NIÑO'S CORNER: Neocon Cries That Tucker Carlson ‘Carries Buchanan’s Anti-Democratic Flag’ As If That’s a Bad Thing
They are the gift that keeps on giving. Ah yes, the neocons. In their most pitiable moments, these malcontents nudge more people toward dissident right-wing views than anyone else. When Tucker Carlson triggers one of them, it’s always a good time.
David Frum, the neocon former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, clutched his pearls with one hand and tweeted with the other on April 29 following another top-rated Tucker Carlson Tonight on the Fox News Channel.
Carlson not only had the temerity to bring up the parallels of today’s political persecutions and the impact of World War I on America at home. He called WWI “the Iraq of its day.”
Frum came in second to none among chicken-hawk champions for the Iraq War in 2003. He used the war to essentially “cancel” conservatives and right-libertarians such as Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Eric Margolis, Taki Theodoracopulos, and others.
Unable to resist further stirring up the Streisand Effect, Frum attacked Carlson for being the new Pat Buchanan.
“Buchanan believed that if only the US had not entered the First World War in 1917,” Frum tweeted, “the Kaiser would have won, and this absurd democracy business would have been shut down a century ago. Carlson now carries Buchanan's anti-democratic flag into a new century.”
What an odd endorsement of Carlson! If WWI truly was fought “to make the world safe for democracy,” then count me in as another flyer of the anti-democratic flag. What it actually was was the kickoff to liberal internationalism, resulting 100 years later in today’s technocracy and libertinism.
But of course Frum thinks wars of the past and present can be leveraged to wipe out his political enemies. That’s how WWI worked out for President Woodrow Wilson, as Carlson was pointing out that evening.
Carlson drew a straight line between Joe Biden making use of the Espionage Act of 1917 to ruin his adversary Rudy Giuliani and Wilson’s targeting of Charles Schenck, an antiwar socialist who published 15,000 pamphlets entitled “Long live the Constitution of the United States.”
Wilson had him arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately convicted under the Espionage Act after also ransacking his property and belongings.
“If you think the presidential election was stolen, by God, speak up,” Carlson said. “And that is the right that is at stake here. The right to speak your conscience, to say the obvious, to tell the truth.”
The truth is WWI was a disaster, just like the Iraq War and really every other war the US is still steeped in. It’s not just about the war itself being a lost cause but its consequences at home as well.
It probably won’t be World War 3 that brings America to its knees. A better bet would be on the ongoing currency wars or even the culture war with its insipid snitch culture that’s virtually privatized the surveillance state down to the individual level.
The American right needs more leaders to speak up like Tucker Carlson with regard to WWI and the country’s repeat trajectory. The route to freedom must leave progressivism and neoconservatism in the dust.
