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Another tidbit from "Trumpism after Trump":
The NatCons were in awe of the great deflection service Tucker [Carlson]
provided for the American ruling class: identifying actual material
grievances and laboriously laundering them into petty insecurities
familiar from the Nineties culture wars. Tucker preached the National
Conservatism Gospel even without quite understanding it. The organizers
believed he contained a wisdom he himself did not fully recognize, like
a fool in Shakespeare. His demeanor was bouncy and cheerful: the vibe
was part Groton lacrosse cheerleader, part finance frat boy. His face
was ruddied from his summer in Maine, where he’d been communing with his
ethnos. His pace was a bit stop-and-start at the beginning—he’d just
given up nicotine—but his signature tic was there: the planted joke,
followed by the waterfall, throw-back-the-head, court-of-Versailles
laugh. He was like a man who looked down at his mouth amazed that it had
been transformed into a giant conveyor belt dispensing perfect modules
of common sense. His trust in his subjective experience was immense.
Tucker had some tough news for the assembled faithful. “Big Business
Hates Your Family” was the title of his talk. Monopoly capitalism was
real. “The main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose
does not come from the government, but comes from the private sector,”
Tucker said. “I was trained from the youngest age, from a pup, to
believe that the threats to liberty came from government. . . . And so
it really took a huge amount of evidence wagging right in my face—not
being the brightest person in D.C.—to realize that in 2019 . . . the
threats come primarily from companies, and not from the federal
government.” He could give examples. “All new Oreos have the label
‘What’s your pronoun?’ A large American company is committing a pretty
brazen act of propaganda aimed at your kids, and the message is that the
binary gender scheme which we were taught in biology class in seventh
grade is no longer operative.” In fighting this, the libertarians would
be worse than useless. Their response was, Yeah, well, if you don’t like
it, start your own Oreo company. “But that’s not really an operative
option in a world of monopoly power. . . . You can’t create your own
Google. . . . You have more power vested in fewer hands than at any time
in American history. And that itself is ominous and should make all of
us cast aside any thread of ideology or theology or whatever, just look
at that straight in the face. Are you comfortable with that? You
shouldn’t be. Of course you’re not. . . . They can make whole ideas
disappear. And there’s some evidence that they’re working to do that.”
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