Cultivated Helplessness

Tucker Carlson Speaks

At last, Tucker broke his silence. Some expected him to take no prisoners: Tucker would eviscerate the Fox higher-ups and perhaps launch into a nationalist harangue, if only as an act of defiance. Perhaps some hoped for repentance. Everyone thought he’d give a hint of what’s to come. Instead, we get platitudes fit for a middle-school principle.

The mainstream media just don’t want to talk about the things that matter. One day, common-sense will set the world free! In context of what happened this week, the performance is bizarre … but then perfectly fitting with Tucker’s personality. The man who had the largest cable-news platform in the country—the man who had the Twitterati hanging on his every segment—demands that we begin talking about important things (still unnamed). This sentiment is the other side of the coin of his assertion this past weekend, at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary, that “marshaling facts in support of an argument” is no longer viable against the forces of evil. We should pray instead.

Both Tucker’s goofy praise of the brave, simple truth-teller and his quietistic call to prayer both lead in the same direction—ironically, to no real speech at all. Words are, after all, power. They inflect our thinking and articulate human action; they generate something new; lead us to change our lives or do something we wouldn’t otherwise have done. Tucker leaves us with a lame hope that common sense will prevail, and that none of this really matters.

Tucker is notorious for peddling the Great Replacement Theory: the idea that through immigration and self-loathing, Whites are being gradually replaced, demographically and culturally, in their own homelands. In Tucker’s retelling, the Democratic Party successfully diluted the votes of native-born Americans. There is much to criticize in GRT, and in particular in Tucker’s partisan version of it (for one, Hispanics are avidly intermarrying with Whites and increasingly voting Republican). But that’s not really the point. The real question is what attracts Tucker to doctrines like this. Is he secretly a White Nationalist, prophesying a coming Middle American revolt? Or does his fascination with GRT derive from something else? Is it, in fact, the cultivated helplessness of the doctrine that most appealed to him?

One of the distinctive aspects of Tucker as a presenter—beyond his confused, golden retriever stare and maniacal cackle—is that he instructs his audience how to feel about news items, with lines like, “This should make you outraged. And you, no doubt, are.” Scanning the titles of segments on YouTube, Tucker, in fact, instructs his audience how to feel before the topic is even addressed.

Tucker wants you to be angry, outraged, bewildered, resentful. Sometimes angry people lash out—often in the stupidest, most self-defeating ways, as on January 6th. “Hurt people hurt people.” But mostly, the emotions Tucker induces stultify his audience into a state of paralysis. The essence of conspiracy thinking—and, at its worst, GRT is a conspiracy theory—is that the bad elites are all-powerful; nothing can really be done. The demographic transformation that Tucker foresees has, in fact, already taken place. Is it not his role, along with the likes of Ann Coulter, to warn about what has already occurred, to lament the passing of the great race, which can find some redemption in voting for the doomed GOP? When given the opportunity to endorse the actual racial politics GRT implies, Tucker denounced it with vehemence and relish. This is, no doubt, the real Tucker.