Tucker Carlson Is A Convenient Distraction For Our Failed Elite

Guest Post by Kurt Schlichter

Vladimir Putin set up Tucker Carlson by murdering Alexis Navalny just days after Tucker‘s controversial visit to Moscow and interview. That’s what happens when a scorpion rides on your back – it’s going to sting you to death even if it’s riding you across the river and will end up drowning itself, too. But the frenzy over Tucker Carlson‘s visit is still massively overblown, and the intensity of it by the ruling class is less an indication of righteous indignation than an attempt to distract from modern America’s shortcomings. Tucker Carlson is not correct in all his details, but Tucker Carlson is correct that our ruling class has completely abandoned, and oppresses, the people it presumes to lead. He’s right to point that out, and he should keep pointing that out.

Tucker Carlson’s not a personal friend – I met him once (at fellow Townhall agitator Derek Hunter’s wedding to the lovely Heather) and did a couple of media hits with him years ago, and he was very pleasant. Others who know him better call him a radical contrarian, but swear by him as a loyal and thoughtful person. There’s one thing that can’t honestly be disputed. Tucker Carlson is an American patriot. Members of our ruling elite will recoil in horror at that reality, but the fact is that they equate patriotism with obedience and respect for themselves, not for America itself. Tucker has neither. He incites our trash ruling class by speaking undeniable truths, like: “Every leader kills people, including my leader. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.” He sees clearly the failures of our own establishment even as he’s accused of being blind to the failures of foreign dictators.

Let’s be clear about Vladimir Putin. He’s a murderous scumbag ex-KGB colonel. He’s not a good guy. He’s not a hero. He’s a Russian nationalist and a massive thief. As Tucker’s interview proved to the nearly 150,000,000 people who watched all or part of it, he is completely alien to the West. His version of history is unknown to us. His verbal tangents are jarring to our ears. His premises are completely foreign. But he seems to resonate with his own people, and that’s the objective reality we have to deal with. We don’t get to choose Russia’s leaders, although, in our hubris, it appears we think we should.

As I have said before, the greatest foreign policy disaster of the last three decades has been the alienation of Russia from the West. That didn’t have to happen. Our ruling class, in its arrogance and greed and ideological blindness, helped make it happen. That’s not to say the Russians are not to blame too. It’s a nation of thieves. But we Americans can only control what we do, and we let cheap domestic politics drive our Russia policy. All this elite hatred of Russia used to be unfashionable. Once upon a time, our cosmopolitan elite loved the Russians – remember that horrible Sting song? It was the Neanderthals who opposed Russia. Then Donald Trump came along, and calling him a Russian puppet became politically useful, so suddenly Russia became bad, and American strategic objectives be damned.

That’s an indictment of our own failed elites. And they haven’t just failed on Russia. They have failed in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, and on and on and on. How about our open border? How about the pandemic? How about the mutilation of kids and DEI and Soros prosecutors? On and on it goes. Has anyone ever been held responsible for these failures? Has anyone in the elite paid a price? Who is the guy who got fired over any of this? Thousands dead, millions impoverished, and our elite shrugs and goes on to the next disaster. That’s what angers Tucker Carlson and the many millions of people who see the world as he does. It should anger them. And it should anger you, too.

Tucker Carlson does not love dictators – if he did, he’d be another rump-sniff trailing our garbage elite. When Tucker Carlson points out that the Moscow subway is beautiful, he’s not saying that Russia is great. He’s asking us why the subways in our capital are urine-soaked hellholes full of lowlifes and criminals. And why the hell are they? We’re supposed to be the greatest country on earth. Lord knows our elite believes it’s the greatest group of people who have ever blessed our planet. Yet you can’t walk 30 feet in the DC subway without stepping in hobo droppings.

Tucker is not saying America should be more like Russia. Tucker is saying America should be more like America. We used to build great things, do great things, be a great nation. But look around you – all you see are filth and crime, degeneracy and social pathologies. Where is our ruling class when some street thug is beating citizens in the streets? It’s on MSNBC complaining that Tucker Carlson is a treasonous traitor of treachery for pointing out how our would-be masters suck.

No, what Tucker Carlson is is angry. He’s angry because we can do better. He’s angry because we should do better. He’s angry because we’re not doing better, and it looks intentional. When Tucker goes to a Russian supermarket and looks at the prices, he may be inartful, but he’s got a point – the prices at our supermarkets are crushing normal Americans. That’s the issue, not the aesthetics. But the aesthetics are always what they want to talk about because if they talk about the substance, people might wake up.

Tucker is a patriot because he loves this country, and its people, and he wants our country to be the country those of us who grew up on rotary phones and three television networks remember. What’s happening now isn’t normal. What’s happening now isn’t right.

Is Tucker correct in all the details? I certainly disagree with some of his points and positions, but his underlying anger? Oh, I agree with that. Our ruling class has failed us. Our betters aren’t better. They are much, much worse. They got their credentials from their prestigious colleges, slid into jobs in our institutions, and promptly began serving their ideological and pecuniary interests rather than ours. What major institution today does a good job for normal Americans? Name one. Are you happy with the pharmaceutical industry? How about our military? Academia? Do you like the way Hollywood is? How about the big corporations? The federal government?

Normal Americans are failed again and again and again, and when the elite gets criticized it has nothing left to do but call us stupid or treasonous or racist or whatever else – that is, when it isn’t arresting us. There’s a guy in jail here in America for making a joking tweet about Hillary Clinton. And right now, the leading presidential candidate is being framed before our eyes to the enthusiastic cheers of our ruling class. That’s not as bad as Putin murdering Navalny in a gulag, but it is bad nonetheless, and tolerating this kind of oppression here is how you eventually let it grow to the point of murdering dissidents in gulags here.

Our ruling class has failed. They never look at themselves. They never critique themselves. Lord knows they never hold themselves accountable. I represented the family of one of the Marines killed in Kabul for a short time. Who got disciplined for that fiasco? Whose career went down the tubes because over a dozen of our terrific young warriors died? Nobody. And they sent some Marines around to brief the families on what happened, and I watched them do it, and then I later watched testimony in Congress that went directly against what those families were told. I don’t know what’s right or wrong. I don’t know what’s true or false. I don’t know what to believe, and dammit, I should be able to default to trust our institutions. Recent experience shows that I can’t.

Tucker Carlson doesn’t want to see Americans die in useless foreign wars, and most of us who’ve been in foreign wars agree with him. I don’t agree with Tucker in all the particulars. I’m considerably more sympathetic to the Ukrainians’ plight, mostly because I went there and trained their soldiers. But we don’t have to agree on every detail. What we agree on is that our country is broken. The elites aren’t mad about Tucker Carlson supposedly sucking up to dictators – they’re fine with sucking up to dictators, depending on the dictator. When Tucker delivers a pallet of billions of dollars to the ones who have murdered Americans for 40 years, you let me know. They are mad that Tucker Carlson doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t believe them. He doesn’t respect them, and he won’t obey them. His huge audience agrees. That’s the main threat to our ruling classes, what they are truly afraid of – the threat of losing their positions, power, and prestige. And that’s the real reason why what Tucker does is so unforgivable.