Fox News is finished, having just fired their only attraction, Tucker Carlson. As a writer who put in years of sustained, conservative antiwar writing against Genghis Bush and the neocon coterie—who burned (and consequently burnt-out) as hot as a Babylonian kiln against invasions backed 100 percent by Faux New and its war-porn flank—something just short of total extinction seems a fitting fate for Fox. The foolish firing of their top rated host, and one of the highest-ranking cable news shows in the country, is sure to hasten the death rattle of the War Porn channel.
Evil And Envy
Fox News has thus cemented its unimpeachable credentials as lickspittle of the Republican Party, which it always was until Tucker. Just so there’s no confusion: the Party is exulting in Tucker’s ousting.
The intuitive and likely most base reason for the ouster of Tucker tracks with human nature: evil and envy.
The instinct of man is evil from his youth ~Genesis 8:21
Or, in the language of statistics, it’s the regression toward the mean; the quest for mediocrity:
"Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans," observed my friend Clyde Wilson, professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the foremost scholar of John C. Calhoun.
So, too, do the responses from the mediocre mainstream media—and I flatter them—where one sees nothing but schadenfreude ("joy derived from the misfortunes of others"), track with the theory of evil and envy.
Fox News is an echo of the Republican Party, which serves the deep, warfare, industry-captured state.
Robert F. Kennedy, on the other hand, is “a choice, not an echo,” in the words of a great conservative, Phyllis Schlafly.
One need not agree with every word Kennedy spoke in a pellucid address announcing for president, almost two hours long, delivered extemporaneously, to grasp that, on the defining issues of our time, almost all of which Kennedy addressed in depth and in detail, Robert F. Kennedy is right and righteous.
Of the welter of words spoken so very beautifully—for a man with a disorder of the vocal cords—Kennedy, Jr. underplayed perhaps two issues and failed to mention but one crucial matter, while delivering a riveting information-dense address, at once deep and philosophical, yet wise and pragmatic, undergirded by historic and constitutional truth. Tactical to boot.
Against The Deep, Warfare, Woke, Industry-Captured State
The overarching impetus of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s announcement is this:
Americans live and labor under an illiberal, unconstitutional, oppressive administrative state. Our representatives are meant to make law. How, then, has this vast bureaucracy, captured by globe-straddling industries, acquired tyrannical law-making powers! Most certainly not constitutionally.
Candidate Kennedy astutely connects the corrupt merger of state and corporate power with the events, stateside and abroad; past and present, unfolding around us—from the collapse of the dollar, the murder of the middle-class via Covid crackdowns and lockdowns (courtesy of the pharma-state), to inflation (Federal Reserve Bank), to the sundering of individual and constitutional rights, to war forevermore (in service of the military-industrial-complex against which Dwight Eisenhower and John Quincy forewarned).
State run “corporate feudalism” keeps us sick, disenfranchised, robbed of rights and due process of law; drug addled and always at war.
On second thought, and for now, I retract my implicit insinuation that Kennedy had omitted to address the war on whites and on law-and-order; for he may have opted to do so tactically and indirectly. Kennedy is hardly sanguine about the "garrison and surveillance state" America has become, noting that, “Being an imperium abroad will destroy democracy, turn America into a garrison and surveillance state.” Kennedy's condemnation and contempt for the fulsome, foul Democratic Party was complete, calling it deliciously the party of "fear, war and censorship... neocons with woke bobble-heads."
For now, I charitably conclude that this gifted man has simply hit on a way to approach these matters in a less divisive and direct manner, using proxy issues. Kennedy thus spoke as passionately and deliberately about the impoverished whites of Appalachia—they were as much Kennedy constituents as the poor of Southeast Washington. He promised the poor—and all Kennedy constituents—this:
“I will be president to those people. We are going to take back the country. You give me a piece of ground and a sword I will take back this country, with your help, we will go America first.”
Behind candidate Kennedy, moreover, were aligned the kind of men and women one saw at a Trump rally: middle class and working-class Americans of all races. With a difference: Theirs were fine, sweet, not spiteful, faces. None sported nose rings or pink hair. All faces were etched with untold pain and suffering.
Caveat emptor. Robert F. Kennedy will need to address the border, as that by-now meaningless phrase goes. He has not. If he cares about the poor of his country, he must convince them that he is not part of the Ted Kennedy Fifth Column, which, in 1965, wrote the multicultural legislation that altered America forever.
Ukraine: Masterful Philosophical Triangulation
Likewise did Mr. Kennedy approach Ukraine in what was a brilliant bit of philosophical triangulation.
First, Kennedy argued that the "geopolitical machinations" underway in Ukraine were tantamount to regime change. Mr. Kennedy next constructed a political argument against the war in Ukraine so inclusive and all-encompassing that it would appeal to all political factions.
To wit, the war in Ukraine is being peddled as a humanitarian mission. Americans are a humanitarian people. Side by side with that claim are the "geopolitical machinations" to effect regime change in Russia. So, if we are prolonging the war to wear Russia down, in the name of regime change, argues this brilliant litigator, then America is also using Ukraine to create “an abattoir of death” for that country and its young.
That, noted Kennedy with passion and invention, is not humanitarian. QED.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s argument against war in Ukraine is tailored to the temperament and sensibilities of the American People, and thus represents a feat of triangulation. His is not the pure libertarian, Just War, constitutional, anti-war argument, but when have those worked? So let us, then, try a position against war that’ll appeal to every segment of the American people (other than our overlords who art in D.C.).
“As long as our major exports are weapons and war,” he thundered, “we will never have a middle-class in this country.” And, “the principal job of every president is to keep the country out of war.”
RFK might even prove intellectually more nimble than Pat Buchanan on matters war. Both would agree that Pax Americana has brought very little by way of peace with it. But this younger member of America’s political aristocracy must distance himself from the late Ted Kennedy on immigration. Robert F. Kennedy will need to concede that, like war forevermore, an open border is inconsistent with a stable middle-class and upwardly mobile working poor who can strive, not starve.
WATCH UK’s David Vance and your columnist discuss, “Tucker Removed by Fox. Robert Kennedy Jr Against The Deep, Warfare, Woke, Industry-Captured State.”
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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter (barely), Gab, Gettr YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new video-podcast.