By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 08, 2025
I’m often accused of being anti-populist because I’m
anti-Trump. The truth is far, far closer to the other way around. For instance,
here’s how I began a column almost two decades ago:
Politics has a math of its own.
Whereas a scientifically minded person might see things this way: One person
who says 2+2=5 is an idiot; two people who think 2+2=5 are two idiots; and a
million people who think 2+2=5 are a whole lot of idiots–political math works
differently. Let’s work backwards: if a million people think 2+2=5, then they
are not a million idiots, but a “constituency.” If they are growing in number,
they are also a “movement.” And, if you were not only the first person to
proclaim 2+2=5, but you were the first to persuade others, then you, my friend,
are not an idiot, but a visionary.
We are beset by many such visionaries these days.
Populism doesn’t need social media to spread idiocy.
Ignatius Donnelly—“the
Prince of Cranks”—got plenty of traction in the 19th century.
Most of the nonsense you see on the History Channel about Atlantis can be
traced back to him. Much of the antisemitic hooey spewed by many of the
idiot-visionaries can also be traced back to him and his imitators. Indeed, he
was hardly alone. The populist era was full of haters of all the usual
suspects: Jews, blacks, Brits, Catholics, Masons, bankers, etc.
There was also no shortage of mystics and mediums
peddling things like “theosophy”
and other crackpot mystical theories. Madame Helena Blavatsky, the creator of
theosophy, had many prominent adherents, acolytes, dabblers, and fans,
including Abner Doubleday, L. Frank Baum, William Butler Yeats, Henry
Wallace (the vice president), Wassily Kandinsky,
Thomas Edison, and Mahatma
Gandhi. They didn’t all believe her mystical mumbo jumbo or subscribe to
every jot and tittle of her race
theories and antisemitism,
but the craziness you hear about demons and aliens today is hardly new.
Blavatsky launched a journal called—I defecate you
negatory—Lucifer.
The name was a sophisticated way to troll Christians. Lucifer, Blavatsky
explained, was the “pale morning star” and “light bringer” that would
illuminate all the hidden truths.
Lucifer was co-founded by Mabel Collins. When
Collins broke with Blavatsky and the theosophists, she recounted how Blavatsky:
taught me one great lesson. I
learned from her how foolish, how 'gullible', how easily flattered human beings
are, taken en masse. Her contempt for her kind was on the same gigantic
scale as everything else about her…. She had a greater power over the weak and
credulous, a greater capacity for making black appear white, a larger waist, a
more voracious appetite, a more confirmed passion for tobacco, a more ceaseless
and insatiable hatred for those whom she thought to be her enemies, a greater
disrespect for les convenances, a worse temper, a greater command of bad
language, and a greater contempt for the intelligence of her fellow-beings than
I had ever supposed possible to be contained in one person. These, I suppose,
must be reckoned as her vices, though whether a creature so indifferent to all
ordinary standards of right and wrong can be held to have virtues or vices, I
know not.
(Or as Tommy Lee Jones says in Men in Black: “A
person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”)
When I read this description of Madame Blavatsky, I can’t
help but think of Tucker Carlson and his imitators and competitors.
I don’t pay much attention to Carlson these days. I
ignore him mostly out of sadness. I’ve known him for decades and considered him
a friend for much of that time. The reason I finally quit Fox News with more
than a year remaining on my contract was his insidious “investigation” titled
“Patriot Purge,” which cleverly insinuated all manner of fevered and deranged
conspiracy theories about January 6, 2021. I say “insinuated” because he wanted
to stay on the “just asking questions” side of legal jeopardy with his lies and
anti-American smears.
What aroused my attention and ire was his attack on Cliff
Asness, a close friend of mine. Carlson off-handedly called him one of the
“sleazier people in American business.” If you want to discount my defense of
Cliff as one of the most honorable and above-board people I’ve ever known
because I hold the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise
Institute, or because he’s a minority investor of The Dispatch (who has
offered his share of criticisms of some of our stuff,
to zero editorial effect) or some other reason (those Joooz stick together, you
know), be my guest. Personally, I think it would be more dishonorable to stay
quiet about B.S. accusations against a friend for fear of B.S. accusations
hurled back at me.
