Truth over tribe makes for strange bed fellows, and I love it
When Tucker Carlson came to town
Last Monday night I joined two and half thousand others in Perth to hear Tucker Carlson speak. He was on-brand. The funny laugh, the deep frown, some conservative truisms peppered with libertarian hot-takes.
If you’d asked me four years ago if I wanted to go see Tucker Carlson speak at an event, I’d have said - Tucker who?
If you’d told me he was a host on Fox News I’d have screwed up my nose and laughed.
I didn’t watch Fox. I thought it was Rupert Murdoch’s personal propaganda network. Actually, I still kind of think that (although antipodean News Corp. outlets the Australian and News.com.au offer more of a plurality of views than critics give them credit for).
But in late 2021 or early 2022, I started tuning in to Carlson’s Fox segments because he dared to say things that lots of people were thinking, but no one seemed to be saying out loud on TV.
Things like, these Covid vaccines don’t work very well, do they? They don’t seem very safe either. Don’t you think it’s weird that the US has been meddling in Ukrainian politics for decades and Putin said NATO expansion was his bright red line, but now everyone’s pretending that Russia’s invasion is purely because Putin is an unhinged, unprovoked psychopath? What’s with all the food factory explosions? And even though we’re cool with people identifying as whatever they like, can we all agree to leave the kids alone?
In a time when the list of things that may not be spoken stretches long like a papyrus roll, it was refreshing and reassuring to hear a prime-time talking head say what many reasonable people were saying to each other in confidence behind closed doors, or at the water cooler if they deemed it safe.
Since tuning in to Tucker, previously on Fox and more recently on X, I haven’t always agreed with his takes. I didn’t like his softball interview with Andrew Tate or the one with the guy who claims he had sex with Barack Obama, which seemed gratuitous and uncredible. In a viral exchange with Australian journalists last week, he unfairly suggested that the ABC hadn’t given due coverage to (synthetic) opioid deaths (they have, and I don’t believe it’s as a big a problem here as it is in the US). I don’t like making fun of people for physical attributes they’re born with (Jacinda Ardern’s teeth were a target).
But quibbles aside, the reason Tucker’s segments rack up tens of millions of views is that he channels popular commonsense and discontent, and he’s not afraid to frankly state the Emperor’s nakedness.
His criticisms levelled at the Australian media during an address in Canberra last week made the point.
(Click here to watch on X, 23 mins)
Tucker called the media’s questions (and some individual journalists) ‘stupid’ and berated them for taking the government’s word for it on all the major issues. This is fair.
On balance, our corporate journalists display no skerrick of self-awareness, humility or curiosity. They practice ‘access journalism’, allow the government to set the media agenda, parrot government talking points, and ridicule perspectives they don’t understand.
They literally believe the most criminal corporations of all time are now benevolent humanitarian organisations dedicated to saving the world. They equate an anti-war, pragmatic view of the US’s war-mongering on Russia’s border with "rooting for Putin’s war.”
They routinely platform rent-an-expert talking heads to discuss how the latest Covid shots might have a smidgen of efficacy against obsolete variants, totally out of step with the >90% of Australians who’ve given up on failed vaccines.
When challenged on details, they arrogantly double down instead of pursuing the dissonance - as when AAP reporter Kat Wong accused Tucker of having said that “white” people were being replaced over 4,000 times, and Tucker denied it outright, stating “that’s not what I think.” A good journalist would either be prepared to cite their source, and/or ask “so what do you think?” Wong did neither, bickering pointlessly (I never said that! Yes you did. No I didn’t. Yes you did!) until Tucker redirected the conversation.
Then there’s the sophistry of ‘humpty dumpty’ doublespeak and veiled insults. In today’s West Australian, journalist Ben Harvey wrote that Queensland doctor Melissa McCann “made sense” when she spoke at Tucker’s Perth show about the censorship of dissenting views on vaccine safety, and opined that “we are awfully quick to cancel people who don’t believe the science is settled on certain matters.” However, he believes “the science is settled” on vaccine safety and reckons “people who argue to the contrary are idiots.” He added magnanimously that “even the idiots have a right to be heard,” before dredging up a flat-earther reference to drive the idiot point home.
This is no doubt what Tucker meant when he said journalists’ “slurs are all by implication.”
They don’t call you an idiot. They just say that idiots with views like yours should be allowed to state them, you know, like flat-earthers. Of course, during peak Covid mania Australian journalists dropped the sophistry, calling the vaccine-hesitant all sorts of obscene names, but most have wiped off the mud and reverted to lobbing backhanders. And in the same paper today, an uncritical report about the “hard-hitting campaign” the government is spending $5 million of our money on to fight “vaccine fatigue” and “vaccine misinformation,” promulgated by idiots, presumably.
