In preparation for the Trump/Vance regime, this is to acquaint people with fascist political theory, and “Common Good Conservatism,” as it originated in Nazi Germany, which might explain Tucker Carlson’s affection for Hitler.
As always, highlight color code- Brown=Fascist ideas
I disagree with the writer of the article below about Howard Zinn, who is definitely not to be compared to the Nazi promoting Carlson, as this by Zinn might have been written by Chalmers Johnson: https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnpeopleswar.html
But it is on point as regards Tucker Carlson. As a continuing researcher of propaganda/Information/Cognitive War, I’ve thought a lot about people like Carlson, and his objectives. Short-term, it’s to get Trump elected, and Heritage into government with Project 2025, even as they pretend to be for Peace, with their plans for an even more massive military buildup than Trump’s first term. But his Oligarchical backers think “long-term,” and for that, and the New Right/National Conservatives it’s clear, they want to erase our memories and replace them with their fascist worldview. Or, as Hitler called it: Weltanschauung.
BLUF: "Another way to put it is to say that Carlson is attempting to construct a usable history for the far right and promote it to a mass public,in much the same way as what Zinn did for the far left when he first published his very popular book in 1980.
"I think this is exactly right—though it’s important that we not leave it at this, because doing so will keep us from appreciating just how diabolically shrewd Carlson is proving himself to be in his current propagandistic project."
I know this email list is very comfortable with, and advocates of, New Right/NatCon ideas, and even non-NatCons quote from Post-Liberals like Patrick Deneen so that when we will soon be governed by the National Conservative ideology of Trump/Vance, one of them should give a hat-tip to the Committee for the Republic for helping popularize post-Liberal ideology. But though libertarians and small-c conservatives are the targets of the New Right/NatCons, not a peep of resistance to such fascist like ideas have been heard here, besides my own. Nor to those promoting Traditional Conservative Willmoore Kendall’s founding fascist like ideology, as the precursor to the New Right/NatCons/post-Liberalism. So much for, “a Republic, if you can keep it.”
The link below is not the greatest overview of National Conservatism, and is not harsh enough in its criticism, but it lays out the critical points of “who” they are, and of their so-called “Common Good Conservatism,” which serves as an introduction to the attached file below on "Reinhard Höhn’s Nazi State Theory.”The author of this piece would have done better for his examples of Authoritarian Catholics to write on Buckley and Kendall, rather than Fr. Coughlin, who is long forgotten and never left a permanent imprint upon society, unlike Buckley and Kendall. But what can you expect from the Conservative/Libertarian Acton Institute?
“. . . but one should recall that post-liberals are not attached to ideas of natural rights or human dignity. Rather, they subjugate concerns for rights and dignity to the common good as they understand it, which is in a more collectivist sense of what a centralized government, duly informed by Catholic teaching, ordains for the people. Post-liberals stress the obligation for subjects to obey political authorities and leave ruling to elites. If the government deems a religious or ethnic minority, especially a Muslim one like the Chinese Uyghurs, a threat to the regime, then it has the sovereign authority to suppress it. After all, post-liberals strongly emphasize the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction, which they argue is the basis for all politics,
Title: The Anti-Liberal Right Builds a Usable Past
From attachment above:
"Community of Neighbours vs Society of Merchants: The Genesis of Reinhard Höhn’s Nazi State Theory"
BLUF:
"Therefore, an inquiry into the roots of Höhn’s theories helps us to understand the dynamics that shaped the Weltanschauung of German fascism and its focus on an antiindividualistic, i.e., communitarian, idea of society. Crossing from sociology of law to constitutional theory, he fabricated an important synthesis of various models of anti-liberal modernity deriving from different political and cultural milieus.
. . .
"Carl Schmitt’s constitutional doctrine (Verfassungslehre) also played a major role in his formation.
. . .
“Once the Nazis seized power, Höhn generally modified his views of the ‘people’s community’ to convey them from the wider discourse of ‘conservative revolution’ into the ever-narrowing margins of the new state ideology.”
Tucker Carlson, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump, Republican vice presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) appear on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Like many other pundits, I’ve spent a number of days now thinking about just what the hell Tucker Carlson thinks he’s doing.
In case you snoozed through the past week, the former Fox News political talk-show host who now peddles his wares on Twitter/X last week offered up a two-hour-and-eighteen-minute interview with a self-trained historian named Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson described as maybe “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” As of Sunday evening, their conversation had been viewed nearly 34 million times—roughly ten times the nightly viewership of Carlson’s old show on Fox—and Cooper’s own “Martyr Made” podcast had risen to become the most popular podcast in the United States.
Over the course of the conversation, Cooper blamed World War II on Winston Churchill and described the Holocaust as the unintentional byproduct of the German military finding itself overwhelmed with prisoners of war as it pushed eastward in its invasion of the Soviet Union. Lacking the food and other resources required to sustain these prisoners, the Nazis had no choice but to engage in mercy killings on a vast scale. That’s how so many Jews ended up dying during the war that Churchill decisively brought about—not because the Nazi ideology of eliminationist anti-Semitism was wedded to ruthless state power by Adolf Hitler and the senior leadership of his fascist government.
Such statements made during the interview, as well as similarly “revisionist” claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Jonestown cult, and other topics, have led to widespread denunciation of Carlson. I’ve appreciated a number of these criticisms, especially those of Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, John Podhoretz on the Commentary podcast (which includes an apology to America for hiring Carlson 29 years ago at The Weekly Standard), and Jonah Goldberg (no relation to Michelle) in his column for The Dispatch.
I was especially pleased that both Podhoretz and the latter Goldberg referred to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in trying to make sense of Carlson’s motives—their point being that Carlson, like Zinn from the left, seems to be eager to promulgate a highly tendentious account of history in order to advance a political aim. Another way to put it is to say that Carlson is attempting to construct a usable history for the far right and promote it to a mass public, in much the same way as what Zinn did for the far left when he first published his very popular book in 1980.
I think this is exactly right—though it’s important that we not leave it at this, because doing so will keep us from appreciating just how diabolically shrewd Carlson is proving himself to be in his current propagandistic project.
