By Conlan Salgado

Written by Conlan Salgado

I must confess that my title is slightly misleading. I am not against Tucker Carlson-ism in the way that I am against, for example, Karl Marxism. Tucker does some excellent work. Really excellent work. However, he is also a prolific retailer, and his retail products are sometimes dirt cheap in terms of fact-value and truth-value. I am against what some have called the woke right, and which I will term the cultural right (as opposed to the political right). Tucker just happens to be its most persuasive and most interesting representative.

The cultural right does not have its own grammar. This is partly because it does not have any powerful and devious philosophers to create a grammar for it, in the way that the Left had Nietzsche, Marx, or Foucault. GK Chesterton, alas, remains criminally under-read and undervalued.

The cultural right, grammar-less as it was, and suddenly finding itself in the position of speaking to millions who were previously deaf to it, quickly adopted a leftist dialect (which sounds suspiciously Canadian to me), even as it articulated right-wing or even conservative positions.

My previous case study, on which I wrote an article, was Darryl Cooper’s magnificent pulverizing of WWII history, on a podcast coincidentally hosted by—you guessed it, Tucker Carlson.

In the article referenced above, I attempted to refute his most outlandish claim—that the Germans accidentally killed millions of Soviet Soldiers, but for the purposes of this article, I will cite another one: that the Black Forest bombings were among the worst terrorist attacks in history.

Even confining ourselves only to WWII, the Black Forest bombings do not qualify as some of the greatest terror attacks perpetrated. The most obvious examples would be the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although since, during wartime I for one have a strange partiality to saving American lives, I am glad we dropped the bombs RATHER THAN sending 100,000 young American men to certain death in an invasion of the Japanese homeland. If not the atomic bombings, how about selecting Hamburg or Dresden, the former of which certainly had terroristic qualities about it?

The greatest act of terrorism in WWII was the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, it was the implementation of Generalplan Ost. After Generalplan Ost, it was probably the Rape of Nanking. After Nanking, perhaps the Bataan Death March. Needless to say, in the company of such depraved acts, the Black Forest bombings are almost irrelevant.

Darryl Cooper, however, did not confine himself to WWII; he allowed himself the latitude of “history”. Are the Black Forest bombings equal to the Destruction of Thebes, or Carthage, or the campaigns of Ghenghis Khan, or thousands of Roman executions, or the Great Leap Forward, or the Destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity, or perpetual regime of terror needed to maintain the Soviet Union, or any of the “historically significant” acts of terrorism over millennia?

Such a stupid statement laid to rest any doubt that Cooper was a historian. He is a pundit and a salesman. His product is cultural relevance and a founding myth for the right-wing moment. Mr. Cooper did tell one important truth: the “Manichean” account of WWII has become the Left’s genesis story about the “Fall” of the Right—and its original sins of racism and fascism.

Mr. Cooper’s response to this violent abuse of history is an equally violent counter-abuse. Puts me in mind of Ibram Kendi’s terrifying claim that the only way to mend past discrimination is with present discrimination.

Having discerned the need for a founding myth, having discerned that WWII has become a rhetorical weapon, Mr. Cooper decided to kill two birds with one stone: put the lie to the left’s version of WWII (being a cautionary parable about populism) while simultaneously transforming the story into a piece of right-wing rhetoric. Instead of a parable about Hitler, Grandfather of the populist right, perhaps we can tell a different story: that of Winston Churchill, Grandfather of the Neo-con and globalist elite. Perhaps, if we can perpetrate a myth about Churchill bearing primary responsibility for WWII, we might show how evil, genocidal, and altogether intolerable globalism and Neo-conservatism have always been. If the pen is mightier than the sword, we shall use Mr. Cooper’s to sever the heads of warmongering elitism and its patron saint Churchill.

If one is searching for a politician on whom to blame WWII, other than Hitler, try Woodrow Wilson out for size. He, among others, brokered the devastating and unfair post-WWI peace which authorized the rise of someone as repulsive as Ol’ Adolf.

As I’ve observed elsewhere, both the cultural right and the cultural left seem to agree that truth is not a function of history, only power is. In truth, WWII does not flatter either the right or the left, nor is it a cautionary tale about any ideology other than totalitarianism, whether arising out of the right-wing or the left-wing.

Interlude

In analyzing the crude and dishonest journalism of the Cooper interview, I am reminded as well of Tucker Carlson’s more recent interview with the Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Aal Thani, whose country has spent 6.3 billion dollars buying American Higher Ed institutions off. Perhaps the increased financing of American elite universities from Qatar (2 billion alone in the last 4 years) has little to do with the virulent brand of Islamism appearing in greater frequency on campuses (though I think not), but I could swear Tucker Carlson was deeply offended at foreign countries interfering in the domestic politics of the American body politic.

