The Kingdom of the Non-Sequitur

and the grand misconception

Americans have lost faith in a broad range of institutions: academia, government at every level and in every branch, media of all kinds, and crony corporations. I just linked to poll results to support that claim, but I suspect you don’t need to be convinced, and the sense of declining trust shows up in your daily discussions with friends and family. The institutional cartel, embodied in the form of a ruling class or new elite who are defined by their uniformity of thought and ritual expression, arrive at the discussion with a top-down model of culture: Trust the experts! “Dr. Fauci says to get vaccinated.”

So they see the loss of trust, and they instinctively look for the driver who’s making the bus go down the low-trust road — the high-status bad actor who’s inculcating the loss of faith in the helpless minds of the ignorant poors. In the current model, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson tricked people into losing faith in institutions because they spread conspiracy theories and disinformation. So the problem is solved: Hit the off switch on Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson (and fascist billionaire Elon Musk’s mind control platform), and faith in institutions is necessarily reborn. If Donald Trump can’t be president again, people will trust the government again.

This confidence that the loss of faith is caused by top-down manipulation is so stupid it’s making me squirm in my seat as I think about it: Your true self actually likes Gavin Newsom, Congress, woke universities, homeless encampments, and drag queen story hour for children, but Fox News TRICKED YOUR BRAIN, peasant. You can’t possibly be losing faith in institutions yourself, on your own motive force. Have a Bud Light and an mRNA injection, and we’ll talk in the morning when you feel better.

And so the need to purge the folk devils, the manipulative purveyors of discontent, manifests itself over and over again in a ritual behavior as old as humanity itself, the performance of “the crops are failing because this woman is a witch.” Burn the witch, and we restore the corn and the hogs before winter arrives.

If [Person A] is a folk devil and a scapegoat, then everything [Person A] does is dark and cruel. OH MY GOD LOOK AT HIM PETTING THAT KITTEN NOW DO YOU SEE HOW DANGEROUS HE IS!?!?!? Cultural performers show up on the page with a kind of tacit assignment, an agreement they’ve made at the level of choosing an identity and seeking a social status. Folk devils are devils, because people who don’t hate folk devils are of a low-status outgroup. Yes, all of life is just like high school.

This brings us to David French. Expressed mathematically, David French is (Tom Nichols x Max Boot)³, I think, but I’m prepared to defer to people who are better at math. French has a schtick, and it consists entirely of endlessly discovering the same two things in print:

1. True conservatives favor the policy preferences of the Democratic Party, and

2. True Christians favor the tastes and culture of the prevailing secular elite.

That’s it. I have just saved you from ever needing to read a David French column. But here’s his latest, a piece in the New York Times — that critical outpost of true Christianity — warning that Tucker Carlson isn’t a true Christian, because he’s “cruel” and an instrument of “dangerous national polarization.”

Here’s the big finish, an analysis of Carlson’s influence in American political culture:

But that influence was dark and malign. For the sake of contestable political issues, he abandoned necessary moral virtues, and he taught his followers to do the same. His daily example demonstrated that honesty and grace — indispensable qualities in every sphere of life — have no place in the politics of the new religious right, and the new religious right thus repeats ancient sins. Christian political engagement must include Christian moral virtue, or it will tear this nation apart.

Take that description of a dark, graceless, malevolent figure who abandoned honesty and moral values, and watch Tucker Carlson talk. Make your own assessment. Here’s a college student interviewing Carlson last year, and asking him for life advice, which leads Carlson to talk about the importance of starting a family, being a faithful husband and a committed parent, and living in nature:

Here’s a more recent discussion with Adam Carolla — a long one, but at least listen to the first fifteen minutes at some point this week, maybe while you do other stuff:

Is this a dark, malevolent, amoral figure? You decide. But don’t take description from other people: Listen to him speak. I hear a person who’s talking about living well in a broken culture by placing your life on the foundation of faith, family, and healthy behavior; David French pretends to hear a monster who’s telling people to embrace cruelty. I’ll hear arguments against, but what I think you’ll discover is that the person Tucker Carlson won’t bear the weight that’s been assigned to Folk Devil Tucker Carlson by an increasingly clumsy narrative-making machine that needs him to play the role of a cultural devil.

The interesting question is why that need exists.

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