Despite Republicans' positive momentum heading into President Donald Trump’s second term, much of the discourse has given way to political infighting as a new generation clashes with the status quo.
In a recent, wide-ranging discussion on “1819 News: The Podcast,” legendary commentator Tucker Carlson explained the impetus for this brewing civil war among the GOP and detailed his own journey from supporting the establishment to putting America first.
1819 News CEO and host Bryan Dawson opened with a video clip from seven years ago, where Carlson argued with Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro about banning driverless trucks to save the livelihoods of millions of Americans.
“Ben's view is that we have a free market, which is hilarious to me. Never defined, of course. ‘It's a free market. What are you, a socialist?’ Spoiler alert, I'm not,” Carlson told Dawson. “But that technology just marches apace. It's unstoppable. It should not be impeded in any way, and the human cost is totally immaterial because we don't measure the human cost because we don't care about the human cost, and that really is his view… It's not an attack on Ben Shapiro, who I don't think is really a very significant figure, but he's a stand-in for a lot of people for whom that's a religion, and that's a false religion, it's a destructive religion."
Carlson said the American people have gone along with that "orthodoxy" — "libertarian economics plus neocon foreign policy" — for so long because they have been presented with a false binary of choosing between the lesser of two evils.
“No one wants that. No one's going to voluntarily support that. They will only support it unthinkingly if they don't know that there is an option,” he explained. “If they think the option is AOC [U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)] versus Ben Shapiro, they'll go with Ben Shapiro… But most people are sort of trapped in that kind of thinking. It's like, we have to support [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu because the option is al-Qaeda. Well, I'm certainly for Netanyahu over al-Qaeda too, of course. But of course, that's not the option. It never was. The whole construct is fake, and it's designed to herd you into a position that is contrary to your own interests. And that's where most conservatives have been. And that dam has broken. I don't think it's between me and Ben Shapiro at all. I think it's a much long-overdue conversation about what the point of all of this is, especially now that Republicans have power. And it's like if the point is not to help the people who live in this country, then what is the point?"
Carlson also argued that prolonged and widespread neglect of young, white men has significantly damaged the current and upcoming generation, though they're starting to push back, as seen in the rising popularity of Nick Fuentes.
“If you had five kids or, in your case, seven, and you told one of those kids, I like all the kids, but I don't like you quite as much because you kind of suck. What would happen to that kid?” Carlson said. “Nothing good. And so we've seen that at scale."
He continued, "That's exactly what they're doing now with this truly evil attack on American young people on the basis of their race and sex. And I hope we don't get to a point where people become really unreasonable in response. But I think we're approaching it. And I got like written out of conservatism, whatever that is. Whatever that is. It's not conservative. But because I interviewed Nick Fuentes, and my point I said right in the interview, I'm totally opposed to antisemitism, just so you know. And he said he agreed whether he does or not. I'm not in charge of his soul, but I am. But I interviewed Nick Fuentes because I wanted people to think about why is this guy the most popular, much more popular than I am, influencer among young men? And it's because they've been destroyed by us. And that's a freaking fact. And anyone who doesn't know that isn't listening. And anyone who listens but can't hear it is intentionally ignoring it. And shame on them.”
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