What Does Tucker Carlson See in Viktor Orban?
Let’s assume that most, if not all of you reading this piece know who Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is. For the few who don’t, Tucker (1969- ), is the son of Richard “Dick” Warner Carlson, a former “gonzo” journalist who eventually became the director of the Voice of America, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles. When Tucker was nearly 10, his father married Patricia Swanson, an heiress to the Swanson Food Enterprises fortune. Tucker is a Paleoconservative news commentator for Fox News. As of the beginning of 2021, he is the most-watched, most popular commentator on cable television. Estimates of his salary at Fox range from $6-25 million a year. The ultimate preppy who received his undergraduate education at St. George’s School in Rhode Island (where he chaired the “Dan White Society” [an apparent reference to the American political assassin who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk] and married the headmaster’s daughter Susan), Carlson has long been a vocal opponent of progressivism, a critic of immigration, and has been described as a racist, misogynistic, ultra-nationalist. He is also a first-class pain in the ass, who while on camera interviewing someone he disagrees with, is well-known for maintaining a look of puzzlement; at times variously frowning and raising an eyebrow in supposed consternation.
This past week, Tucker Carlson broadcast live from Budapest, where he spent a good deal of time interviewing and exchanging grins with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who heads an authoritarian government bent on targeting liberal institutions, including universities, the judiciary and the media. While in Hungary, Carlson took a helicopter to inspect a border fence designed to keep out migrants. Yes, in addition to all his other political phobias, P.M. Orban is also a xenophobe. Carlson’s visit bolsters Mr. Orban’s mission to establish Budapest as an ideological center for what he sees as an international conservative movement.
Orban (1960- ) who refers to his governing philosophy as “illiberal” democracy, has, over the past twenty years, been compared to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, France’s Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump . . . which tells you just about all you need to know about the corrupt Hungarian autocrat. To Tucker Carlson and a growing number of American paleoconservatives, Orban is a shining star; a guidepost on the path to a new America built for – and run by – white Christian men who bar the gates to most of the world’s “struggling masses yearning to breathe free,” and use whatever conspiracies they might concoct in order to keep their camp followers scared witless.
In his first nightly newscast from Budapest, Carlson praised Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us,” and held up Hungary’s hardline policy on rejecting asylum seekers as a model for an American immigration system that he believes is too lenient and has weakened the power of native-born citizens, an argument that Carlson’s critics say overlaps with white supremacist ideology. Carlson also praised Hungarian Prime Minister Orban for not allowing "this nation of 10 million people to be changed forever by people we didn't invite in and who are coming here illegally.” To make sure his US viewers understood his message, he contrasted Mr Orban's policies with those of President Biden:
"Because the lessons are so obvious, and such a clear refutation to the policies we currently have, and the people who instituted those policies, Hungary and its government have been ruthlessly attacked and unfairly attacked: 'It's authoritarian, they're fascists…' There are many lies being told right now, that may be the greatest of all."
Unbelievably, Carlson has gone so far off the rails as to claim that Hungary is “freer than America.” In Orban’s Hungary, the ultimate preppie told his fellow travelers, their leader refers to white Christians as “the original inhabitants” of the country. Carlson treats this vision of national identity as fundamental to Hungary’s “success.” As Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent recently noted: According to Carlson, here [in America] . . . you’ll be silenced by Silicon Valley or hounded from your job if you dare criticize the “orthodoxy” of liberal internationalism and social liberalism — that is, if you yearn for association with a national identity that is culturally insulated and unsullied by socially liberal threats (like “transgender athletes”) to traditional conservative values. Who’s freer? If you’re an American, the answer is painful to admit.
It would be a pleasure to say that Tucker Carlson is a lone voice in this disgraceful, despotic forest. But alas, he is not; far from it. As the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum noted in an essay which came out just the other day, The aggrieved Americans who now find their way to Orbán or Vladimir Putin also dislike their own country, albeit for different reasons. They cannot abide its racial diversity, its modern culture, its free press. Those who dream of a white-tribalist alternative—one that also puts pressure on gay people and uses anti-Semitic tropes in its propaganda—believe they have found this nirvana at dinners and think-tank events in Budapest. What American paleoconservatives fail - or even worse, refuse - to recognize is the irony that under a nationalist autocrat like Orban, it’s impossible for a Hungarian equivalent of Carlson—a loud television pundit, critical of the government, watched by millions of people—to exist. In Hungary, the ruling party doesn’t merely influence the press. It owns the bulk of the press, and not metaphorically.
My dear “Pal Al” Blake - the nicest Yankee fan I know – sent me an email the other day asking whether it might work for people to start boycotting Tucker Carlson’s advertisers on Fox. Well, I looked it up, and to my amazement discovered that at his peak the likes of Disney, T-Mobile and the brokerage firm Ameritrade were among those who paid big bucks to keep him on the air. Of late, most have left the fold. In the second quarter of 2021, Tucker Carlson Tonight had as its most prolific sponsors “Fox News Channel” (17 airings), “My Pillow” (13 airings), “Balance of Nature” (9 airings) and “Rejuvenate Muscle Health” (5 airings.) Could it be that the preppie who has been at the forefront of pushing anti-vaccine theories, called the Joint Chiefs of Staff head “a pig” and continually talked up replacement theory is now on a downward spiral? Well, in the words of Elliott Ness, “Follow the money.”
To give the paleoconservative Carlson the benefit of the doubt (why, I do not know . . . but I guess that’s the rabbi in me), that he truly doesn’t believe much more than a soupçon of the bilge he broadcasts on Fox, his cynicism about America is so profound, and his nihilism so overpowering, that he simply does not care. If he can make people angry, he achieves his most important goal. Sound like anyone who served as POTUS from 2017-2021?
This is all very, very dangerous stuff. People like Tucker Carlson, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar and Matt Gaetz as well as Governors Ron De Santis and Greg Abbott (and let’s not forget the terrorists of January 6), American Democracy stands atop a desperate precipice.
If anyone had told me back in the 1960s that a half-century later I would consider myself and fellow “freaks” more patriotic than the “straights,” I would have asked them what in the hell they were smoking. But this is no more the case. As we used to say back in the days of the Free Speech Movement and People’s Park . . . “let your freak flag fly” . . .
Don’t give in, and above all, don’t give up: America is not and never shall be Hungary . . . or Russia or Brazil. We are the land of the free and the home of everyone . . .
Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone