Tucker Carlson, Twit of the Year

Tucker Carlson, with his claim to have a monopoly on Western values--he doesn't--his apocalyptic chicken little rhetoric that the sky is falling--it isn't--and his utopian rhetoric that eden is just over that rise--it isn't--is an all too typical and all rather common example of a right wing demagogue in the late modern and early postmodern eras, an era which has seen an increase in demographic diversity, cultural fragmentation and narcissism (both Cryer Tuck and Dissembling Donald are cut from this cloth), and a global corporate economy in the core nation West.  In fact, his claim to be the guardian of a parochial conception of Western values--one that is inherently intolerant and brooks no contradiction--his claim that the end is nigh--an end that for two thousand years has never been nigh--and his edenic utopian opiate of the masses discourse come right out of the playbook of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean theocracy.

So too, of course, does Carlson's anti-Semtitism. Carlson's posh toff meets populism anti-Semitism is likewise the product of Mediterranean theocracy as it was institutionalised in an imperial and intolerant Roman Empire in "decay" or in change. Like all instances of such scapegoating, including claims that Jews were drinking the blood of Christian children and poisoning wells, such claims are bullshite. They ultimately all function as the emotional appeals of true believing demagogues or consciously gobshitting cynical or machiavellian bullshitters to rev up the emotions of the anti-intellectual mob so to attain power (Gimme, Gimme, Gimme), prestige (I wanna be adored), and/or financial gain (let's make lots of money).



Carlson's posh toff meets populism demagoguery is also--and this perhaps has an even longer pedigree than Mediterranean theocracy--hypocritical. Carlson and those of his ends justify the means ilk praise their values while damning to hell the same or similar values in others. They praise their priestly money changers while consigning to hell the financial backers of causes with which they disagree and which are as much a product of Western values, non-theocratic Western values in this instance, as their intolerant Western values. 

In the end, old Cryer Tuck is nothing but a good old time pot and kettle if with a silver spoon stuck up his arse. And like the gilded silver crap Swanson dinners are served on, that silver spoon is ultimately fool's gold.