Is Tucker Carlson a Harbinger of a New Information Age?

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"I believe the threat of authoritarianism is far, far greater from those that use the language of liberalism..."

The blooming of Tucker Carlson, which is causing meltdowns in the liberal establishment, is to be celebrated, albeit with some reservations. 

Carlson's RW and cultural defects—Sinophobia, migrant demonization, tendency to hypernationalism, and above all a lack of historical and political sophistication, precisely when US imperialism has succeeded in injecting enormous chaos all over the political map through its cynical promotion of a fake "Wokeist left" ⁽¹⁾—may prove a hindrance to his proclaimed intentions, to offer his audience truths absolutely denied by the liberal-interventionist media.

That said, it's clear that Tucker Carlson is a work in progress, and that his growth, by and large, has been—at least objectively—in a progressive direction. Progressive, of course, not as defined by the usurping Woke left, which is not a real left at all, neither in composition nor in practice, but simply empty symbolism calculated to deceive, while providing the Western empire with phony claims to vanguardism and moral superiority in the defence of human rights. These, as we know, constantly translate into pretexts for demonisation and later actual regime change ops, all part and parcel of the interventionist playbook used by a supremely hypocritical power.

This is not the place to go into an exploration of why, where, and how the devious capitalist/imperialist establishment decided to hijack the "left" label to derail the class struggle, but it is obvious that such misuse of the language has benefited the "liberal class" by prolonging its obstructionist and useless life, while, at the same time, their constant betrayals and crimes in the service of a putrid status quo have soiled the name of the real left to a degree that severely cripples its participation in national politics. This effect is sadly seen today across the world, especially throughout the collective West, which, as a web of obsequious vassals and satrapies, absorbs and apes the foul cultural winds blowing from imperial America.

The Threat of a New Information Age

Still, and despite the handicaps outlined earlier, underscoring the fact that Carlson, like almost all mainstream American and Western journos, is painfully out of his depth when dealing with a genuine world-historical figure like Putin, he performed an invaluable service to humanity by giving Putin a platform to explain himself, and to reach millions without injecting too much of the usual tendentious venom expected by the ruling elites of all professional journalists when "interviewing" someone already marked—character-assassinated—by the American disinformation machine.

Indeed, given the media hysteria surrounding the interview, it's quite probable that Carlson's natural gaucherie and instinct of self-preservation also kicked in, explaining the staccato, jarring tone he assumed at times toward Putin, perhaps in hopes of placating the mobs asking for his treasonous head in the unhinged "West". 

All those things of course may be soon forgotten. What will remain—assuming the record is written by decent people—is his contribution as a major catalyst for a seismic shift in mass communications from which the corporate media and the filthy officiating political class—the main enforcers of the imperial narrative—may emerge severely wounded.

The ironic beauty of this process is that, considering the nature of the beast, the disaster was all along inevitable and almost entirely self-inflicted. The immediate cause was the classical combination of factors found in tottering empires: constant wars, overextension, runaway corruption, an utterly shameless and mediocre leadership oblivious to the urgent needs of the people (can anyone find a better symbol of this pervasive dereliction of duty than semi-demented, Ukraine-obsessed Joe Biden?), all of this balancing itself atop a maelstrom of rapidly multiplying, incurable problems issuing from the immutable nature of the enthroned socioeconomic system.

The unraveling begins

As history has taught many times, such things usually spell massive deligitimation for the reigning order. The US, which still sees itself as the "exceptional" and "indispensable" nation, and worse, still insists on other nations seeing it as such, has proved to be pitifully ordinary in this regard.

The vanishing of legitimacy takes many forms. In the US, the first truly alarming signs of widespread alienation from the established order came with the sudden, bizarre and stubborn ascendancy of Trump as a popular tribune. This allegiance by the MAGA crowd and Trump's resilience have been tested by almost a full decade of vicious slandering and law fare, during which the Establishment has tried just about everything in their power to retire Trump from the public sphere—from the Russiagate hoax, which seeded the soil for the Ukraine war, to the "Jan. 6 insurrection", a glorified riot cynically elevated to "coup" by the Deep State, to further erase Americans' Contitutional rights, to ever more ludicrous examples of lawfare against Trump, a tedious process that continues to this day. 

