Tucker Carlson is just asking questions. Questions like: what if Andrew Tate’s camgirl harem is actually the height of masculinity? And: isn’t the Russian grocery equivalent of Aldi absolutely incredible, just as the Moscow train station is perhaps the most beautiful thing mankind has created? And this week: why don’t we fully appreciate the total bind Adolf Hitler was in when he had just so many prisoners of war thanks to German success on the battlefield?
The decisions Carlson has made in the past several months have struck his former friends and ideological allies as veering in the space between the eccentric and the outrageous. But his most recent foray into the undiscovered country of whackadoo revisionism has broken off even some of his last cadre of conservative defenders, who maintained despite all the signals that this man, once the most influential media figure on the right, was still a good, brave, stable Christian conservative with the best interests of America at heart.
Sometimes it is extremely disappointing to have your worst instincts about a person rewarded, and that is the case for many on the right today. Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper, an amateur revisionist historian and podcaster, attempted to rewrite the history of World War Two with Winston Churchill cast as a malevolent villain and Adolf Hitler as a misunderstood man of peace:
You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re… so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says, “Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”
The conclusion is framed as a destruction of moral mythology, in service of the same view that Carlson has been advocating for deliberately and loudly ever since his career in mainstream media was cut short: that America, rather than being the greatest nation in the history of the world, is at home and abroad a force for evil.
There are numerous problems with this conclusion, beginning with actual facts. But the more interesting aspect is why so many confused conservatives are all asking the same question: why? Why is Tucker doing this? Why has he gone from skirting the edge of acceptable discourse in a wisecracking jester act to jumping over the edge handcuffed to Candace Owens?
Carlson’s motivations are unknown to those outside his circle. From the outside, though, it has all the hallmarks of someone who glories in offending those he dislikes, but is unwilling to do the work to even understand what they believe. If you want to argue the alternate history of the Civil War, you don’t just start by understanding John C. Calhoun, you start by understanding Abraham Lincoln. The version of history Carlson chose to host and promote about World War Two is as deep as a 4chan thread and just as insightful. It is based on the aim of deceit, but with the arrogance of someone who absorbs history by osmosis. Why read a book? A podcast summary works just fine.
The American right has had a very rough go of it when it comes to promoting media careers. The combined forces of tens of millions of dollars spent on scholarships, fellowships, book projects, media training and public relations invested in a host of writers, commentators and publications has mostly turned up naught. Carlson is now just another example of a wasted talent who betrayed everyone who built him up along the way.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s claim about Donald Trump was that he called the soldiers buried in Aisne-Marne “suckers” and “losers”. Today’s version of Tucker Carlson is just asking the question: but what if they were?
Four weeks in, Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, which penetrated ten to twenty miles deep into Russia, allows us to draw several conclusions. First, it demonstrated that the Russian army, one of the most formidable military forces in the world before the war, could no longer respond swiftly and decently.
Second, the war with Ukraine remains deeply unpopular in Russia: the first invasion of Russia proper since World War II has not sparked any patriotic response.
Third, Putin does not feel any threat to his power and is under no pressure to change his current course. The success of Ukraine’s Kursk incursion has not yet forced Putin to do anything differently.
By the end of July 2024, the Russia-Ukraine war, in its third year, seemed to be stalled in an attritional warfare in Eastern Ukraine. At the enormous cost, of thousands of losses, the Russian army was grinding forward at the pace of one or two miles per week, or even slower. Improved air defense has not been able to fully protect civilians and energy infrastructure from missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, but they are fighting back with much more force than before. Meanwhile, Ukrainian-made drones hit oil and gas refineries deep in Russia. Still, the media narrative was of Ukraine slowly but surely losing the war. The Kursk Offensive changed that.
The immediate military lesson from the Kursk offensive is relatively straightforward. For about a month, Ukraine forces occupy a part of Russia and the Russian army cannot force it out. What’s worse, it has yet to stabilize any defense line. The progress of the Ukrainian forces is slow, and the Russian territory is vast, so there is no threat to major cities or communication lines, yet its progress nonetheless.
Who would have thought, back three years ago, that the Russian army would not be able, for weeks, to stabilize frontlines inside Russia? The Kursk Offensive is a visual demonstration of Ukraine’s army's capability to wage modern maneuvers warfare with combined armed forces.
