Tucker Carlson, Shitposting, and Political Realism

The Bell Tolls for Television

The news moves so fast that yesterday’s bangers are today’s cringe. The same applies when your business tends to be news, political reactions, and hot takes. This means you can constantly have a tweet at the ready, a sign to tap, or of course be a sort of loveable yet insipid contrarian to remind people to “get with the program.” Twitter being the epicenter of this, means that statements can be made with sarcasm, inside jokes, or just taking the piss out on something can be used against you out of context.

More often than not it’s seriously just having a bad take or something that ages well because Twitter algorithmically promotes hot takes and instant reactions.

Nothing has caused more of this as of late than the recent firing of former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. For the last six years he has been a generational bridge between the average Fox News watcher and the more nuanced and online positions of the right, from anti-war voices to those raising the alarm bell about the state of America’s demographics. His firing of course had caused all sorts of quakes and shakes in the Conservaspace, and the Online Right in general.

The silence of course wasn’t for long in the midst of speculation as to why he was fired, whether it be for the woman who puts the Gross in Grossberg, or the various legal milieu that came from the Dominion Lawsuits and more. However Tucker Carlson quickly broke the silence on April 26, 2023 with a video just to give everyone an update since the abrupt dismissal from the most popular slot and program on Fox News.

I’d embed the tweets but Substack and Twitter’s pissing contest has made that all but impossible right now.

In less than two weeks and even more speculation, yesterday afternoon had Tucker Carlson announce that he plans to deliver his hourly news segment straight to Twitter, with the platform being heralded as a place for free and open discussion. I’m sure some of you aren’t going to agree with Mr. Calrson’s assessment, but it is the only platform so curated and self-segregating that you can find rabid anti-Jewish sentiments on one side of the twitter ecosystem, and you’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Black Israelites calling for the genocide of Europeans. To refer to Seymour Skinner, good times were had by all!

We’re so back? We’ll see.

In the midst of the “We’re So Back” posting, there has been a chain of accusations that Twitter will turn into the platform of “The Far Right” or the tried and true method of “disinformation” be spread all over the website. As much noise has been generated from just two tweets by Tucker Carlson in the last 14 days, let’s take a look at Twitter.

Bird App Numbers

Despite the number of changes, firings, freezes, and updates - Twitter has actually grown since Elon Musk took over. According to NBC back in November, shortly after the takeover, Twitter had seen growth.

And to hear it from the man himself, we have a more recent figure here:

To add a more anecdotal figure to this, the ability through Streamyard and other platforms to simulcast my YouTube shows to twitter while I’m live is a feature he should probably expand on, especially now that large accounts have monetized their brand on the bird app. So far, the doom and gloom over the app and space itself seems to follow the same kind of Online Right “it’s so over, we’re so back” kind of cycle. Do I think this means Elon is some kind of messianic figure for sane discussion in politics? Absolutely not. He’s not Classical Liberal Jesus or anything like that, and you shouldn’t be putting your trust in princes and the sons of men anyways. Were the mass firings and turning a meaningful profit with a subscription based service smart? Yes on political and practical grounds.

Whether or not Curtis Yarvin’s suggestions on making Twitter a platform for truth made it to Elon’s eyes and ears,

Twitter should be in the truth business

Mr. Musk’s “Community Notes” feature has been an excellent way to dispel propagandistic nonsense very quickly, at least when it comes to American politics. It’s been effective at the ways to contextualize information, in a way that doesn’t just go in one direction. While it might put Steve Sailer out of work as the best race reply guy on the website, its effectiveness will be put to the test as the next US Election Cycle rolls around. Then and only then will it be tested, as the trust in the app under Musk will be scrutinized as memories of the pandemic and 2020 Election had been a time of great information suppression.

Yet as Community Notes has been widely praised, Elon did respond to the Tucker news, and made it clear no formal business arrangements had been made in respects to a potential partnership.

This seems relatively sane, for now.

The Media Ecosystem

Broadcast Television still has the eyes and ears of one of the most important voting age demographics in the country, boomers. While Boomers are closer to than most of us when it comes to slipping from this mortal coil they are the ones with wealth, and money. The average age of a Fox News viewer is somewhere around 68 years, and similar 60s age demographic for MSNBC and CNN, although the key demos will vary by sex, race, and income. This doesn’t include the countless gyms, offices, and airports that play these things in the background.

