Tucker Carlson, Master Wrecker
Why I'll Never Vote for J.D. Vance
Batya Ungar-Sargon does it again.
One Party Is Purging Antisemites. The Other Party Is Electing Them begins well by citing the excellent New York Times coverage on the shock Chevalier primary win over Adrian Espaillat. Then she has to do some thinking, and her mind abruptly stops functioning.
The message here is clear: Anti-Zionism and antisemitic tropes about Jews and money are the price of entry into the progressive movement, the cost of winning elections on the Left.1
Yet the exact opposite is happening on the Right in the Republican Party.
Tucker Carlson, a man who has made his output almost exclusively about his opposition to Jews in recent years, who has hosted multiple Holocaust deniers on his show and is rabidly, obsessively anti-Israel, is no longer part of the Republican Party. After months of being publicly berated and even ousted from MAGA by President Trump, Carlson has announced he is done.
And this after his close friend, Vice President JD Vance, made obsequious comments about how welcome Carlson is last week.
/facepalm/
It didn’t occur to Batya that things are never what they seem in politics, and no, this isn’t conspiracy-talk, it’s just deductive reasoning.
Following the Russian Revolution, phrases and words entered the English language to describe that motley crowd of people who enabled communism while not being Party members. The favorite was fellow traveler. Fellow travelers were enormously helpful to the Communist party; they had the freedom to maneuver that an actual party member didn’t. They were the original “just asking questions” crowd.
Then actual Bolshevik terms entered the lexicon of English language political writing: accelerant (crisis‑pusher), and disorganizer (internal saboteur).
They all apply to Tucker, but none of them really bite. The word that applies to Tucker is wrecker — a corrosive actor who weakens the system from inside the system. To the Bolsheviks, a wrecker was an internal saboteur - people who did maximum damage because they still appeared to be aligned. In political analysis, “wrecker” has been generalized to mean someone who weakens a system from a position close enough inside the perimeter to matter but far enough outside enough to evade discipline.
Stepping outside the GOP frees him. Inside the party he had to pretend the institution still mattered. Outside it, he can attack its legitimacy without paying any cost. This distance gives him max leverage. Notice the article never says he changed party affiliation. Carlson is making a show of stepping outside the party just far enough to attack it, but not so far that he loses relevance to it. If When Vance runs, Carlson will support him — not because of party loyalty, but because Vance is the only leader who fits Carlson’s ideological and emotional template.
Clever, clever. Too clever for Batya. But not for you and me!
Movements are said to tolerate wreckers even as they’re being hollowed out because they perform a function. They say the unsayable, break what the institution is too timid to break, and absorb the blame the core wants to avoid. A wrecker expands the movement’s range of motion while taking none of its risks.
I don’t quite buy this. Movements don’t tolerate wreckers; leaders do.
A movement on its own would expel a figure who corrodes it. But a leader can keep a wrecker close because the wrecker does work the leader can’t do openly. That’s the JD Vance role here. Carlson can hollow out the GOP only because Vance, as leader, allows the wrecking to serve his purposes. Obviously his immediate goal is to become president.. His purpose is to create an isolationist America, and a bunch of other vague, abstract, contradictory things (weaken the federal government while strengthening economic interventionism, for example).
We don’t know what Vance will do because he contains multiple, sometimes conflicting impulses. But we do know who his friends are, and that tells us the range of outcomes he considers legitimate.
If you want the whole picture of the Vance-Carlson political bromance, read Jason Hart’s X feed but read this for a summation of the whole story.
Peter Thiel gave Vance $15 million to become the Republican senator from Ohio. Thiel is a post-liberal, high-techbro who believe in a state-directed economy. He also dabbles in nutty stuff like transhumanism. He’s like something out of an Anthony Burgess novel adapted by Stanley Kubrick. 2
Vance is chummy with post-liberal Catholic integralists, such as Patrick Deneen and Kevin “Venomous Coalition” Roberts, the ghastly president of the once venerable Heritage Foundation, and Adrian Vermeule, defender of the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.