Another major surprise – at least from the pre-war perspective – is the total absence of any notable response from the Russian population. Ukrainian army controls more than 100 small towns and villages, and yet there are zero protests against the occupiers on these territories. No peaceful protests, no armed resistance. When Russian troops occupied Ukrainian towns back in the first months of the war, there were always peaceful protests. The Russian occupying troops have to brutally suppress both peaceful protests and underground resistance, torturing and executing civilians without a trial. In Russian villages, there is simply no reaction.
Though there is no evidence for Vance’s claim that these “childless cat ladies” are driven by a vindictive desire to “make the rest of the country miserable,” it is true that single Americans tend to lean left. Exit polls from the 2020 presidential election make this clear. Whereas 53 percent of married voters supported Trump, 58 percent of unmarried voters chose Biden. This gap was especially large among women. A narrow majority of married women (51 percent) supported Trump, but he lost by a landslide among unmarried women, earning just 36 percent of that demographic’s vote.
Marriage rates have been slowly falling in the U.S. for decades, but the decline has not spread evenly across the political divide. The General Social Survey has always asked respondents about their marital status. We can use GSS data to look at marriage patterns for Republicans and Democrats over time. For simplicity, the figure below includes divorced, separated, and widowed respondents in the “ever married” category. When the survey began in the 1970s, both groups were similarly likely to say that they had been married at some point. Since that time, both groups have shown a decline, but the drop has been significantly steeper among Democrats.
The relationship between marriage and political leanings is even more remarkable when we consider the aggregate data. The U.S. Census Bureau calculates the median age at first marriage for every state, broken down by gender. This variable has long proved a strong predictor of how a state will vote in presidential elections. We see a clear linear relationship: in red states, women tend to get married younger.
Conservatives have always viewed family formation as an essential element of a healthy society. Though these correlations are undeniable, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. Part of the marriage gap can be explained by other variables. For example, religious people are both more likely to get married young and more likely to vote Republican. Older people are also more likely to be married and to support the GOP. Blacks and Hispanics have lower marriage rates than non-Hispanic whites, and they typically vote for Democrats. Even when controlling for myriad other factors, however, the marriage gap remains statistically significant and substantively important.
Though there is no explanation for this gap, there are several plausible theories. In the 1980s, when scholars first began noticing the partisan marriage gap, sociologist Kathleen Gerson suggested that marriage is associated with changing political priorities among women. Unmarried women tend to be more concerned about questions of gender equality, economic or otherwise. Gerson found that unmarried women took great interest in debates about the Equal Rights Amendment and were more likely to be pro-choice. In contrast, married women, especially those who did not work outside the home, tended to support a status quo that benefitted their husbands’ economic prospects and were generally more conservative on social issues.
More recent research suggests that unmarried women, compared with their married counterparts, have a stronger gender consciousness and greater sense of “linked fate” with other women. That is, they are more likely to believe that the status of women as a group is closely connected with their own prospects. Women with this mindset tend to be much more liberal and more inclined to back the Democratic Party.
What kind of party can you throw with more than $500,000? For months, the organizers of Flagstock 2024 plotted an answer to that question. Last night, at a field outside an American Legion hall in North Carolina, some of country’s biggest stars took to the stage as busloads of college students arrived at a location that organizers had gone to great lengths to keep secret.
“In country music, we say if we’re gonna make it happen, we show up in your home town and we make it happen,” singer John Rich told the crowd from the stage. And make it happen they did.
Organizers had such a massive budget because Americans donated sums large and small to a GoFundMe, titled simply: “UNC Frat Bros Defended their Flag. Throw ’em a Rager.” While $500,000 can seem like a lot of money for a rager, the event eventually transformed into more of a music festival, along with the stratospheric costs that come with that. The stage alone cost around $100,000, and everything from private security to insurance to a glistening row of porta-potties to UNC ice sculptures added up quickly.
“We’d better hope there are no fires anywhere in this area, because it looks like all of the fire engines are here,” one attendee quipped. John Ondrasik, whose stage name is Five for Fighting, kicked off the concert with a rendition of his platinum song “100 Years” as jets flew above stage. He told The Spectator that, while he’s performed at many patriotic concerts before, the circumstances that led up to Flagstock struck him as “unique.”
“In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness. In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.”