Traditionally the media would set the agenda, look at the breaking news, the threads on twitter, what people were talking about, and how that could be coordinated to push a specific agenda or the reporting therein on that subject matter. Twitter has a built-in advantage when it comes to the traditional broadcast regime, is that if you are loud and bombastic enough, what the news talks about isn’t nearly as damning when it comes to your cult of personality. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are/were pretty good at this. Elon could tweet about shitcoins or go on some YouTube channel to react to memes, smoke weed on Joe Rogan and divert attention away from how things were going at Tesla or SpaceX, or how it could be used to manipulate his stock price as one of the world’s richest men.

Auron MacIntyre discusses the importance of Twitter in the modern media ecosystem in IM-1776, one year ago.

Twitter is not just another social media platform, and both Musk and his opponents are fully aware of this. The micro-blogging site may have a relatively small user base compared to its closest competitors, but what it lacks in volume it more than makes up for in influence. Twitter is the preferred platform for our elites. Journalists and media pundits, i.e. the people responsible for weaving The Narrative that every American is forced to ingest (whether they realize it or not) all operate within the bird app. The site serves as a networking tool and dopamine dispenser for the class charged with controlling what the average person sees, hears, and thinks. But that class has become increasingly terrible at their job, and the only way that Twitter has been able to defend its status is by banning anyone who becomes too effective at challenging the narrative or exposing how embarrassing those who craft it have become.

This dopamine hit cycle hasn’t gone away, but the vibe has certainly shifted. Censorship on the platform still exists, but not nearly in the degree it was under Parag, Dorsey, or rest of the Subcontinental Trust and Safety Team. It’s where propaganda, and people thinking that they’re smart and edgy by adopting regime talking points duke it out on twitter on a daily basis while the FBI and ATF get ratio’d.

Tucker Carlson speaking directly to twitter where a younger audience, primarily aged 25-35 exist can change the media ecosystem. However, there is a distinct loss of Carlson, the boomer whisperer in chief, has lost the ability to speak to Baby Boomers in the platform he was once King of, while bringing on everyone from Charles Haywood to Raw Egg Nationalist in his Tucker Carlson Originals. The media ratings for FOX hasn’t been all that great either, at least according to a recent report from Newsweek.

If Tucker is going to do this on Twitter, he’ll need to be aware of the change in viewership he gets, the likelihood of strengthened coordinated attacks on himself and staff (my mutuals!) and that Elon may indeed be worse than the Devil he already knew. But the ecosystem gives him a way to bypass Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, and the rest of the insipid media network, and put him in a way to compete with the younger pundits all vying for news as young people look to their digital devices for their news and information. Tucker’s firing was certainly a sign that mainstream, broadcast television anchors are more or less no more. He may have been the last. Who really cares what Don Lemon, or Rachel Maddow’s neverending Russia Hysteria had to say? Love him or hate him, it was Tucker Carlson. Are the bells tolling for the death of television media in the traditional sense? Perhaps so.

Attacks by Other Means

Tucker, by the nature of being on Twitter means he is subject to external pressures. Whether that’s Community Notes, or more likely pressure by outside fact-checking, government entities not necessarily on Mr. Carlson, but instead on Elon Musk. Musk has more dealings, contracts, and regulatory oversight that could be and will most likely be used by regime affiliates to put pressure on Musk and anyone he platforms, or what he uses as a platform to escape this planet. What kind of cui bono could we see if something were to happen to the largest public digital spaces and all of a sudden, EPA regulations for SpaceX were to ease off?

Of course there is the fandom hugbox death by echo-chamber that could occur, as we all tend to live in carefully curated pseudo-realities that is our Twitter “Following” section on the timeline. Would it just be easier to ignore him? Probably not, after all it only took Trump tweeting and being President for Ron Pearlman to lose his fucking mind with the “LIL DONNIE” tweets, I’d imagine Tucker Carlson being able to reply, make longer videos in response to people like old school YouTube, or just being a more active entity on the app means he’s probably going to be very busy with this new platform of his. However mass reporting, doxxing, and raiding are also likely possibilities that he would have to be aware of. His staff and producers, like Gregg Re and others who have their finger on the pulse of the Online Right Ecosystem, probably know a thing or two on how to avoid that.

This could come tumbling down, and a realistic expectation is that you may just see your preferred talking points being regurgitated on the platform by Tucker just watered down. Things of course are still going down the shitter quickly, whether that be at the US-Mexico Border, the Administration toying with the 14th Amendment about the Debt Crisis, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Tucker might just be the pleasant copium that we all want and deserve, to take us out of our respective misery as the right remains to a large degree, relatively toothless in the march of the Progressive Banner. Speaking Truth to Power tends to get you killed, but what happens when Truth is Community Notes, or in the hands of someone who isn’t as likely to play ball, or notice the obvious disparities in interracial crime?

Only time will tell.