Populist Bile and the Downfall of Conservative Media

Remember when, by and large, right-wing voices actually took pride in being better than the Left?

The original purpose of conservative media was not just to give the Right more sympathetic representation, but to provide better journalism than the corporate press. More honest, more trustworthy, fuller context, “fair and balanced.” And once upon a time, it basically was—while never fully without biases, failings, or blind spots, on balance patrons of talk radio, Fox News, National Review, and the like could be reasonably confident they really were getting reliable accounts of what was going on in the country, including a clearer understanding of opposing views than the mainstream media gives of us, and a higher likelihood of bad Republican behavior being held accountable than with Democrat deeds and left-wing sources.

In 2023, we can’t say that anymore.

Nowadays, many outlets and personalities in what now can only be loosely described as “conservative” media are every bit as likely as leftists to lie and obfuscate in support of favored politicians, help bad candidates out with softball interviews, give them so many passes that they can openly make light of broken promises without fear of consequence, and generally dumb down important discourse with sophistic talking points.

We got one of the most dire illustrations yet of the state of right-wing media Wednesday in Tucker Carlson’s interview with Candace Owens, concerning Ben Shapiro getting caught on tape finally criticizing dimwit demagogue Owens for a month of vile, insipid pandering to the anti-Israel (and worse) crowd (which ultimately meant nothing since a couple days later co-founder Jeremy Boreing confirmed that he and Shapiro have neither the ability nor the desire to maintain basic standards for Wire personalities). Hot Air’s John Sexton has a useful rundown of the sequence of events, including Owens claiming that “antisemitism is being weaponized in order to silence critics” (as if she was completely oblivious to the very real and obvious anti-Semitism conservatives were talking about) and generic strawman preening that “no government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide” when (a) nobody was claiming otherwise and (b) she knew damn well that Israel was being falsely accused of genocide.

As Ian Haworth put it in an excellent Washington Examiner column, “one of the primary criticisms of Candace Owens’s rhetoric since Oct. 7 is that it’s intentionally vague, with carefully worded pseudo-analyses designed to either enrage or delight its readers without having to stand by a specific viewpoint or principle.”

In what should have been a bright flashing warning sign for analytical observers, Carlson prefaced their conversation about the dustup with a disclaimer that he was completely ignorant of the story he had made a conscious decision to cover on his show: “To call somebody disgraceful, particularly a coworker, seems like a pretty big step and I really don’t know the background here. What is that about?”

OWENS: You know, there isn’t much of a background. I saw the video when everybody else saw it when I woke up. Nobody warned me about it, it looks like maybe he didn’t know he was being recorded, it looks like it was some sort of a private event, I got no clarity on the issue that he was particularly speaking on and in what was said. I also, I can’t respond to it beyond what he’s saying because it’s just ad hominem attacks.

CARLSON: Yeah, cause it’s not, you know, we disagree, I don’t think she’s correct, or maybe she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It’s ‘absolutely disgraceful.’

So, assuming for the moment we can take his words at face value, Carlson admitted he wasn’t qualified to tackle his own topic at all, did no due diligence or show prep of any kind, and proceeded to give one party of the dispute the floor to present her version of events entirely unchallenged, with no probing or scrutiny or fact-checking whatsoever. Irrespective of the specifics or issues involved, this is what passes for responsible journalism, let alone quality content? Really?

But before long, it becomes clear (for those who didn’t already know what Tucker is all about) that forces far less innocent than lazy incompetence are at work. Carlson acted surprised to learn that Shapiro used to support the Covid-19 vaccines (a stance he disavowed in October 2022), marveling that he was “on the left” on one of the “biggest issues of our time”—you know, an issue he didn’t bother to ask Donald Trump about in his September sit-down interview, despite Trump’s administration rushing the shots to market and Trump narcissistically continuing to stand by them ever since.

Innocent oversight, I’m sure.

Other whoppers included the pair agreeing that it was completely outrageous to associate Charlie Kirk with anti-Semitism for nothing more than questioning an Israeli security failure (no mention of what Kirk really said, or what others in his organization said), stupid Nikki Haley comments the Right has almost universally condemned that Carlson somehow twisted into evidence that "a lot of the Right is opposed to the First Amendment,” and Carlson pushing with a straight face the idea that “basically no one in the establishment in Washington is for the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primaries” (as long as you don’t count the Speaker of the House and his predecessor, the chairmen of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican National Committee and its chairwoman, or a slew of sitting members of Congress....).

But arguably the biggest grotesquerie came when he said the following about the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel:

I hated watching that. And I feel so sorry for the Israelis who were killed. However, there’s an emotional response that is disproportionate, I think, on the part of some commentators. I mean, our country is being invaded right now by millions of young men whose identities we don’t know, probably don’t even like America. And they’re not living here. Over 100,000 Americans die every year of fentanyl. I’ve known a couple. Those are real tragedies...I’ve never seen anything like the emotion from any commentator around those tragedies as I’m watching about a foreign tragedy, I think that’s odd.

Carlson was essentially replaying the lie he got away with telling about Ron DeSantis last month, setting up a false conflict between caring about bad things at home and bad things abroad. As a lot of people pointed out, it ignored the small matter of the attack claiming 31 American lives and nine American hostages. But that’s just the start of how sick this is.

For one thing, drug overdoses, while tragic, are for the most part self-inflicted and therefore avoidable. Drug dealers are scum of the earth who society must punish as such, but ultimately it takes a willing customer to ingest their poison. People killing themselves through bad decisions objectively is less outrageous than people being intentionally murdered by others through no fault of their own—let alone intentional murder so barbarically cruel as to rival the Saw movies. It is not only defensible but correct to register two different emotional responses based on the nature and context of the two different sets of deaths, and stopping to portion out sympathy on the basis of the victims’ nationalities is the real breakdown of the human conscience.

For another, the underlying “logic” is one of the key factors of why knee-jerk isolationism is not just wrongheaded but morally poisonous. It’s sustained in large part by cultivating resentment of a broad group not for anything it’s done to us, but for the sin of needing help or even just sympathy. Demagogues condition the easily-led to scapegoat those lousy foreigners for America’s problems, as if the former have anything to do with the latter.

This is exactly what the Left does with its various identity factions: train them to hate the rich, the white, the male, not for actually doing anything to the poor, minorities, or women, but for (supposedly) faring better in one way or another, which progressive dogma teaches can only have come about at the expense of others. Populism—or at least, Tucker Carlson’s brand of it—is, to a significant extent, nothing more than leftism in conservative drag.

Today, peddlers of such poison get honored as heroic truth-tellers by conservative institutions as prestigious as the Heritage Foundation. It didn’t use to be this way. Once upon a time, for all its faults and weaknesses, American conservatism at least had the self-respect to relegate it to the impotent, lunatic fringe. We said we were better than the Left, and we strove to be better than the Left because some minimal standards of integrity really mattered to us.

That’s not true anymore. And Tucker Carlson may not be the only reason why, but his continued acceptance on the Right is proof positive of how far the rot has spread.