Since Tucker Carlson had his "parting of the ways" with Fox, he's shown what the future of media can be when not controlled by a company. He's free to say and do what he wants, and he's reveling in it. He's able to get big interviews like former President Donald Trump and cover important topics like the interview with Devon Archer here and here.
He's shown that new media can be a huge draw with such topics, getting at last count almost 260 million views on the Trump video. While that view count doesn't mean 260 million different people or that the people who engaged with the post watched the whole thing, what it does signal is what a hugely popular video it was and how successful such a medium can be.
It bodes well for new, free media.
One thing that a lot of media don't want to take on is the people in power. But Carlson certainly isn't shy about that. Perhaps that's part of what contributed to his "parting of the ways." He was in Hungary this week and spoke about how the Biden Administration was wrongly dealing with them. But perhaps his most important remarks were about the uni-party in our own country.
"America is the prettiest country in the world," he declared. Even the "crummy" parts, he added. That's the feeling of someone who loves his country and can't help but recognize its beauty everywhere, even in the bad parts.
However, the country has been "taken over by lunatics," he asserted, although "the core of the country has not changed."
The people who run the U.S. are no longer "even pretending" to offer a better life to those who live here, Tucker declared. He says he never hears anyone doing that anymore. That's a brilliant observation. What they are now doing is telling us how they think things should be and how we should just go along with it. Moving from government of the people to dictating to the people.
Instead, what they're offering makes "human flourishing" very difficult, Carlson said.
"The ruling party is the party of the childless, the unmarried, the people working for low wages for large corporations and living in tiny apartments in overcrowded cities that are rife with crime...Who votes for the people who run the United States right now? People who are again, working for big non-profits, banks, living in crowded conditions, very often alone, in big soulless cities, having their food delivered by immigrants, and spending their time glued to a screen."
Carlson compared that to prison, where people sit, isolated and cut off from nature for years. "That's the life of your average Democratic voter," he exclaimed.
"Who are the people who oppose this?" he asks. He judged them to be the "majority of the people in my country." He notes that they're poorer "on paper."
"But are their lives worse if you live in a place where you can see the sky," he asked. "Where you can make your own food and maybe even know where it comes from? If you can go outside and identify three species of trees or hear birds, or experience silence, the rarest commodity in the modern world."
He talked about hearing things other than NBC or Google, "higher voices" in that silence.
"Those are the people who are not with the program," Tucker proclaimed. "People who have a daily experience of others and who have a daily experience of nature."
"Those people are much more likely to acknowledge a power beyond themselves and their government," he said.
"When you're living crowded as you would on an industrial farm as a cow, or as a chicken in a pen, you are not liberated. You are enslaved. You cannot think clearly. Your reference points are gone. You can't see the stars. You cannot see God's creation. All around you you see drywall and screens...And your ability to think clearly goes away. And the next thing you know, you're still wearing a COVID mask three years later."
Now, he's speaking in generalities and I think that he's not saying if you live in a city you can't see the truth. Or that if you live outside the city, you have perfect vision. But I think his point is well taken that aspects of modern living and things put on us by the government are inhibiting our ability to see clearly and ferret out the truth, to see that which makes us fully human, to understand our true place in this world and our connection to that which goes beyond this world. I get this having moved from New Jersey to Texas. I see the difference in me when I put my feet more in the sand and the sea. But this is what we are being cut off from, as the government dictates to us more and more, not who we are, but who they want us to be. And that is a people they can control for their own power. That's why they no longer even feel the need to pretend.