of the footage where they were being violent.
Re the Jan. 6 riots: I don't think those rioters were a threat to the government. They had no chance of overturning the election or carrying out a coup. I do think, however, that *Trump* made credible attempts to overturn the election, including his fake electors scheme and his attempt to get false vote tallies from Georgia. It just seems like these small-time rioters are taking the fall for Trump. Other people always take the fall for Trump's schemes.
Carlson did not deny there was violence. I understood him as saying that the reports of violence were exaggerated to the point of lies. If we can believe a separate hour-length documentary from The Epoch Times (which Carlson had nothing to do with), violence was initiated by the Capitol Police, not the protesters who got violent in retaliation. This aligns with the fact that two of the five deaths were caused by police violence, not the protests themselves.
Trump told his supporters to march to the Capitol, and he said to do so "peacefully and patriotically." This last is always carefully edited out of all the official reporting. (One thing you cannot do is trust corporate media outlets to report the truth. They lie regularly, by commission, omission, or diversion; their business model is "manufacturing consent" and has been for decades.) Trump never said to *enter* the Capitol. That was the doing of guys like Ray Epps, whose exact role in this thing remains a question mark, since surely we are entitled to ask, What did he think he was doing? Epps (who testified before the committee if I remember right) denies being an agent provocateur, working for the FBI, and the FBI denies this as well. Okay, fine, so what *is* his story? The Epoch Times
As for Trump's performance, all I will say is that until March 2020 when circumstances clearly outside his control erupted, the economy was in relatively good shape according to all the official measures. Unemployment was at record lows including for blacks and Hispanics. Inflation was nearly nonexistent. The situation at the border was under control even if he did not build the wall. Contrast this with the mess the loons presently in charge in D.C. have given us. Trump oversaw a fairly decent economy all the while defending himself from allegations of Russian collusion (more media lies about something that never happened). Trump did not start any new wars-of-choice, as I think we can be certain Hillary Clinton would have done (most likely in Syria). The reason he was hated by the powerful collection of entities in the intel community and the military-security complex generally, he collectively called the "deep state" which is as good a term as any.
(The same people who spent almost three years trying to delegitimize the results of 2016 now expect us to take their word for it that there was nothing "janky" about Election 2020.)
Re: Russia/Ukraine: My inference would be that the Biden administration is trying to weaken Putin by whatever means they can, because they see him as an enemy. It's that simple. The war is costing Putin, so they're content to see it continue, even if it is costing Ukraine more.
His claim that 7 Ukrainians are dying for every 1 Russian is literally based on a crude MSPAINT.EXE job done on one of the Teixeira documents, in a version that circulated on Russian Telegram channels simultaneously with the original unaltered version. He's an idiot with no ability to determine the truth of even the simplest most easily checkable claims.
I think this is a given. Obvious, even. It's interesting to explore, though, *why* Putin (and Russia generally) are seen as an enemy. Why this visceral, irrational hatred of another nation and its people. It's not simply a legacy of the cold war.
Russia is a Christian Orthodox nation. The fact that the Soviets spent 70 years trying, sometimes brutally, to eradicate the prevailing Orthodoxy without success testifies to that faith's staying power. Russia is a traditional society with a traditional family and social structure. The bulk of its populations are lily-white. They reject the gender-fluidity nonsense that has swept the Anglo world. Putin, finally, is a Russian nationalist, not a globalist. One of the rationales for the invasion was to end the brutalizing of ethnic Russians in the Donbas. In short, Russia and its leadership is everything the Anglo world is not, and vice versa. Moreover, and finally, the Kremlin sees NATO expansion (doing the bidding of the Anglo empire) as an existential threat. And not without reason. They are aware that there are lunatics on our side who want global dominance, who cannot accept a multipolar world.
Ah yes. War crimes, massacring and raping civilians, suppressing free speech, decriminalising domestic abuse are all fine because muh “Tr@D!” and because [insert Donbas genocide bullshit that can be easily debunked with a basic google search].
Well if that is what you want… then I kindly suggest a one way ticket to Russia.
