Libertarian Conservatives

"Whether it does any good or not, a law enforced must hurt someone."

"When the word leader, or leadership, returns to current use, it connotes a relapse into barbarism. For a civilized people, it is the most ominous word in any language."

"According to Tucker, "dismantling the system of oppression" means "dismantling the entire american economy and system of governement". Now, did he inadvertently make a nuanced point about how systemic oppression is definitionally baked into every level and facet of that very same system? Yeah, yes he did. Am I'm going to give him credit for doing that? FUCK NO, especially not when this is what he said next."

""I couldn't care less about what this talking inferiority complex has to say, but I do feel for the women and survivors in his life who now see they wouldn't be believed or safe with him...Many survivors of assault don't tell family, friends, etc bc of how they see others treated"

"When you look at what Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence — very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that we have to be willing to contend with."

"That man's a beast; who else could fill an entire show each night, asking questions that Google could easily answer?"

"Tucker Carlson is attempting to stay the course amid an advertiser exodus from his Fox News program because of his racist commentary. Carlson had been a mouthpiece for white supremacy, and since being promoted to a prime-time slot on Fox, he has elevated fringe “alt-right” grievances into mainstream media."

"Tucker Carlson lambasted his fellow members of the right this week over their response to an ICE agent fatally shooting a woman in Minneapolis, accusing them of trying to score “political points” and failing to see Renee Good’s death “through a human lens.” “The 37-year-old was an American citizen and reportedly the mother of a kindergarten-aged child. Did we disagree with her views on immigration? Probably. But that shouldn’t matter,” a recent edition of Carlson’s newsletter read. “Her death is a tragedy, regardless of her partisan affiliations, ideological beliefs, or who pulled the trigger. A woman got shot in the face.” The right-wing broadcaster added that numerous conservatives criticized the left’s at-times insensitive response to the recent killing of activist Charlie Kirk, and claimed “violence around the world is desensitizing Americans to violence at home,” pointing to the recent U.S. incursion in Venezuela and American support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Carlson’s nonpartisan tone surprised some on the left, including former Obama administration official and podcaster Jon Favreau. “Somehow, Tucker Carlson had a far more humane reaction to Good's death than JD Vance,” Favreau wrote on X."

"I think the thing that Tucker gets a knock for — that he doesn’t deserve — is this idea that he’s evolved and changed in some radical new direction. Tucker has always been that guy. He is legitimately that guy. He is not faking it. He comes by his beliefs and his convictions and even his tone of voice quite naturally. He is not putting it on."

"Tucker and I agree on just about nothing, but he has always been kind to me, and a fun person to fight with. I wish him all the best."

"Although Carlson flirts with white identity politics, particularly on the topic of immigration, his real ideology isn’t white nationalism or even conservatism, at least in the sense that conservatism has come to be defined in America. More than anything, he espouses the Middle American radicalism that John Judis, writing in 2016, identified as the ideological core of Trumpism. Middle American radicals (MARs) are neither fully liberal nor conservative but a blend of the two, mixing populist economics and a hostility to big business with intense nationalism, right-wing positions on race and immigration, and a desire for strong presidential leadership. Their animating idea is that the broad (and implicitly white) middle of American society — those Carlson referred to, in a podcast interview with Ben Shapiro, as people with “100 IQs making 80 grand a year” — is besieged on two sides, by a corrupt elite above it and a grasping underclass below."

"From his position in the 8 p.m. slot, Carlson has managed to become one of the most influential voices in conservative politics, often by refusing to adhere to Republican conventional wisdom. Only a few weeks before the Iran flare-up, he delivered a monologue in praise of Elizabeth Warren’s “economic patriotism” plan; in January, he launched an intra-conservative war over the virtues of capitalism with a monologue attacking Mitt Romney, private equity, and conservatives who “worship” the market. He is also perhaps the most reviled talking head in the country thanks to his frequent diatribes against diversity, immigration, and multiculturalism."

"Tucker's not one to be plagued with dark nights of the soul . . . He seems to bob along and that's part of his appeal, his perpetual chipperness. The guy can handle more workload than anybody I know."

"Tucker Carlson began at The Weekly Standard. Tucker Carlson was a great young reporter. He was one of the most gifted 24-year-olds I’ve seen in the 20 years that I edited the magazine. His copy was sort of perfect at age 24. He had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism, I would say, paleo-conservativism. But that’s very different from what he’s become now. I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethno-nationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way."

