#51 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday June 7)
A letter from Tucker Carlson:
Dear Democratic Leadership,
Since the election, it’s been unusually quiet for a nation fighting through a pandemic, buffeted by repeated mass killings, responding to challenges to the world order, and dealing with myriad issues in the economy and with employment. Twitter and Facebook have effectively silenced Mr. Trump, who is limited to occasional rants on talk shows and a revolving door of Republican party supplicants, willing to buy into the pernicious lie of a stolen election.
Meanwhile, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green and other crazies are getting way too much press in the mainstream media. Fox News is short on things to rile up the faithful since the election. And while I’m busy manufacturing controversy and conspiracy I need your help! If we want to get another right-wing racist autocrat, I will continue to do my part to rally the troops but I can’t do it alone!
Here are a few things I’d ask you do, in order to provide me fodder to feed the gullible faithful on the right:
Police brutality and racial profiling
Please try to lump together all police in going after the bad cops. It makes it easier to characterize the gun-toting Republican far-right faithful as standing for “law and order.”
Rather than seeking meaningful reforms in police recruitment and hiring, training (both initially and over the course of an officer’s career), and more closely monitor and sanction bad behaviors, instead please use the phrase “defund the police.” It trivializes the real issues at hand, reflects an absurd objective—no one to enforce the rules and keep us safe—and raises the specter that what you really want is anarchy.
Expanding the literary canon
Please continue to push the notion that there is no such thing as correct spelling or good grammar. It supports the right’s narrative that you want to dumb down America.
Continue fighting to ban books. When you argue for pulling Shakespeare, Dickens, Huck Finn and other classics off the bookshelf, you look ridiculous. And you divert attention from legitimate attempts to (i) expand the canon to include previously underheard female and minority voices, and (ii) discuss the real issues of anti-intellectualism and non-liberal open discussion on our college campuses.
Cancel culture and naming
By all means, please continue to identify people from history that don’t fit the perfect narrative of 21st century mores. The more you fight to delegitimize people like Lincoln, Washington, taking down statues and changing names of public buildings, you detract from the very real need to eliminate honors of Confederate leaders and other similar villainous and treasonous people.
Please aggressively continue to silence mainstream conservative thinkers from college campuses. It allows us to argue against “liberal intellectualism” as just the other side of the coin.
Keep attacking capitalism as the source of all of society’s woes. After all, communism, socialism and state nationalism has worked so well for others. I’d love to label you as trying to destroy America’s way of life.
Try to characterize the debate on taxes as a means of redistributing wealth, instead of focusing on the need that we all pull our weight, as we can, to provide the infrastructure, defense, and other benefits of a civilized society for all of our citizens. Whatever you do, don’t refer to intelligent taxation as an investment in our children’s future. That would make too much sense.
Try to load all reasonable legislation with the weight of a myriad of political objectives only loosely based upon the bill itself. By way of example, load up any stimulus bill or election integrity bill with a bunch of favored political programs that can only ensure failure to pass necessary legislation.
Teaching in elementary and secondary schools
There really isn’t much of an argument against teaching about the myriad of cultures in America. Every student should better appreciate the contributions to our political life, but also our educational system, science, math, the arts, and literature of our fellow Americans (and, for that matter, outside of America as well). And we should definitely learn about the struggles of these groups. But I need you to give me more to yell about. Making it a study of who was more victimized than the other group, a revisionist history based on oppression, and the constant refrain that all our woes are the result of white supremacy enables me to argue you are teaching only the negative side of American history.
Continue to pursue the “new new math” that attempts to recharacterize the study of mathematics as a journey with “no right answers.” Trying to articulate math as a social studies problem rather than one of the last vestiges of truly right and wrong answers is brilliant and supports my narrative.
When focusing on the rights of minorities, the oppressed and those different from the mainstream, try to draw people’s attention to a relatively small group and one for which there is little understanding and much controversy. I choose transgender rights. I can really get a lot of mileage focusing on this. It also allows me to recharacterize the debate as an assault on women’s sports.
Let’s go for the reeducation camp model in addressing equity and inclusion. I want you to get every corporation, nonprofit and community group to mandatory meetings where you call them all racist at the core and where you characterize every societal inequity as part of a grand scheme of racism. To top it off, make them sit through hours of this—like traffic school—so that they turn their brains off and simply endure. In this way, you’ll aggravate them, message to them that there is only one way to look at things and bore them to death.
Along the same lines, do not ascribe to the maxim “show, don’t tell.” Don’t try to teach about events of social injustice (and events to overcome it). Instead, focus on convincing people that they are racist and need to change (which may be true but is hardly the way to move doubters).
If you do all these things, I’ll have a lot to rail about and, importantly, you’ll increase the chances that the Republicans capture one or both houses in the 2022 elections. Your motto should be “go for everything at once—go for the whole loaf and don’t settle for less—articulate any good idea in the extreme.”
By doing this, you will play into my hands, resulting in electoral defeat for you, and then give me even more to talk about after the Republicans are victorious. We can do this—together!
Thanks for your support,
Tucker