Everything about this is hopelessly confused nonsense. I urge you to go and make some wrong Metaculus predictions so it will be harder for you to wiggle out of how wrong you were later.
"In any discussion of geopolitics," Jon Pilger, one of the few remaining investigative journalists who is honest said recently, "history has to be part of one's analysis.... There has to be a basic knowledge of it, to understand why things are happening, or what is likely to happen." Do you even have a clue about the history of that part of the world? Prove it! These days, when some bozo keyboard commando calls me an "idiot" I figure I've said *something* right. So maybe it's 5, 4, or just 3 Ukrainians falling for every Russian. Who knows? Who cares? Only a real idiot thinks a corrupt, backward nation like Ukraine can go up against the Russian army. The reason Biden (or his handlers) have thrown hundreds of billions down that rathole, money that could be better spent at home (or given back to the taxpayers)!
I have yet to see an answer to a question I raised, about the fundamental *weirdness* of the fact that antiwar sentiment right now seems limited to a handful of writers of various ideological perspectives all of whom have been driven out of corporations and forced to go independent. Some are here on Substack (Glenn Greenwald, for example). Carlson is just the latest. All are likely treading lightly, lest they inadvertently (or on purpose) expose something that really pisses off "our" overlords and they end up like Julian Assange.
Thus as Pilger also said, "Almost nothing you read in the Western daily press about the war in Ukraine is to be trusted."
Keep it up my dude, this is just incredible posting
One final remark. The people I feel sorriest for are the common Ukrainian people. They did not ask for any of this. They did not ask for the Western neocon-led coup (2014) that hijacked their country and put it on collision course with Russia. They did not ask to have their towns destroyed and their lives upended by what resulted.
That said, I am not participating further in this conversation.
I trust that's not over your head, Evan.
I think when it comes to the supposed GRT there is a lot of Motte/Bailey on both sides.
But I think the Left is particularly dishonest here: there's "No One is Illegal", sanctuary cities/states, policies specifically designed to stifle ICE, drivers licenses and even voting for noncitizens, plus the way all these policies are pursued but hidden or denied when brought to light.
I guess my point is: If all your beliefs and policies clearly point in one direction—de facto open borders or at least the proposition that we are morally obligated to open our borders to the poor and brown—but then you deny that this will create massive demographic and social change, and also that these new immigrants won't prefer the party that enabled their arrival and oppose the party that didn't, this just reeks of dishonesty to me.
I get that this all still doesn't quite add up to "GRT" in the literal sense—of course there's no back room of bigshots orchestrating this, and of course the Dems never explictly state "we want to open the borders to increase our voter rolls"—but there are many roads that can lead to the same place, and if the general idea (sans the more extreme demagoguery and nutpicking) gets us to the same result, I think there is an essential truth and factual reality here.
And now that even the slightest quibble to mass immigration is met by the usual shrieks of Racist Nazi Bigot! it makes it even more difficult to have a sensible discussion about any of this, and as our politics now mostly resembles a cafeteria food fight, I think the Dems are even more gung ho about mass immigration as another way to wound their blood enemies, the Deplorables.
My sense has been that Carlson is appealing because he is his best when he is in critical mode. He can attack both both "liberals" and "conservatives" with humorous, often well-deserved, scorn. He is clearly at his weakest when promoting his own pet theories, where he often goes off the deep end.
I had a dream the other night and in the dream I came upon the realization of something really significant. I then walked into a restaurant and sat down at a table with two other people and Michael Huemer. I began talking about this realization and all the while Michael had his eyes glued to his phone. Wondering why he wasn't paying attention to what I was saying I leaned over to look at what he was watching. He was watching a rerun of that old television show 'CHiPs'. I got up from the table and walked away. It then occured to me that the realization I had was dumb. True dream.
> My best guess is that he’s confusing someone’s asserting the uncontroversial parts of the theory with their asserting the controversial part.
This right here is like 50% of conservative discourse – make an absurd accusation implicating large numbers of specific people in some kind of convoluted and consciously evil plot, get called on it, then find even one person vaguely on the left who say something that vaguely kind of sounds partially compatible with the accusation and treat that statement as final proof.