"He's great at digging up stuff and great at getting people to confide in him and tell him things they later wish they hadn't . . . He's engaging and boyish, and people take a liking to him."

"I've been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. Has anybody heard of somebody called — has anybody heard of Tucker Carlson? [...] What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his — by his perspective. I haven’t watched anything that he’s said"

"Hitchens: But I do remember telling Tucker, I wish he wouldn't give up writing for TV. And I hope he sometimes hears the distant, hollow echo of my voice, "Tucker, don't do that!""

"Interviewer: And another book I wanna..."

"Hitchens: Do you know, I can't remember what the piece is now, and I hope he isn't watching. It's, although this was pre-9/11 it seems like so long ago to me. I'm, I hope Tucker will forgive if I say I don't remember which piece we picked from him."

"Interviewer: Why?"

"Christopher Hitchens: [W]e picked each other's favorite writers we had from the other side, to see whether we could, get the cream of left-right political writing. So I must've picked Tucker."

"Carlson is comfortably familiar. He’s one of us, an entertaining companion at lunch, full of gossip and wit and even ideas. At the same time, over the years, he has become radically unfamiliar. There are not many journalists or other people regarded as public intellectuals who are promoters of Trump and Trumpism, and who share the president’s fluency in insult and indignation. It is the composite nature of Carlson’s character—belonging at once to two divergent worlds—that makes him interesting to fellow journalists in a way that, say, Sean Hannity, with a larger audience and more direct influence with Trump, generally is not. Many colleagues once viewed him as an important voice of the intelligentsia. Many now believe he has joined the dumbgentsia. They wonder, as Columbia Journalism Review put it, “What happened to Tucker Carlson?”"

"I would consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist."

"He has used his platform to push out prejudice. I think it’s disgusting and I don’t think it deserves a place on a major news network....incredibly irresponsible to even make such a statement while we are still burying people who were gunned down by a white supremacist."

"Like Trump, he would find success by catering to people who despised the world that had spurned him. He made revenge into a career."

"If indeed Carlson was fired in part for workplace misogyny, he will fall into a venerable Fox tradition. The network has a history of tolerating the abuse of women until revelations become too inconvenient, at which point even figures who’d seemed irreplaceable, like Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, are tossed overboard. Contempt for women was part of Carlson’s brand at Fox News; his infamous “The End of Men” special urged men to tan their testicles to ostensibly increase testosterone and thereby rescue society from collapse. It would be fitting if contempt for women is what finally derailed him."

"The times I’ve been on TV I didn’t find him to be an effective advocate of his viewpoint. I don’t think he does a good job. That’s what his problem is."

"Tucker is RIGHT! White Supremacy is a ZioMedia Conspiracy Theory! The term is itself a lie. Millions of White activists are NOT 'supremacists' We seek NOT to oppress or destroy any race! Human Rights for all - EVEN FOR WHITE PEOPLE! Stop antiWhite racism!"

"God bless Mr. Carlson for focusing on these vital issues."

"I do a lot of shows. He is, without question, the fairest and most intelligent interviewer I’ve ever experienced on the conservative side."

"He read adult books when he was 6 and 7 years old . . . He read War and Peace when he was a little kid."

"Mr. Carlson misread, mischaracterized me. He’s a good reporter, he just misunderstood about how serious that was. I take the death penalty very seriously. I take each case seriously. I just felt he misjudged me. I think he misinterpreted my feelings. I know he did."

"Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic. Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriors—the whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the world—the transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who can’t afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. It’s a cynical game that treats all of life as a play for ratings, a battle for clicks, and this demands constant outrage, white-identity signaling, and the kind of absurd generalizations that Rachel Bovard used to get that room so excited. Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change."

"Maybe he should be a little more concerned about the suffering of [Ukrainian] civilians at Russian hands? But on his show Monday night, he didn't mention the Bucha massacre. The Kremlin is, naturally, delighted with Carlson's support and has made quotations from his dishonest program a mainstay on its television shows and social media feeds."