One of the things I love about Cliff—aside from our
shared nerd-love of comic books—is that unlike a shocking number of people with
f–k you money, he’s actually willing to say f–k you to people who have it
coming. I know a lot of honorable, honest, patriotic people. I don’t know any
who are more honorable, honest, or patriotic than Cliff.
What makes me sad
about Carlson shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed the degeneration of a
once clear-eyed, patriotic, funny, and joyous journalist—and friend—into an
angry crank who carries water for Russia, Iran, and, of course, Qatar. Tucker
has more than enough f–k you money himself. He doesn’t need to do any of this
for money, he wants to do it. He enjoys it. I think in part because he
has let his bitterness toward “the establishment” corrupt his soul to the point
where he thinks he can get payback by engaging in what Julien Benda called “the
intellectual organization of political hatred.”
That’s the relevant difference between Carlson and Cliff.
Cliff loves America and detests antisemitism and is willing to tell people who
don’t, f–k you, which is why he withdrew
support for his alma mater when it played footsie with
Hamasniks and Jew-haters. Carlson craves the attention he gets by saying f–k
you to America and Jews.
What separates Carlson from many of his imitators is that
he’s very smart and informed. He knows when he’s lying. He knows what he’s
doing.
I have no such confidence about, say, Candace Owens. She
may have a certain kind of shrewdness or glib cleverness, but her ignorance
pulls her into idiocy. Because she has a thumbless grasp of facts, she starts
with conclusions: “Jews
are bad,” and then googles until she finds the proof she needs. She calls
this “doing her own research.”
For instance, when told that Jerusalem has a “Muslim
quarter” she simply assumed that meant it was a segregated ghetto akin to
the Jim Crow South. That’s how ignorance paves the way for idiocy. If she’s
ever read a single mainstream history book cover to cover, I’d be legitimately
shocked.
Carlson’s errors and lies are more sophisticated. He’s
better at “just asking questions” of people he knows will give wrong answers.
Part of his schtick is to elevate and promote cranks as authorities so that
their bile is taken as authoritative. He touted Twitter personality and
podcaster Darryl Cooper as “best and most honest popular historian in the United
States” so that Cooper’s claims that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain
of the Second World War,” would sound authoritative as Carlson nodded along.
Cooper claimed that the only reason for the
Holocaust—which wasn’t really, you know, the Holocaust —was that the
Nazis failed to plan adequately for all of their prisoners
of war. “They launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal
with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political
prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle,” Cooper said.
“They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into
camps, and millions of people ended up dead.”
Millions of people ended up dead.
He sounds a bit like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club:
“Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place.” Millions of
Jews “ended up dead” because gas chambers, firing squads, deliberate
starvation, and slave labor happen all the time.
Carlson once told me that Orwell’s “Politics
and the English Language” was one of his favorite essays. It’s one of mine
too, one of the very few I make myself re-read every couple of years. I guess
we read different essays. Because this passive-voiced, deceitful, yada-yadaing
of wholesale murder is one of the most grotesque things said in recent years.
And it is precisely the kind of thing Orwell was denouncing when he wrote, “In
our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the
indefensible.”
The Carlson I knew would issue that quasi-manic,
hyena-like guffaw for which he is famous at the suggestion that the Holocaust
was simply an accident of those famously poor planners, the Germans. The
Carlson of today theatrically nods along..
I’m not going to run through all of the examples of this
schtick. The fake awe at Russian
grocery stores; the earnest brow-furrowed fascination with artificial
intelligence’s demonic
roots in the Kabbalah; the claims of interdimensional
demons, one of whom scratched his arms in the middle of the night while he
was sleeping with his four dogs. The Carlson I knew might apply Occam’s razor
to the mystery of the scratches and blame one of his dogs. But no, the new
Carlson thinks the more likely answer is that a demon traversed the
border between its Stygian home dimension just to scratch him and depart.
Mephistopheles: “How’d your interdimensional trek work
out?”
Beelzebub: “Great. I left a minor scratch on his arm.
That’ll teach him not to criticize Israel!”
But let’s get back to the logic of populism.
The petri dish of poisonous populism.
I said earlier that populism doesn’t need social media to
spread idiocy. It doesn’t. But boy howdy does it make it easier and more
lucrative.