Obviously motivated reasoning of the exact same sort that exists on the left is the major factor here, but I think we are kind of lying to ourselves if we don't acknowledge that differences in intelligence and reasoning capacity increasingly play a role. Rightists genuinely have a great deal of trouble evaluating even simple pieces of evidence. They routinely accept claims that they want to be true without doing the most elementary checks. For example, I have heard many rightists tout a supposed damning admission by the writers of a 2020 anti-Trump position that nobody cared about at the time; the very first time I heard that story, I simply read its first paragraph, then checked the petition and found that they were unambiguously lying about what it had said in the first place. You could understand if this were just a manipulative tactic but the truth is that they are just unbelievably gullible. Even if you could get them to admit it's a lie, they would refuse to accept that they and not some other group of people somewhere are the marks of the lie. They would believe they are really in on the con, like they did with Trump.
Regarding GRT:
Imagine an alternate reality in which immigrants and their descendants are reliable Republican voters. In this case, do you think Democrats would maintain their principled open borders policy? I seriously doubt it.
We know the following:
1. The white population is dwindling in America due to a low birth rate.
2. There is a large influx of legal and illegal immigrants, mostly non-white Mexicans and Central Americans.
3. These immigrants and their descendants are pretty reliable Democrat voters. The result, if this continues, will be a permanent Democrat advantage.
4. Democrat politicians have publicly stated that they are aware of 1-3 and are happy that this is happening.
5. Democrats, when in power, have reduced immigration enforcement to allow more immigrants to enter the country.
It is true, as far as I'm aware, that no Democrat has publicly stated explicitly that their intent is to entrench their own power by opening the borders. It is possible that Democrats are principled open borders advocates, and it is purely coincidental that open borders serves their electoral interests. But it seems pretty unlikely. And if it is true that many Democrats are privately motivated by a desire to entrench their own power, as seems likely, I think this counts as GRT being true.
Let's start with this: Increased immigration totally fits with the rest of what the left believes in. Now, in addition, let's say they notice that it also might result in their gaining more political power. What are they supposed to do -- *reject* this policy that they think is independently great, just because it also benefits them?
Is that what the Republicans would do? No sir.
The Republicans are trying to stop immigration. That also fits, let's say, with the rest of their beliefs. In addition, stopping immigration would benefit *them* politically. Why don't we then get to accuse the Republicans of underhanded manipulation?
Both sides support a policy that (a) fits with their ideology, and (b) benefits them politically.
The counterfactual speculation that Democrats would support less immigration if immigrants tended to support Republicans is exactly parallel to the (equally plausible) speculation that Republicans would support *more* immigration if immigrants tended to support Republicans.
I agree with all of this. I was only trying to argue that the GRT is essentially true. I agree that Republicans are no more principled than Democrats, and I think they would immediately switch their position on immigration if they thought it would benefit them politically.
There is a deeply unfortunate belief in American life that otherwise justifiable reforms are somehow tainted if they are introduced in a normal partisan political context where tactical advantage is a factor, instead of by wise, clean, nonpartisan Good Government Advocates, on an extremely sanitized interpretation of the Progressive Era model.
I think you are right about some of this but you could do a little more research or you might be rightly accused of being the pot calling the kettle black. Try starting with the ones you admitted were only glancingly researched.
Is there a reason you don't hyperlink more? It sort of interferes with the flow to see random links written out, and it's especially bad if one is listening to the article on the podcast app, because it just pronounces the link as if it were a word?
Interesting
Do you think his “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight” text is consistent with anti-racism?
it really seems democrats are more open minded than conservatives, ie a democrat is more likely to watch conservative tv than vice versa, which, if true, is deeply ironic because it gives more money to republican demagogues.
Also when it comes to television and politics I think it’s a pretty good idea to assume government figures and these kind of entertainment journalists often don’t believe what they say they believe.
Just take a look at any biography of any politician, they generally roughly believe in the things their side believes in but often they don’t believe the specifics.
Sorry. Why would a democrat be canceled by wokists if they supported GRT? That seems extremely implausible.
A counterargument on the question of Tucker’s consistency/honest on Trump:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/in-defense-of-tucker-carlson/