Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. A case in point was the chyron that Fox News posted briefly on June 13. That was the day that Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami. The news story featured a split screen. On the left was Joe Biden speaking at an event in Washington for the secretary-general of NATO. On the right was Donald Trump addressing supporters in New Jersey. Underneath ran the unspeakable truth: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”
That fresh-breeze-of-truth window was open for a total of twenty-seven seconds. Then it was slammed shut. But that was long enough. Our Guardians on the internet erupted in fury. Fox issued a public apology and canned the veteran producer responsible on the spot. The Washington Post wailed that Fox had “crossed a line” with the unseemly graphic.
Yes, that is amusing coming from a house organ of the leftoid Democracy-Dies-In-Darkness megaphone. But the irony is that such eruptions of unchaperoned truth-telling are more and more rare at Fox, which has molted into a standard-issue mushy media mouthpiece.
Sure, there are still a few conservative-sounding pundits on Fox. But the corporate culture there is 100 percent grade-A woke. There’s also the dwindling audience, of course. As Chadwick Moore reported for The Spectator last edition, “total Fox viewership is down nearly 40 percent from the same time last year, and has tanked a whopping 62 percent in the key demographic.”
I had seen that “wannabe dictator” chyron while swiping through the news, but I hadn’t understood its fate or the significance of that fate until Tucker Carlson laid it all out in the fourth episode of his burgeoning new show on Twitter. As I write, that thirteen-minute clip, posted late on June 15, has garnered more than 30 million views. His six Twitter monologues to date have scooped up some 400 million views.
Tucker’s performance was a bravura exercise in what Quintilian might have called litotes, asserting something by asserting its opposite. “Joe Biden is not a wannabe dictator,” Tucker repeatedly assured us, tongue firmly in cheek, because he doesn’t do the things that any bona fide dictator worth his Swiss (or Maltese) bank account does.
But, of course, Biden does do those things. Tucker provided the damning inventory, from the corrupt enrichment of himself and family to his arrest and censorship of people critical of the regime.
Last summer, when the Feds raided Mar-a-Lago and made off with boxes that contained some files marked classified, I wondered whether Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray would consider the risky move worth it.
I mean, raiding a former president’s house and carting off a ton of his personal effects, including passports, was a bit much, wasn’t it? At the time, I speculated that the jury was still out on the question of whether the raid was worth the blowback.
Maybe. As I noted, such going-too-far on the part of the FBI and other agencies of the government apparat has been worth it in the past. Consider only the Russian collusion delusion. That was made up out of whole cloth to destroy Donald Trump.
The utterly fictitious nature of the gambit was eventually revealed, but so slowly and in such piecemeal fashion that the damage to the agency, and to the regime generally, was minimal.
Even the people who seemed guilty of crimes — Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Michael Sussmann and others — all walked. Clinesmith actually altered an email in order to open a FISA investigation on Carter Page, thereby providing the Feds with a backdoor into the nerve center of the entire Trump campaign.
The original email said that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith inserted the word “not,” thus providing the specious grounds for the whole Trump-is-a-Putin-Puppet meme. He got probation (!) and was last in the news, page B-78, when his license to practice law was quietly restored.
But we now know that it wasn’t to collect classified documents the former president had ferried out of the Oval Office that the Feds raided Mar-a-Lago. Nor was it to gather evidence about a rambunctious protest in Washington shortly before Joe Biden took office. As I noted at the time, it was part of a sprawling effort to taint Trump, to render him radioactive to the public.
In this sense, it was just another chapter in the Russian Collusion Delusion, that long-running, expensive but preposterous effort by deep-state actors — in the GOP as much as among Democrats — to undo the terrible mistake made by “deplorable” voters in electing the wrong man in 2016.
It was also a prequel to the entertainment being rolled out by Special Counsel Jack Smith at the behest of his master Merrick Garland. That’s why I cannot take seriously all the tongue-cluckers who are subjecting Smith’s baroque thirty-seven-count indictment to meticulous scrutiny. Smith is on the case for one reason: to provide cover and a rationale for the administration’s unbending purpose: Operation Get Trump.
That’s why the establishment, from the Fox executives on down, had hysterics when a brave producer supplied the world with that impermissible statement.
“Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” That’s the issue here. Everyone knows it. But no one is supposed to acknowledge it. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2023 World edition.
