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I recently attended The Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary Gala, a sprawling and swanky affair featuring many fine presentations, a surprise Dierks Bentley mini-concert for the country music enthusiasts (yours truly among them) and an extravagant post-dinner fireworks show over the Potomac River. But the highlight of the evening, bar none, was former Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s electric keynote address and his (all-too-brief) colloquy on stage afterward with Heritage’s exceptional new president, Kevin Roberts.
Carlson’s speech was both wildly entertaining and poignant, at times slapstick funny and at other times humorously self-deprecating about his Episcopalian faith. But as Carlson began to reach his peroration, the key substantive takeaway he wished to impart unto his audience became clear. The relevant political and cultural battle lines in the year 2023 are not those befitting a civil and polite discussion where both sides are reasonable, both sides pursue their own version of the common good and the best think tank white paper wins out in the end, Carlson cautioned. No, our current civilizational struggle is not reflective of a refined policy debate between amicable partisans; rather, it is one that implicates fundamentally distinct theological and anthropological visions of mankind — of man’s very biology and his relation with his fellow man, the state and God Himself.
I immediately hearkened back to an interview Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams did with The Atlantic in October 2021, where Williams had this provocative (but accurate) line about America’s contemporary fault lines: “Even during the Civil War — I think we’re more divided now than we were then. As Lincoln said, we all prayed to the same God. We all believed in the same Constitution. We just differed over the question of slavery.” This is the precise sentiment that Carlson was getting at in his keynote speech at the Heritage gala last Friday.
We in the audience did not know it yet, at the time of Carlson’s speech — nor did Carlson, for that matter — but the broadcasting star had already given his last searing monologue for Fox News. In a stunning development, Fox News broke the news to their highest-rated host on Monday morning that he was fired. Hopefully, Carlson will retain something approximating his exceptional level of cultural and political influence in whatever role he next serves, because his witness to truth and civilizational sanity have never been more necessary.
This is perhaps most clearly true when it comes to gender ideology and transgenderism, which is the issue most directly implicated by Carlson’s framing of America’s fundamental divide as a struggle between differing theological and anthropological conceptions of man. Is sexual dimorphism an obvious empirical reality, rooted in Genesis 1:27, and mandating legal codification for any regime that claims a basis in truth and justice? Or is gender instead “fluid,” wherein man can replace God and change his gender on a lark, and wherein it is contemptible bigotry to deny anyone’s subjective sense of biological or sexual reality? Tucker Carlson certainly knew his answer: He opened a memorable 2021 interview of former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson by asking the then-sitting governor, who had shamefully vetoed a bill to protect vulnerable children from the predatory scalpels of the woke-besotted medical establishment, why he had “come out publicly as ‘pro-choice’ on the question of chemical castration of children.” Oof.
That is not a debate where the “best white paper wins.” It is a zero-sum contestation of clashing visions of the human person, rooted in diametrically opposed substantive underpinnings. And, more to the point, the forces of godlessness, paganism and civilizational arson certainly already treat the debate over gender ideology as a vicious winner-take-all battle.
The recent mini-insurrection in Nashville, which followed the tragic shooting of a Christian school and the temporary expulsions of two insurrection-complicit state lawmakers, can best be understood as one elaborate attempt to distract the public from the real issue: That a transgender lunatic shot up a Christian school, and that law enforcement has thus far been unwilling to defy the transgender lobby’s not-so-thinly-veiled blackmail, opting instead to deep-six the deceased shooter’s presumptively anti-Christian manifesto.
More recently, a similar situation unfolded in Montana, where Republicans who control the state House banned a transgender lawmaker from attending or speaking during floor sessions following the lawmaker’s comment, during the debate over an anti-chemical castration bill similar to the one Hutchinson vetoed in Arkansas, that the lawmaker hoped colleagues would see “blood on (their) hands” when they bowed their heads in prayer. Numerous protesters were arrested and forcibly removed from the legislature earlier this week, as they agitated in favor of the uncouth transgender lawmaker.
Large swaths of the modern Left have made the fight for gender ideology and transgenderism their foremost hill to die on precisely because they are so infatuated with their own vogue anthropology and “theology” that they view the other side — the side of sanity — as wholly undeserving of the civility and respect that a normal exchange over public policy might entail. I know this all too well, myself: My writing that invariably elicits the most protests when I speak on university campuses is a short piece I wrote a few years ago praising U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan’s admirable use of biologically correct pronouns in a judicial opinion. I’d write the same thing again today.
