Tucker Carlson and company are displeased with Trump, who is not listening to them
I’ve read for quite a while that Tucker Carlson and his anti-Israel wing have a lot of influence on Trump.
I never thought that was the case. It has always seemed to me that Trump’s approval of Israel, although not kneejerk and automatic, is nevertheless solid.
So this seems correct to me – Carlson didn’t “lose” Trump; he never had him:
The other big loser in this struggle is a “woke right” faction of the conservative movement in the United States that opposes Israel and has been fervently opposed to any action to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons. More to the point, this rag-tag group of talk-show hosts, right-wing influencers and social-media gurus who can’t seem to mention Israel without betraying their antisemitic tendencies has lost President Donald Trump.
Or to be more precise, they never really had him. …
The most prominent of these voices on the right is former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose shows and posts on the X platform reach many millions of people. As I’ve noted previously, Carlson is adamant about his distaste for Israel and his willingness to shill for the Iranian regime as well as its ally Qatar. …
As polls have consistently shown, Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly support Israel, even as Democrats and the political left have abandoned it. Yet Carlson and his woke right acolytes, imitators and supporters are certain that Trump will lose his MAGA supporters if he continues to support Israel and doesn’t pursue a policy of appeasing Iran. However, as Trump said in an interview in The Atlantic, he’s the one who decides how to define “America First,” not Carlson and the trolls he platforms or plays to via the Internet.
What’s up with Carlson? Perhaps he’s getting money from those sources, which would be the simplest explanation. But I don’t think that’s it. I think his anti-Israel stance is both a niche position that gets him a following and a lot of clicks from a certain segment of the right and distinguishes him as the star of that group, and a natural continuation of positions he’s always held.
I’ve never been a big TV news watcher, but there was a time many years ago when I did watch it with at least some regularity. I haven’t watched it for years, but I stopped watching Carlson long before I stopped the rest of it. The reason was that he was terrible on foreign policy questions. Here’s what I wrote about Carlson in September of 2024, and it represents what I’d been thinking for many years:
… I got to the point long ago of not being able to stomach Carlson or his guests when they talk about anything foreign-policy related. I long ago decided he was basically Pat Buchanan on steroids, and although I suppose now and then Carlson gets something right (particularly if he’s talking about domestic issues), on foreign affairs he’s been spending a great deal of time giving a platform to people who are wrong. And it’s a big platform because he has a huge following.
Carlson basically represents the views one can often see at The American Conservative, which is a publication founded by Buchanan himself in 2002. Just as an example of what I mean, today the American Conservative website highlighted this article entitled “Zionism Is Not an American Principle: It is time to put some daylight between American policy and Israeli actions.” Here’s an excerpt, to give you an idea of some of the flavor:
In the short term, President Donald Trump must resist entrapment in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice, continue to make (likely futile) attempts at negotiations, and defend the safety of U.S. soldiers caught in the middle—preferably by funneling them out of the region entirely. In the bigger picture, the United States must begin the process of separating fervent Zionism from its policymaking institutions.
War of choice. The author elucidates what he means:
Israel’s behavior is anathema to any kind of morality or human decency. From its numerous wars of aggression and territorial expansion, to its racialist laws, to the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from their ancestral homes and their continued debasement under a brutal military occupation (which has lasted longer than the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe), to its war of annihilation on Gaza, including the purposeful targeting of civilians and children—this is not a government that can be reasoned with.
There it is: the complete leftist line merged with the acceptance of Hamas propaganda. “Conservative”? Hardly. The principles involved are these: (1) anything that anyone we call “neocon” is in favor of, we oppose (2) Jews are neocons; neocons are Jews (3) therefore Israel is the worst of all.
You can see American Conservative’s coverage of Tucker Carlson here; it seems to be a love fest.
Trump is a good deal less enamored:
“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” Trump told Scherer. “For those people who say they want peace — you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon—that’s not peace.”
Trump also referred to Carlson on Truth Social as “kooky.” I’d say that’s being kind – as well as retro.