At this point, however, largely on account of their ignominious defeat in Ukraine, the ruling elites, long insulated from reality, and intentionally myopic about the actual triggers of the crisis they precipitated, have started to panic. Alarms have surely gone off in multiple quarters. The rise of Russia to superior military status, and of China to astonishing economic heights, have created fractures in the oligarchy, and the kind of wild flailing that invites desperate solutions.

This is more or less the coordinates the "collective West" inhabits right now, captive populations of a sociopathic ruling class that has embarked on an openly announced global conflict to preserve its undeserved hegemony at any cost, even nuclear annihilation.

A healthy reaction

We have said many times that human salvation at this point requires the complete neutralisation of the US empire's machinery of disinformation—nothing moe and nothing less. The global oligarchy with headquarters in Washington has long hijacked the minds of billions of people around the globe forcing them to do and accept, or become unwitting accomplices, to things that are diametrically opposed to their interest and repugnant to their morality, and that's putting it extremely mildly. Caitlin Johnstone, an unusually lucid voice, zeroed in on the pervasive corruption of the corporate media in a recent piece that deserves to be read by just about everyone. Excerpts follow:

Well, guess what, folks. As dramatised by Carlson's Putin interview, it looks like the almighty truth-containment wall of the system is starting to crack. Irrepressibly, largely spontaneously, and with ever greater force and speed, a new information paradigm is being born to meet the urgent survival needs of humanity. This paradigm, conceived in a still hotly contested digital matrix where the dying system still exerts much influence through a variety of advantages, is nonetheless largely grounded in truth. State power, corporate ownership, and huge chunks of badly brainwashed humanity can delay the process, but eventually reality will win. Moral integrity in mass communications is an idea whose time is come.

❕ Tucker Carlson said that he was satisfied with the trip to Moscow and communication with the President of Russia.

“Our task is to tell what most people in the Western world do not know. I think we did it, friends. In America, people are not much different from Russians, as I… pic.twitter.com/5C2ufqkGei

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) February 8, 2024

Corporate media, created to serve Mammon, can't operate, let alone thrive, in this new kind of atmosphere. Obscenely paid media criminals like Rachel Maddow won't be around much longer, as ther utility is drying up fast. The masses, and particularly the young, are deserting establishment media—the Wall Street / billionaire-owned media, mind you—in droves. It won't be able to hold the line. The Internet and its proliferating children, from the computer to the iPhone, are implacable; by nature they are far too restless, numerous, instantaneus, irrepressible, and porous to keep enormous secrets under wraps. Especially monstrous secrets with witnesses around. In such cases the outcome is preordained.

Two major tipping points may have accelerated the process. Israel's depraved assault on Gaza—cowardly sadistic, grotesquely disproportional, unrelenting, and utterly revolting, the words truly fail me to express proper disgust—and the tsunami of lies still hiding much of the truth about the Ukraine War and its ugly purpose, clearly tested the deception system to its foundations. In time, as events accumulated, the truth began to burst through not just on independent media, where highly talented, digital citizen journalists and commentators have laboured in relative obscurity for years, but on mainstream media as well, where, at last, there is a growing insurrection in the ranks. Apparently, many people at such huge corporate platforms have finally become nauseated with their assigned tasks and enforced moral lethargy to the point they are willing to risk lucrative careers for the sake of satisfying their conscience.

Belated? Oh, yes. Terribly belated. But it's beginnng to happen with a mighty synergy that strikes fear in the hearts of the multitude of rascals who have long relied in lies to maintain their ill gotten power and impunity. 

Evil has easily collected—and will collect—far more victims than it should before justice, glorious justice, duly preceded by generalised truth, arrives. But, flaws and all, this is a triumph of human decency over organized hypocrisy that will resonate down the ages. Let the unraveling go on.

—P. Greanville

NOTES
⁽¹⁾ Just watch "The Spain Interview"with Sebastian Abascal—a fierce Francoist anticommunist whose ideology certainly qualifies him as a far rightist, but who is also a complex and interesting figure in a hugely complicated nation, with a largely cogent and deserving critique of the current corrupt Spanish government, and see how Tucker struggles to place what Abascal says on his own map of geopolitics, finding few familiar signposts.