"In recent weeks, Carlson has been pushing a bogus Kremlin claim that Russia had to invade because Ukraine was building bioweapons labs with help from … Hunter Biden. This odious lie might be designed as a "false flag" operation to justify Russia's use of chemical weapons. Yet Carlson, the consummate "useful idiot," continues to peddle this loathsome propaganda under the guise of just asking questions."

"As scholars such as Leo Chavez and Otto Santa Ana have shown, threat narratives of replacement, conquest, invasion, and infestation have circulated for well over a century. What is new is how this racist rhetoric is being promulgated by a particularly influential set of forces that includes a white nationalist president, formidable conservative media ecosystem, and an empowered anti-immigrant and alt-right political contingent, often undergirded by a persistent gun culture." Together, this nativist assemblage has taken up the white nationalist rhetoric of the "great replacement"-a conspiracy theory in which white people are being systematically "replaced" by people of color through mass migration (possibly orchestrated by Jews and other "globalists"). Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham in particular characterize white Americans as being "replaced through immigration to the benefit of Democrats"...Asserting that "foreign citizens will be electing our political leaders" and characterizing Democrats as "the party of foreign voters now," Carlson describes Democrats as engaging in "demographic replacement," using a "flood of illegals" to create "a flood of voters for them." Speaking to Fox's disproportionately white and elderly viewers, Carlson has asserted that he is not "against the immigrants" but rather "for the Americans," because "nobody cares about them. It's like, shut up, you're dying, we're gonna replace you.""

"Some people, like me, believe retirement should be partly socialized. Others, such as Tucker Carlson, believe in a purely private system: If you don’t save for your own retirement, your neighbor has no obligation to bail you out. Both arguments have roots in the American spirit: We are at once wonderfully communitarian and intensely individualistic. I felt then – and now – that rather than pretend there is not a major philosophical difference, or that there is one objectively perfect solution, we should debate our policy options vigorously."

"Tucker Carlson is basically "Daily Stormer: The Show." Other than the language used, he is covering all of our talking points."

"Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews."

"Example of someone engaging in very effective rhetoric is of course, Tucker Carlson. Tucker is helping mainstream conservatives change the way they think about politics and causing a massive swath of Trump voters to look deeper into many of the issues that we already talk about. The left is aware of what he's doing, and he's aware of what he's doeing, so it works phenomenally."

"I was shocked and sickened by the reaction of the ghoulish and really repulsive reaction of the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Charlie's death. Basically made it all about him and all about his country. Immediately trying to take the energy, the sadness, the grief that people felt over Charlie's murder, and redirect it toward support for whatever project he's involved in... I don't think that I've ever seen anything lower than this attempt to hijack Charlie's memory and use it for his own political ends, particularly because what he said was completely untrue."

"You hope Charlie Kirk's death won't be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build. You hope that! You hope a year from now, the turmoil we're seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me...if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that—ever, and there never will be. Because if they can tell you what to say, they're telling you what to think, there is nothing they can't do to you because they don't consider you human. They don't believe you have a soul."

"What [FOX News] are doing is what they always do, which is just turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and just trying to knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them subject to more wars. .. Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who's calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now."

"There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that's right! Dad comes home. And he's pissed! Dad is pissed! He's not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they are his children, they live in his house. But he's very disappointed in their behaviour, and he's gonna have to let them know. He's gonna have — "Get to your room, right now! And think about what you did!" And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And, no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way."

"The idea that the only things that are real are the things that we can see or measure in a lab, that's insane. That's just dumb."

"If you're powerful and wise, you seek to bring stability and order and predictability and peace. That's what a father does in his family. That's what a good CEO does in a company. It's what a good general does."

"[Referring to Ben Shapiro, an American conservative commentator] They don’t care about the country at all, [...] but I do … because I'm from here, my family's been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I'm shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned. And I can't imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America, because he doesn't, obviously."

"Of course, Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator! Just because he's trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed, doesn't mean he has a totalitarian impulse, c'mon, that's absurd! It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title ‘wannabe dictator’!"

"[On the claims of David Grusch and the supposed cover-up by the US government of recovered UFOs and (alleged) absence of reports from some major media outlets] That's what the former intel officer revealed, and it was clear he was telling the truth [...] In other words, UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now, in a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn't."

"Who organised those Black Lives Matter riots three years ago? No one's gotten to the bottom of that. What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it's still classified."