In the aftermath of the US presidential debate, we have a most dramatic example of the disconnect between dominant corporate media narratives, and what the rest of us all knew to be true because we saw it with our lying eyes. The leader of the free world has dementia. The media knew it too of course despite their carry on about ‘cheap fakes’, and are all the more discredited for pretending that Biden’s car crash debate performance came as a shock.
Here is Tucker Carlson making sense again, in a video captioned “Joe Biden’s dementia, as seen from 10,000 miles away.”
(Click here to watch on X, 9 mins)
People are so, SO sick of it - declining trust in media and government tell the story, along with declining viewer and readerships. And those of us who are sick of it have one thing in common - we just want to hear what’s true. We don’t want to be lectured, lied to ‘for our own good’, having to read between the lines like citizens of a Soviet country or banana republic. We just want to hear it straight.
And so on Monday night, I turned up to the Perth Convention Centre to hear what Tucker Carlson had to say.
Tucker’s Perth talk centred on the decline of Western civilisation. He described the ways in which Covid measures, immigration policy and culture wars are eroding our civilisation from within. Not in a direct attack, but through the back door, by people in high positions taking advantage of citizens’ best nature. People in the Anglosphere want to be kind, they want to be polite, and they are willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. These good instincts have been exploited by our leadership class, Tucker said.
As Tucker sees it, much of the Covid and gender theatre is about crushing people’s spirits. He referred to “obedience masks” and called pronoun protocols an “elaborate humiliation ritual.” Just say no, was his main message. Don’t go along with it. You might get arrested for trying to visit your dad in hospital during Covid restrictions? So what. He called on Australians to reconnect with the courage and fortitude displayed by the diggers who we honour every ANZAC Day.
In Tucker’s view, the driving force behind the decline of Western culture is a spiritual war. “Destruction for its own sake is the hallmark of evil and that’s what you’re seeing,” he said, stating several times that our leaders flat out hate us. But he seemed upbeat. “I think we’re going to win,” he told the audience.
Most of the media coverage of Tucker’s Australian tour has been hyper-critical. But if you read the news, you can easily see why Tucker and thousands of people in the audience who clapped and hooted think that our leaders hate us, and are even driven by evil forces.
In Australia, the cost of living crisis combined with a housing shortage has driven record numbers of people onto the streets. Just this week it was reported that inflation is at 4%, with an imminent rate rise expected to put even more pressure on Australian households.
Human rights were violated at scale during Covid and no one actually cares or has apologised for it. The state, territory and federal governments’ pandemic response inflicted staggering social, health and economic harms, but the ring leaders have been given awards for it before moving on to cushy private sector jobs.
Our governments are shockingly wasteful of taxpayer monies - like binning 35% of our multi-billion dollar Covid vaccine supply, or blowing half a billion dollars on Covid tests against a budget of $3 million, or wasting over a billion dollars on a cancelled roadworks project.
Where the interests of powerful politicians or corporate partners are threatened by citizens seeking assistance or transparency, our bureaucracy is hostile, closing ranks to protect the powerful at the expense of the citizens it purportedly serves. Our leaders lie and insult and gaslight us daily, and the media mostly allows or facilitates it.
The Australian experience is similar to any of the other Five Eyes nations, or the Anglosphere that Tucker referred to.
The Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig captured the general feeling of disgust towards our leaders in his latest work, released the same week that the worst Covid premiers were awarded Australia’s top honour:
THE STINK
Terrible sleazebags made into lords
Horrible creeps winning noble awards
Everyday people trudge through the dirt
Shaking their heads as they swallow the hurt.
Leaders and liars grin from on high
Flaunting their medals and carving the pie
Parading their greed but unable to hide
The stink in the land when honour has died.
The scum always floats to the top, it is said
It’s as old as the hills and as cold as the dead
It stinks to high heaven, it’s darker than crime.
The slippery slope and the slippery slime.
For my part, I see more shades of grey than Tucker, or perhaps he’s so inured to packaging information for the screen that he presents it in high definition black and white because that’s what cuts through. I think a lot can be explained by the venal self-interest of the people at the top, and the bloated clunkiness of our bureaucratic structures and processes.
Where Tucker would say they hate us, I tend think some of our leaders don’t even care enough about us to hate us, they’re just lining their pockets and helping out their mates. By the way, it is well known that a lot of Australian politicians, entertainment personalities and business leaders are Freemasons - the ultimate mates club.
Some of our leaders govern for the few, not the many. They have positive regard for the citizens who agree with them on everything but contempt for the ones who don’t. Some have bought into the elitist ‘noble lie’, justifying all manner of deceits to corral the dumb plebs. Some are probably captured or being blackmailed by other powerful stakeholders, and given that an estimated 1% of the population are psychopaths, a few are almost certainly true psychopaths.