Carlson has always adapted his persona. Remember the bowties? The talking heads are performers, always have been. Sometimes they’re “really” like their public persona, and sometimes not.
Tucker is right to be skeptical, because these adventures rarely end well, but then he indulges in the silly notion about settlers, as if that wasn’t how our country came to be, admittedly mexico and spain were less surly neighbors,
once upon a time he was for the iraq expedition, but then he quickly soured on it, considering those that rose up out of that pigs breakfast and those who were blackballed in one way or another, take milley and austin for instance,
@miguel:admittedly mexico and spain were less surly neighbors
LOL, I’d say we were the “bad neighbors” in this neighborhood.
I agree that “regime change” in Iran doesn’t seem likely at all, much less to deliver anything better for the people of Iran than exists now, and I don’t think it’s an appropriate or realistic goal. It’s not like Iraq and Afghanistan were all that long ago. As for Germany and Japan, those countries were converted to bone-flecked ash before the regime was successfully changed, and that’s really not something to initiate, even though Iran has been far from innocent.
But whatever Israel does or doesn’t do with Iran, I personally only care if Americans are more secure or less secure because of it. Whether any good is done for the people of Israel or Iran by it is a very distant consideration to me.
Yes, Tucker was once a neocon, he does regret it, but now is going too far in the other direction. It’s kind of similar to being a dry drunk. You don’t drink anymore but that’s the only part of your personality that’s changed. When the mullahs chant “death to America, death to Israel” you have to take them at their word.
No if Santa Ana had been less stupid, they would still retain part of the SouthWest and West Coast, more Yosemite Sam, then anything else,
there are other elements we haven’t gamed out, like the newcomers from countries of concern, that crossed our borders in the last four years,
by the way Senor Grossi, says you missed a spot, was he ever a neocon, even when he worked for the Standard, I don’t think so, we can second guess the hope over experience that the Medicis engaged in both expeditions, even smart fellows like Rumsfeld made mistakes, were the likes of Colin Powell and Armitage more wise, one can’t say, was debaathification poorly managed probably we could concur on that point, did the likes of Suleimani take advantage of those opportunities, one can probably agree on that point,
Powerlineblog.com has traced Carson’s descent pretty well:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/category/tucker-carlson
Especially:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/05/tucker-calls-on-the-israeli-government.php
Mike Doran started a thread on X yesterday called “the Dumbest Take” featuring among others Carlson and some of his guests, as well as dummy leftists. It’s simultaneously amusing and informative. Give it a look, or even chime in with suggestions if you’re so moved: https://x.com/Doranimated/status/1934313021959966838
Wrong on Ukraine, wrong on Russia, wrong on Israel, is he wrong on China too?
I’ve no more time for Tucker and his fellow travellers.
some new angles,
https://www.jns.org/hackers-hit-irans-bank-sepah-disrupt-services-nationwide/
of course we cannot discount we are as susceptible even more so,
I’m cautiously optimistic, but the last 20 plus years should have told us hope is not a strategy, many have died many were broken inside, in these games where only a few players, seem to have scored the jackpot, the ones who give us advice about the next engagement,
thucydides and kagan, were often very wise about these things,
“I got to the point long ago of not being able to stomach Carlson or his guests when they talk about anything foreign-policy related. I long ago decided he was basically Pat Buchanan on steroids, and although I suppose now and then Carlson gets something right (particularly if he’s talking about domestic issues)” — Neo in 2024
Pat Buchanan was often right on foreign policy as well…for another age.
It’s seemed to me for a long time that the ‘isolationist’ (admittedly an unfair term, as Buchanan himself accurately pointed out)/non-interventionist Right has been in denial about the implications of technological change. They long for a world of Western peer powers, with the USA able to be safely neutral behind the Atlantic and Pacific. They long, in effect, for the world from the 1870s to the 1940s. That oversimplifies, of course, but emotionally I think they crave it. But it’s gone and never coming back.