Apparently buying gigantic amounts of influence at culture-shaping institutions which train the next generation of bureaucrats, doctors, and judges–institutions such as Cornell, Harvard, Texas A&M, and many others–does not constitute interference in domestic politics. For the life of me, I have a difficult time finding anything more offensive or pernicious than a foreign country with totally alien values attempting to buy the minds of American youth.

This was either deliberate omission on Carlson’s part or journalism so derelict it does not deserve the name journalism. NOT ONE SINGLE QUESTION ABOUT THIS FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATION BY QATAR. NOT ONE.

WWII Again

Since the Manichean account of WWII was indeed the founding myth of the Liberal World Order, it is unsurprising to hear the Global Left constantly rely on terms or tropes which first arose in the War’s context. Often, these tropes are used in lieu of serious analysis. For instance, the notion that Putin will likely invade Poland if we cede Ukrainian territory to him is meant to conjure up the image of a brutal Hitler—poised to take Poland as a prelude to his brutal subjugation of much of the European continent.

The cultural right, or an increasingly large segment, seems also to enjoy loading scary WWII terms with the responsibility of an actual argument, and then flinging the thing at their opponents. Witness the rise in accusations that Israel is committing genocide. Genocide is a word invented to describe the systematic killing of European Jewry. Genocide is a succinct word for industrial murder, which constituted the most awful and impactful invention of the 20th century, far exceeding the atomic bombs’ horror. The 20th century was in some sense defined by industrialized murder, which was the preferred method of the Soviet Union, CCP, and Global Communism in dealing with its enemies.

If we accept Hamas’ casualty figures (we will do so for the sake of argument, acknowledging that they are almost certainly inflated and manipulated) of 53,000 civilians, and subtract about 22,000 for the number of militants Israel claims are dead, then we arrive at 31,000 collateral civilian deaths. This is almost two years into the conflict.

By comparison, the Allied powers killed 40,000 civilians over 14 days when it bombed Hamburg; needless to say, although civilian sections were specifically targeted by British bombers, Hamburg did not constitute a genocide. It was a brutal urban warfare campaign. If Israel had actually been indiscriminately bombing a densely populated urban environment with 5+ million people over the span of months, the death toll would not be 31,000 civilians. It would reasonably be 150,000 civilians at the most conservative estimate, perhaps as high as 500,000 civilians.

Given how Hamas strategically uses large civilian populations as both shield and bargaining chip for its own existence, it is almost miraculous that only 31,000 civilians have died. Whatever Israel is doing, it is not a genocide. One may adopt the position that it is an unjustified brutal urban war, or, as I myself do, one may adopt the reasonable position that Israel is prosecuting a justified brutal urban war.

Case in point: the cultural right, in a fight, relies primarily on pulling the pin and lobbing an emotional grenade. Genocide—BOOOMMM! Genocide is a more frightening word than most, and it is meant to make you categorize Israel with the worst regime in human history, not because facts have been followed to conclusions, but because the emotional impact of a word such as genocide will hopefully prohibit any need for fact-finding at all.

In any case, I trust the reader has absorbed my general concern. The cultural right is a coalition of resentments and odd postmodern insights. It is mostly an internet driven phenomenon. It reproduces through memes and podcasts. It is not nearly obsessed enough with orthodox Christianity. It eerily approximates a digital version of the French Revolution.

It renders history in the service of ideology. Frankly, I must confess that as much as I love Donald Trump, I do not believe MAGA will save the culture. It may save the federal government, and I shall be delighted if it does so. What will save American culture is orthodox Christianity and the destruction of the social media ethic and the emergence of a more sophisticated manner of spreading ideas other than memes.

Common sense is not an adequate replacement for Christianity; Tucker Carlson-ism is not a worthy replacement for truth.

Conclusions are important, and to the extent that the cultural right has very different conclusions than the left, it must be considered an infinite improvement. Ends, though, do not justify means, and leftist ways of thinking and feeling are uncouth and dangerous ways of reaching such conclusions.

Nietzschean methods breed Nietzschean monsters. Indeed, it remains for the cultural right to answer a thoroughly Nietzschean question with an enthusiastically un-Neitzschean answer: Why Truth? Why Not Strategic Falsehood?

For it was a ferociously anti-Nietzschean Jewish preacher who first gave an insight which a country trying to reclaim its freedom would do well to contemplate and hold dearly: “If you abide in [Truth], you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

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