He did. Remember the speech he gave to the FDNY prior to the election? He never liked Trump. That was never his brand of conservative.
Carson was pandering. He has been pandering all along, but also scoring the blows he otherwise would have had no opportunity to make if he didn't play the game. He pandered his way into what is arguably the most profitable and influential news anchor seat in American politics in the 2010's. Goodbye Bill O'Reilly. Goodbye Greta. Hello Tucker. Quite the coup for a man who previously had been best known for being one of the two great, historic victims of Jon Stewart haranguing CNN in service of a centrist backlash against hyper-partisanship that Stewart himself later abandoned just as radically as Cortez deviates from the classic liberalism of her own party (while
she nonetheless struggles with basic reading comprehension and math).
I believe it's similar to that interview posted elsewhere here on the front page of the WR with Tillerson. He said in the interview, "I mostly agree with the President's platform, but where we differed so greatly was in the tactics to achieve it." For Tucker, I believe the two great issues that Trump champions with which he agrees are the fight against abortion, and the fight to maintain American sovereignty against the unsustainable cornucopia of illegal Southwestern immigration that has arisen over the past 40 years. I believe he was hopefully resigned-- at the height of his optimism no more than curious-- Trump might turn out to be more fox than crazy, but I think he has seen enough now to have conclusively decided which it is. He has lost hope that Trump might be that precocious child capable of growing into the size of his seat.
In some ways Tucker competes with Shapiro to be the heir to Buckley. I'm not sure if you've ever seen
The Best of Enemies, but one of the ideas that has stayed with me since viewing that documentary was the comment that Buckley and Vidal understood something that many intellectuals of the time did not grasp, and that was the power of the television. Today, Rogan has rightly emphasized again and again on his podcast, correctly and to great enrichment of himself, that internet is the new TV. In this sense, I favor Shapiro to be Buckley's heir.
However, when Shapiro mocks Ocasio-Cortez, you get the sense he sees no serious danger in her, even an asset to be exploited, while Tucker quite soberly recognizes her potential power-- the symbol she represents. Back when Vidal and Buckley were debating, Vidal was leveling the same rhetoric at the right as we hear today, but it was the top 5% controlling 20% of the wealth, and the bottom 20% only controlling 5%. Americans would likely disappear a small country today just to have that spread. Tucker understands that unless Republicans
do something to address it beyond regurgitating axiomatic philosophy, youthful radicals like Cortez won't go anyway. Her kind will populate candidacies like the stars populate the sky. In this sense, I strongly favor Tucker.
Unfortunately, their papers are glorified rabble-rousing blogs, and so both fail to anchor their bid with a genuine bastion of authentic intellectualism tethered to the written word like
The National Review. In this sense, I favor neither.
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