I think that people are on the wrong track by focusing on his attitudes towards Jews. Vance is a nutcase on everything. He really comes into full flower when he chats with his batshit friend, Sohrab Amari, “socialist Catholic convert New Dealer.”
My gosh, I really didn’t mean this to be about Vance — I meant it to be about Tucker. So let’s course correct and take a cold hard look at Tucker Carlson once and for all. I’m not going to go into his crazy upbringing (I’ve already done that here3), or dive into the swamp that his show has become. That’s all well known.
I want to focus on the thing that really shows his true character: the Dominion v. Fox defamation lawsuit because it’s something that core MAGA and other less fanatic yet sincere Trump voters are in denial about: the allegedly stolen 2020 election and why Tucker was fired from Fox.
“Because he told the truth!” No, it’s because he cost them $787 million in damages. During the discovery phase of Dominion V. Fox, Tucker was revealed to have been a thoroughgoing liar. In the motion for summary judgment Tucker Carlson’s name is mentioned eighty-nine times.
Here are a few of the citations:
(Only problem: he didn’t believe a word of it.)
There are dozens more citations in this document alone and this is only one slice of the Dominion record. Carlson’s private messages appear across multiple filings — complaints, exhibits, and other discovery materials — but I’m not cataloguing them here. This is enough for my purposes.
They all indicate that:
Carlson never believed the election was stolen. He said so repeatedly in private; it came out in the proceedings, it cost Fox nearly eight hundred million bucks, he was fired, whined in public, and ended up with the golden parachute of MAGA victimhood, while privately loathing Trump.
The myth of the stolen election of 2020 carries deep weight in MAGA and that’s why no one in the movement has ever faced this. There were cases of fraud here and there but they weren’t enough to swing a huge election.
Repeatedly I hear that Biden got “20 million extra votes” — not so. Twenty-two million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016. Fifteen million more for Biden; eleven million more for Trump. (That’s 26 million because some people switched from third parties to the two main candidates; the net was twenty-two million.) Somehow “the steal” managed to add eleven million more to the loser to make it look more plausible? Ridiculous.
It’s painful to read the naievete of Batya Ungar Sargon.
But if they [Vance’s obsequious glazing of Carlson] were meant to convince Carlson he still belonged, they fell on deaf ears. This week, Carlson announced he would not remain part of the Republican Party over its friendship with Israel, which Carlson calls “putting a foreign country above those of its own citizens.”
Carlson followed up his dramatic but content-free break with the GOP by insulting and abusing Trump with shocking vitriol on his show. He hasn’t gone nuts; he’s doing what he always does — repositioning himself ahead of the next phase of the right, even if that means turning on Trump brutally.
Carlson’s heaping abuse on Trump isn’t a digression, it’s the clearest demonstration of his structural role as a wrecker. He’s not loyal to leaders; he’s loyal to the direction of the movement. When he thinks the center of gravity has shifted, he shifts. When he thinks the future lies with Vance’s post‑liberal project rather than Trump’s personality cult, he pivots — brutally, publicly, and without hesitation. That’s the wrecker doing what wreckers do: clearing space for the next formation. His whole career he’s done this.
The pattern is unmistakable:
He turned on the Bush‑era GOP he once worked inside.
He turned on the neoconservative foreign‑policy world he once echoed.
He turned on the libertarian‑leaning right he once flirted with.
He turned on the mainstream media institutions that employed him.
He turned on the national‑security consensus he once treated as authoritative.
He turned on Trump — first privately (Dominion texts), now publicly.
Tucker Carlson knows just what he’s doing. Always look forward to the next thing. And wreck the thing you left behind.
Between a Vance-led Republican party (an ugly hybrid of Catholic-converts who hate reality, and groypers) and the DSA-led Democrats, it’s looking hideous.
As for Batya, she’s been exiled from MAGA by Alex Bruesewitz and will have to figure out her next career move.
I can’t help her there. I’ve always been lousy at career maneuvering.
This is actually not true. The DSA is exploiting the weakness in the primary system, but that’s a different subject.
One of his investments is called The Methusaleh Foundation. Yeah.