But those protesters, whether in Nashville, Helena, Stanford Law School or another academic corridor, are not open to rational debate. They are not willing to be reasoned with. Rather, they know their conclusions, because they have fully imbibed a highly fashionable — if false — anthropological and “theological” conception of man. Those of us on the side of civilizational sanity need all the help we can get in pushing back against the onslaught.
Tucker Carlson, please come back soon.
When I was growing up in the UK the division was class based, upper class versus working class. Thatcher effectively ended that because she enabled the working class to become better educated and buy their council houses.
There was also division between coloured people and white people but we fixed those ourselves by living together.
Today there are dozens of new divisions as the academics and political scientists are effectively the government, politicians who have never done a days work in their lives. They now control the narrative, they have the power and they are the least deserving of the power.
The mad scientists are running the world, time has come to stop this.
Contracts are meant to be broken; that’s why there are lawyers but they usually aren’t in any hurry.
Forza, Tucker!
A contractual agreement for employment goes both ways. He signed a contract to work as a journalist and reporter not to remain on the sidelines and keep his mouth shut.
Does his contract stipulate “I Tucker Carlson agree to remain under employment of Fox by not engaging in reporting or journalism and keeping my pen and mouth shut until 2025”?
As far as I know you cannot hire a plumber and then stop him from being a plumber until his contract runs out unless he signed a contract that explicitly states that. I don’t even think such an absurd kind of employment contract is legally allowed. “We will employ you not to work” does not sound like something objective law can uphold.
What, no Rand spam?
Hey, it’s very simple. God, through the law he handed down to Moses, made it VERY CLEAR that sexual relations were to be ONLY between a married man and woman. When a civilization departs from God’s Holy Law, it goes into a moral free fall. Why, the homosexual civil rights movement in the 70s was inspired by the heterosexual sexual revolution. What a DISASTER that has been. God knows what is best for us. When we depart from His holy word, we sin and SUFFER CONSEQUENCES.
But surely he could be a guest speaker in many contexts. His speech at Hillsdale would be an example.
The conflict today seems a bit like the opposition of magicl thinking and scientific reason, as occurred in the era of Galileo. The far left makes magical claims such as that people can choose their sex, aka gender, scientific methods are just a form of racist ideology, life only becomes human if the mother claims it to be, and a wide range of oppositions between scientific reason and magical ideologies. The problem is that the magical vision is linked by the left with moral concepts, namely right and wrong. good and evil. So, the notion of working out the truth by scientific reasoning is ruled out by the hegemony of the magical.
Tucker’s speech was brilliant and everyone should go and read it. It was essentially theological as he talked about the leftist abortion ideology and the transgender insanity that encourages children to chemically castrate and permanently physically mutilate their own bodies. Not to mention the idea that children (and the state) should have power over the parents. Basically what he said is that none of this is in the realm of political debate as it is completely immoral and shouldn’t even be debatable. It’s now more like the historical and religious battle between good and evil and has become an existential battle for our Christian heritage and, in fact, it is now about the very survival of our western civilization.
In order to know who controls you, take note of those you are not allowed to criticize….Voltaire
Regardless of the issues with Fox, Tucker is an interesting, humorous truthful news source. He is not going away and the young as well as the old watch him.
i watched Carlson from the day his show aired on Fox News. When i couldn’t watch it, I taped it. I touted Carlson on Facebook. I stopped watching the day he said “nobody cares if Russia invades Ukraine” and had as his guest Douglas Macgregor who moronically claimed Russia had legitimate reasons to fear Ukraine, Yes, the same Douglas Macgregor who predicted the war would be over in 3 weeks. He is still lying about Ukraine.
Carlson is 100% wrong on this issue and it is distressing to David Horowitz supporting Carlson. Horowitz has chosen principal over principle.
Putin is attempting to reconstitute the Soviet Union. Support for the imperialism of totalitarian Russia is beyond the pale. Ukraine has every right to align with Europe. and be free of Russian control and influence. Russia has never been democratic and has always been imperialist. Watch the podcasts of Russian expert Professor Stephen Kotkin and learn why Carlson, and now David Horowitz, are 100% wrong.
David Horowitz wrongly claims that Fox News has abandoned conservatives. Fox News is still right on all of the issues and has plenty of patriots who served. David Horowitz has abandoned what he has stood for for the last 20 years. I look forward to Carlson being abandoned as Ukraine liberates Crimea, Carlson is a disgrace.