Ship of Fools (Tucker Carlson)

This is not a Fox news rant.  Tucker indicts both Left and Right in the current crisis.  While he doesn’t use the language of “Deep State,” both Left and Right are in the Deep State.  The key to his thesis is in answering the following question: Why did America elect Donald Trump?  The Left will say because they are racists and all.  Well, maybe, but why Trump?

Even if they are racists, why couldn’t they choose someone more traditionally Republican?  The people knew that Trump, despite all of his faults, didn’t create the problems in America.  The current leadership–collectively defined as the Left/Right status quo, the media, the universities, etc.–did.  As Tucker says, “Ignore voters long enough and you get Donald Trump.”  Our elites haven’t listened.

Tucker opposes illegal immigration, of course, but he points out that liberals have traditionally opposed it.  That’s because liberals used to favor the working man, and when you have a glut of workers on the market who will work for less, wages go down.  It’s the law of supply and demand.  That is why big corporations favor unrestricted immigration.

War

While Tucker drops truth bombs on every page, this is his finest chapter.  It’s also in this chapter where he takes Republicans to task (I dare not call them conservatives).  The Right doesn’t have a monopoly on war.  Leftists today are as pro-war as Bill Kristol.   That wasn’t always the case.

Liberals in the past opposed war because they knew the human cost.  “Yes, they were hysterical, inconsistent, and simplistic, and often motivated by a dislike of their own country.  But on a basic level they were right: war is not the [long-term] answer; it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.”  War is also complicated. “Violence tends to create chain reactions that move in unpredictable directions.”

This also explains why the Deep State turned on Donald Trump.  You can even isolate the precise moment.  It was February 13, 2016.  Trump said, “We should have never been in Iraq.  We have destabilized the entire Middle East.”    (This leads Tucker into a fascinating digression on Bill Kristol and the Neo-Conservative movement.  For all of Kristol’s faults and utter incompetence in foreign policy, he at least studied under intellectuals like Strauss and originally represented a sane centrist policy.  The Middle East wars forever discredited him.  If he is bad, Bob Kagan was worse.)

The rest of the book describes the environmental crisis (both real and imagined), transgender politics (which ultimately hurts women), the attack on men’s financial well-being (which also hurts women), and the like.

This is actually a compassionate book.  Tucker knows that the downtrodden in rural America are hurting (those are the groups that Woke Evangelicals avoid in their summer mission trips).  And he wants to make it better.

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