So Tucker Carlson moved online one year back, going from FOX to, as it now turns out, a mix of Elon Musk’s X & his own subscriber network. FOX fired him, at which point his influence collapsed, & he also started going around the world meeting ‘world leaders,’ sometimes interviewing them (I wrote partly in defence of Tucker’s Putin interview for Asia Times). The point was made by that firing that everyone is replaceable, that there is no connection between the driving force of conservative politics, whose most impressive partisan Tucker was, & the media mechanisms that connect that force to money, political institutions, & the electorate. FOX would rather maintain its place in American media, a very oligarchic situation, than take a chance on the political conflict at the core of which we find Trump & Tucker. This is very comfortable for FOX now, but catastrophic in the future, since the FOX audience is too old & only Tucker can really move the young. Of course, Trump & Tucker are themselves only tenuously connected. The ‘right’ is disunited, to say the least. Tucker’s purpose is no longer obvious, nor his ambitions.
But this weekend, we have the most important interview he’s done in a year, with Jeremy Carl, author of The Unprotected Class, on legal discrimination against white people, but especially white men, the most important part of American politics that we cannot talk about in ordinary politics or respectable society. You can listen to the interview on X.
Carl is a mild-mannered middle-aged family man who has dedicated his rather scholarly tract to his children; he’s an academic type, he’s served in gov’t, he’s a think tank guy—now at the Claremont Institute. Not at all the type you’d expect to write a volume that threatens to dynamite conservative complacency on the issue of equality before the law. He doesn’t do well in interviews, as though he were shy or nervous, but this only emphasizes the importance of his writing & his willingness to do a public service. I’m reading through the volume now & will review it at the earliest opportunity, so I recommend you buy it.
1.) I am in essential agreement with everything that J. Carl and T. Carlson say. My level of alarm about the long-term effects of anti-white rhetoric is slightly lower, but only slightly. I agree that the general silence on the South Africa story is very telling. I agree with Carlson labelling the overall phenom in the U.S. "systemic racism against whites." I agree with them and Titus that this must become more of a conservative platform and policy issue going forward. See pp. 106-114 of Michael Anton's The Stakes for some of the information behind my thinking.
2.) That said, I do not agree w/Titus that this "is the most important part of American politics that we cannot talk about in ordinary politics or respectable society." Regular pomocon readers know darn well that I believe the suppressed part of American politics that is the most important right now (both in its content, and in the fact of its suppression) is the Covid/Vax Disaster, esp. the millions-killed by the CV-19 vax aspect of it. They also know that I believe the most damning failure of contemporary conservativism is its participation in that suppression, extending from Fox right on down to quite a few of our "edgy" young conservatives.
And even if the Disaster had never occurred, I believe I would hesitate to say that this discrimination-against-whites-issue is the most important taboo part of our politics. I mean, the debt? the state of marriage? the ruin of academia? the abandonment of about a dozen other elementary principles of liberal democracy besides not-discriminating on the basis of race?
3.) While I'm at it, I should add that I do not agree with Titus saying (the post below this one) that in Steve Sailer we find the "only man who noticed & talked candidly, intelligently" about the "changes in society of the last 30 years or so." I've never read Sailer regularly, except maybe in the early days of the blogosphere, when I regarded him (at VDare) as the sanest representative of the "we gotta talk about race" side of paleo-conservatism, while myself thinking that some aspects of race issues SHOULD be talked about less. Maybe he has for some time been expanding his range and knocking it out of the park, as Titus's esteem suggests, but regardless, that "only" label for him is way too much.
Titus, we know you're like Peter Lawler in often weaving provocative hyperbole into your talk and prose, often quite effectively, and preferring that mode to my at times too-laboriously-qualified one. Still, while I am sorry to add a contrary note to your generous praise of Sailer and Lomez, when you drive so directly over measured statement, my reaction is pretty predictable! Finally, I do not yet have an opinion about whether the 2020s Sailer is good food for today's conservatives, so feel free to provide in these comments, or to send me, links to his best 2020s pieces.