One of the fundamental problems with our present moment
is the confusion of sincerity and seriousness. On the left we can see this in
the cult of personality in Zohran Mamdani. His ideas are nonsense, but people
sincerely adore him and want his ideas to be true. His supporters may be
serious about their sincerity, but their sincerity doesn’t make his ideas any
more serious. I sincerely want eating pizza to make me thinner. The universe
doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
A more sinister example can be found in the platoons of
moral poltroons who, just yesterday, commemorated the two-year anniversary of
the October 7 murderous rape gangs by honoring the Hamas “martyrs” who died in
acts of “resistance.” Many of these people started bleating about Israeli
“genocide” in Gaza when Hamas was still murdering Israelis. And they haven’t
stopped since. Now, many of them oppose a plan to stop what they dub genocide
because it might come at the cost of Hamas ceasing its “resistance.” Whether
you agree with me that their position is evil is irrelevant. It is utterly
unserious. It’s very sincere. But it is geopolitically ridiculous.
And yet, because there are large numbers who believe it,
they are treated as a 2 plus 2 equals 5 constituency to be mollified or
appeased—because many politicians, journalists, “experts,” and voters confuse
sincerity with seriousness. If you sincerely believe that a cabal of Jews
controls the world, or maybe just the weather, you’re free to do so. But a
country run by serious people—including its actual citizens—should have the
moral, political, and civilizational confidence to utterly ignore you,
if not condemn you or try to talk you out of your stupidity. But just as Willie
Sutton apocryphally explained why he robbed banks—“that’s where the money is”—too many
politicians and “influencers” can’t resist taking these people seriously
because that’s where the passion is. And passion—“engagement,” clicks, sales,
ratings, votes—is the currency of this craptacularly populist moment.
On the right side of this populist moment, we see an
insatiable hunger for constituencies of idiocy.
Megyn Kelly, another person drowning in f–k you money, is
moving on Carlson’s and Owens’ audience like some foreign conglomerate eager
for new markets. She refuses to condemn Owens and her ilk’s antisemitism
because they have large audiences that sincerely believe a lot of nonsense and
lies. Kelly says that no one cares about—largely undenied—allegations that Tom Homan took a bag of cash for political favors because
“he’s a national
treasure.” Whether he’s a national treasure is, at minimum, debatable. What
shouldn’t be debatable is that allegations of corruption should be investigated
regardless of how popular someone is with a slice of the podcast market.
Every day, I am told that criticizing Trump honestly and
accurately is “insulting” to his fans because they sincerely love him and don’t
believe any inconvenient facts about him. Or they believe the facts, but they
just don’t care, because they hate Trump’s enemies more. Any weaponization of
government and law enforcement he indulges is fine, because “Democrats did it
first.” His avaricious hunger for power is routinely rationalized with spurious
nonsense: This is what we voted for! He was treated unfairly! He can’t help
himself! He thinks he’s right!
For argument’s sake, let’s say all of that is true. So
what? Democracy has always been vulnerable to populist passion. H.L. Mencken
famously said, “If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents,
he would promise them missionaries for dinner.” His was a criticism of this
tendency in democracy. It was a tendency the Founders worried about, which is
why they set up a system to keep the temptation at bay. Now we’re being told
this isn’t a bug we should be vigilant against, but a feature we should
celebrate.
Dismissing facts because they hurt your feelings and
justifying the corruption of our system of justice because “they did it first,”
or “everybody does it” is reified, politicized childishness. Defending toddlerism in the executive is institutionalized childishness. One of the
defining features of childhood is the inability to productively regulate your
feelings and passions. That’s why we call adults with the same problem
“childish.” And that’s what most populism is, the elevation and indulgence of
immature passion, the glorification of childishness. Children aren’t always
wrong to be angry or upset, but what marks them as children is their inability
to sufficiently control their emotions. When your child sincerely tells you 2
plus 2 equals 5, the serious parent tells them they are wrong.
When millions of childish people tell you 2 plus 2 equals
5—because the Jews want you to believe it’s 4—the serious person says
“you’re wrong,” even if it comes at the expense of tantrums on college campuses
or YouTube views of the Tucker Carlson network.
No comments:
Post a Comment