Tucker's Tome: my review of Tucker Carlson's anthology
Tucker's Tome: my review of Tucker Carlson's anthology
In Taki’s Magazine this week, I review Tucker Carlson’s anthology of his magazine work, The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism:
The most spectacular story is “Hired Guns,” which ran in Esquire in March 2004. In retrospect, Tucker writes two decades later:
Probably no story I ever did changed my views more than a trip I took to Iraq for Esquire magazine in 2003. I arrived a tepid supporter of the war, and of neoconservatism more generally. I returned home a determined opponent of both.
In it, Tucker accompanies American civilian contractors (i.e., mercenaries) on a Mad Max run through the gauntlet from Kuwait to Baghdad:
To make the SUVs harder to hit, we’d be traveling fast, between 110 and 120 miles per hour the whole way, including, if possible, through towns. “Pretty much for no reason will we stop,” Jack said. “Drivers, if you’re disabled in the kill zone, stay off the brakes. We’ll ram you out of there.”
Not surprisingly, SUVs don’t get good gas mileage at 115 mph. But refueling in a recently semi-conquered Iraqi city presents its own challenges:
…every station has a gas line…. People can wait for days, camped out in their cars, for a full tank. We had no intention of doing that. Waiting in line, stationary and exposed, was simply too dangerous. Instead, we commandeered the gas station….
Kelly motioned for me to stand guard with my rifle by the back wall. There was a large and growing crowd around us. It looked hostile.
And no wonder. We’d swooped in and stolen their places in line, reminding them, as if they needed it, of the oldest rule there is: armed people get to do exactly what they want; everyone else has to shut up and take it.
It seems as if our politicians should have been able to anticipate better than they did that sending American men with guns to roar around Iraq like they owned the place was going to make Iraqi males resent us. Tucker writes:
It wasn’t until later, after we’d left the gas station and were back on the highway that I felt guilty about any of this…. There had been quite a few children there. I’d seen them watching as we forced their fathers out of the way to get to the pumps. “We neutered their dads,” Kelly said. He was right. We had. And we’d had no choice. It was horrible if you thought about it.
You can read the rest of my book review, “Tucker’s Tome,” at Taki’s Magazine.
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.