There are systemic explanations, too. Cardiologist and public health campaigner Dr Aseem Malhotra frequently says that powerful capitalist corporations (like the big pharma companies) behave psychopathically as entities. This is partly due to their size, structure and obligations to shareholders to produce profits above all else.
Sheer incompetence and bureaucratic inertia are also likely factors. Our bureaucracy is enormous - 2.4 million, or more than 1/10 of Australia’s 21.2 million working age residents work in the public sector. Government reports reveal a pedantic interest in processes, procedures and measuring things, but with little bearing on meaningful outcomes.
Another way to view things is that all civilisations eventually collapse, and that Western civilisation is in the decline stage, as is the way of things.
Probably, it’s all of these things combined. If we characterise ‘evil’ as a destructive force that is the opposite of everything good, one can easily see its influence driving much of the decline, and an opposing force driving efforts to resist. This could be conceptualised in metaphorical or literal terms, depending on your world view. So while my own world view doesn’t map exactly onto Tucker’s, hearing his has helped me to develop and articulate mine.
One of the things I like about this new intellectual landscape I discovered during the Covid era is the plurality of views I’m exposed to, and the willingness of speakers and audiences to engage in good faith, to take what they like, and leave the rest. This is the kind of talk I want to go to - where the speaker is fearless about stating his position, and seemingly totally fine with me agreeing with some points, and disagreeing with others.
I was grateful to be invited to attend as a guest of Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. Again, not a crowd I knew anything about a few years ago. My impression of Clive was that he was a kooky buffoonish billionaire, because that is the caricature of him that the media presents.
The mining magnate and former Federal MP has played up to the caricature, with his eccentric business ventures and wacky sound bytes. One such venture: the ‘Palmersaurus’ exhibit in Coolum, branded as a theme park but really more of a short walk dotted with mechanical dinosaurs and Palmer business advertising.
When one of the dinosaurs, named Jeff, perished in a fire, Palmer told the ABC , "Jeff's brother is waiting in the dinosaur park to be liberated to take his place… Certainly the next birth we have of a dinosaur, we will name after Jeff."
“The life-size T-Rex has been roaring at golfers on the ninth hole of the Palmer Coolum Resort since December 2012,” wrote the ABC.
Clive was also frequently featured in the media for issues related to his mining businesses, his political party, and a public spat with West Australian Premier Mark McGowan.
It wasn’t until Covid that my two dimensional view of Clive (which I had unconsciously absorbed from media headlines) softened, as I learned that he had donated almost 33 million doses of hydroxychloriquine (HCQ) to Australia’s national medical stockpile, which was initially received with thanks by the Health Minister, Greg Hunt. In a detail that fits with the Palmer penchant for branding placement, apparently Clive wanted his foundation’s logo stamped on the medicines prior to distribution.
However, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) subsequently strongly recommended against HCQ for treatment and prevention of Covid, citing concerns that HCQ was unsafe and ineffective. After a public stand off, the Palmer Foundation’s HCQ doses were destroyed, as “regulations on the handling of medicines prevented the freight handler from either selling or donating the hydroxychloroquine elsewhere.”
Clive was defamed as a misinformation-spreading crank for this effort, and for advocating to allow Australians access to ivermectin, which the TGA also restricted. It was unfair. Since then, Clive has brought out international Covid medical experts like Drs Peter McCullough and Pierre Kory, has funded an important vaccine mandate legal challenge, and has thrown his support behind Australia’s first Covid vaccine injury class action spearheaded by the aforementioned Dr McCann.
At the Tucker Carlson event, I chuckled when Clive advertised his latest venture, a cruise ship called the Titanic II, in his pre-recorded speech (apparently he was unable to attend live due to illness). Of course he did.
One of my favourite podcasters, investigative journalist
has a saying, ‘truth over tribe’. One of the biggest problems in our polarised time is tribalism. Can we form a new path, a new way of getting along?Truth over tribe. We don’t need to agree on everything. We don’t need to like everything about each other. But we can come together on the issues we mutually agree are important, and we can centre a commitment to seeking out the truth of any given situation, no matter how challenging or uncomfortable. With this attitude, I find myself speaking with people I never would have engaged with before, attending events I’d never have heard of, pondering ideas I’d not considered… and I’m so much richer for it.
*Correction 1 July 2024: An earlier version this article incorrectly stated that Kat Wong works for the ABC. This has been corrected to AAP.
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Agree totally Rebekah.
One of the positives of Covid for me was completely weaning off the media.
I have not bought a newspaper nor watched any news for 4 years now.
I have not watched a single ABC program over that time.
I read The Spectator, Quadrant, plenty of books, and Substack has arrived.
I listen to Dark Horse and Jordan Peterson Podcasts.
The quality and variety of information from these sources dwarfs anything I previously read in MSM.
No wonder politicians of the Uniparty are united in a desire to censor.
🙏 we don't have to agree on everything just respect others differences