Never Go Full Tucker - Konstantin Kisin

Never go full Tucker. For days now, my timeline has been full of clips from the allegedly blockbuster showdown between American podcaster Tucker Carlson and British politician and broadcaster Jacob Riesmog, in which they clashed on the subject of the Second World War. Based on excerpts, I prepared myself for something genuinely dark. One clip in which Carlson claims he has no idea why Britain fought World War II was particularly worrying. This I thought is the moment, Tucker has finally gone all the way. His cross-sirubicon set up a tent on the other side and started selling merch with my struggle on it. And so, despite wanting to watch the entire thing less than the remake of Downfall directed by Darryl Cooper, I forced myself to. Sadly, far from being disgusting and outrageous is mostly just disappointing. As he correctly says in the discussion, Carlson isn't a secret Nazi, he's just ideologically captured and not very bright. A typical podcast, in other words. As regular viewers will know, I've talked extensively about what I call the "Woke Right". This is a term that has caused much consternation because to many people, "Wokeness is definitely a pathology of the far left". To be woke is to be extremely left-wing. I take a different view. To me, "Wokeness is a pathology of human beings that has reflected not in the views people hold, but in the behavior its adherents feel entitled to engage in". Most people have been implicitly taught to think of the political spectrum as a line with communism on the far left and fascism on the far right. Or, "Shoot Theory", on the other hand, sees these far ends of the spectrum bending toward each other and meeting as they reach for the same methods. We saw this in the 1930s when the hostility to an active destruction of democracy, suppression of criticism, scapegoating, and extermination of outgroups, socialist economics, militarism and so on were prevalent both in the communist world and in the fascist countries of Europe and beyond. The "Horseshoot Theory of Wokeness" is no different. The ideology which is paraded as gay-raised communism is different from the post-liberal right. But the methodology is similar. Identity, terror and victimhood, the belief in the fundamental immorality and erudimability of their political opponents and the general black and white thinking about everything, including war, history and politics. The "Woke Left" approach to history is simple, imagine a perfect world. Now look at people who lived 200 years ago and notice that they were not living in it. Conclude that they were monsters, tear down the statues. And what about the "Woke Rights" approach, imagine a perfect world? Now look at the people who were making impossible decisions before and during World War II and notice that both the process and the outcome were not perfect either. Conclude that they too were monsters and invert the moral order. This is how you get to the Churchill with the greatest villain of World War II rhetoric and what is that, if not the metaphorical tearing down of his statue. Killing innocent people is always wrong, tuck your emotes. And of course, in a utopian vacuum, we'd all agree with him because it's superficially true and important. Proportionality, discrimination, the whole apparatus of just more theory exists precisely because we take it seriously. But as a moral position about the Second World War, he's not profound, it's childish. The Second World War was a mass slaughter of civilians. That was its defining characteristic. The Axis powers murdered civilians on an industrial scale as policy continuously until the moment they were physically prevented from continuing, six million Jews, millions of slaves. And that's just Hitler's Germany. Japan had been in Manchuria since 1931 and at full scale war with China since 1937. By the time Hitler invaded Poland, millions of Chinese civilians were already dead. With much of the killing done in close quarters and by hand, the headed with swords burned or buried alive were used for bayonet practice. So the actual question, the one any serious person has to answer, is not, is killing innocent wrong. It's this. When the mass killing of innocence already happening at vast scale every single day, are you willing to use force to stop it? Knowing that doing so will kill enemy combatants and civilians too, but in far smaller numbers. When moral perfection is the standard, Carlson's what about is almost works. In fact, it seems to work on millions of people who want simple explanations for complex problems. Look over here, says Tucker, Britain locked up political opponents and their wives during the war. One democratic, to disrupt the frame of Churchill Good Knight's bad, Britain did X less than perfect thing is close to compelling. Less so when you know the fact. The person he's talking about is Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley was in turn in May 1940 with the invasion expected within weeks. He'd married Diana Mittford at Goebbels' house with Hitler as a guest. Diana had met Hitler repeatedly and was lobbying for a pro-Nazi radio station in Britain. He was released in 1943 on health grounds despite a public outcry and lived on until his death in 1980. Such tyranny! Next, Carlson explains that Hitler never wanted war with Britain. After all, he said so. And if you can't trust that of Hitler, who can you trust? Seriously though, ask yourself, is this a coherent position for someone who's built a career on being suspicious of powerful elites? Would Tucker accept this line of argument regarding Joe Biden or Anthony Fauci or even Donald Trump? By the way, we know exactly what Hitler wanted. He wanted Germany to become a hegemonic power in Europe, an aspiration which had been the organizing principle of British foreign policy for 400 years to prevent. If you're a fan of logical consistency, by the way, you'll know that Carlson advances the argument that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine in 2022 because great powers will always concern themselves with what happens on their borders. Yet Britain, a great power in 1939, was supposed to look absently on as Hitler gobbled up all of Europe. Besides, as the Soviet Union found out, even in the lines for Hitler didn't mean he would not turn on you the moment he felt it was to his advantage. For signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Stalin in 1939 and invading Poland together, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa less than two years later, invading the Soviet Union and butchering its citizens, which brings us to the exchange everyone's clipped, when asked why Britain fought World War II, Rysmog replies that we'd all be speaking German. Tucker says, "Who cares? We'd all be speaking German is English shorthand and has been for 80 years, for we would be living under an extermination as tyranny." British people do have an aversion to foreign languages, but World War II was not about a phobia of really long nouns. This is the point at which Carson deploys his favorite trick of invoking Britain's current problems as being a direct consequence of the victory which he puts in air quotes. If you want that war, why is your country so screwed is effectively his question. This is another bout of utopianism, of course, because as with the woke left, he deliberately avoids the actual choice which faced Britain in the 1930s. We were not choosing between fighting the war and the land of peace, milk, and honey. Even if we accept that the current state of Britain, which I agree is depressing, is a consequence of fighting a war nearly a century ago, a tenuous claim and best, that does not mean that Hitlerian empire stretching from Cali to Vladivostok was a better alternative. Tucker's rhetorical posture is easy to adopt but hard to disguise. He almost succeeds in making his "wise" your country's screwed argument sound like a far-reaching, all-encompassing philosophical query, like he's exploding the bounds of our tunnel vision. In reality, he's just moving the goalposts. Somehow Churchill is expected to not only answer for his conduct in World War II, but every absurd and short-sighted policy decision that came since, including those made decades after his death by people who, hey, everything is stood for? All of this is just incredibly low quality, motivated reasoning about history, which we've seen before from the Imram X-Candys and Robin DeAngelo's of the world. Indeed, it's not an accident that Churchill has been the target of far-left attacks for decades. He represents as much of a threat to their worldview as he does the Carlson's, and for the same reason. Britain was right to fight the Nazis. It did so honorably, and its victory is one of the great achievements of Western civilization. If you enjoy these videos, remember to go to constantincisan.com and read them as articles, days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time. 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