The trouble, of course, is that technology has shrunk the world down and wiped out that network of peer powers. Washington D.C. and Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran, etc. are closer together in terms of travel time and communication today than D.C. and Richmond were during the Civil War. Mass communications and high-speed travel mean that today’s world is like several implacably hostile families forced to share one big house where formerly they shared a county.
Tucker Carlson has been getting nuttier for a long time. At one point I remember him saying that modern nuclear weapons are so powerful that a single bomb dropped in NYC could destroy Miami. Yeah, no.
As a result of their ache for that former world, when you try to tease out their actual policies, the result is that they always end up calling for America to retreat, to back away, to pull back to our shores. They don’t conceive of it as a retreat, in their own minds it’s just ‘minding our own business’, but the _de facto_ result is global retreat, and a power vacuum that others will fill.
Their craving for that world has caused them to starting sounding like the Left sounded during the Cold War, assuming that America is instigating every conflict and that if we just pull back things will be peaceful. I’ve recently seen supposed MAGA conservatives basically echo McGovern’s infamous speech from the 1972 Dem convention about turning inward. I’m not sure he even realized it.
I’m more than slightly tired of hearing them whine about neocons, too. I supported the removal of Hussein, and given what was known at that time, I was _right_ to do so.
I _never_ believed in the ‘welcomed with open arms’ idea, or that we could easily Westernize Iraq, and I was scared to death that the people in charge would let the effort to build some kind of functional state so we could safely leave turn into something like that (which of course they did).
Many of the people whining about neocons supported the removal of Hussein and _did_ think they could Westernize Iraq, and when that turned out to be unworkable, decided the neocons must have lied and the whole thing was a scam.
Spare me.
I’m also hearing some MAGA types who should know better say that America must stop policing the world. That’s that same denial, that same ache for the pre-WWII world. If America gives up being world policeman, then one of two things are going to happen:
1. America becomes one of the world’s _policed_, as some other power or coalition of powers emerges to fill the vacuum, or.
2. America must be armed to the teeth against being policed by that same.
There is no 3rd option.
How bad option 1 would be would depend on which power or powers emerged as the new dominant power. But anyone who thinks there is any power better for America to fill that role than America is living in a fantasy world. Ditto anyone who thinks the vacuum would remain unfilled in a world where missiles can reach anywhere in less than an hour.
But the world the paleocons crave is gone. Forever.
Don’t think he did himself any favors with that goofy interview featuring “America’s leading historian” (or something along those lines)—that’s right, the dude who blamed Churchill for WWII(!)…
Oh, I forgot [smacks forehead]—TC, a true child of the Enlightenment and Free Inquiry(TM), was “only asking questions”…
Right.
File under: So…is TC a kook? (Or just a twisted, malevolent SOB??)… Jus’ askin’….
Niketas Choniates on June 17, 2025 at 12:25 pm said:
LOL, I’d say we were the “bad neighbors” in this neighborhood.
The Anglos who settled Texas (and later California) were settling an open land. Santa Annas’ war on them was ethnic cleansing.
Part of what made the Mexican American War doable was public sentiment that developed because of bad behavior on the part of the Mexicans. Not just their war against settlers but the continued border raids after they lost that war.
I appreciate that Carlson has conversations with folks from a wide range of political positions. Sometimes I do wish at times he would engage in some pushback, but I don’t think Tucker is an expert in some of these areas.
One example was Brett Weinstein on the Darien Gap last year. What was going on there was shocking and deserved more attention. Weinstein was well versed on the area as he had done research there as a biologist.
I think Iraq and Afghanistan has changed the appetite for engaging in military intervention. We do need to consider the consequences of any actions– which was obviously lacking in those two adventures.
It’s hard to be consistent when considering war. I don’t know, but I’d like to draw Tucker out on when he would consider the use of the military. I suspect it’s based on direct attacks. In the case of Iran, Trump’s line was set at Iran directly attacking our personnel.
I’m very skeptical about this notion of regime change, even though it seems to be the easy way to end Iran’s nuclear program. The military balance inside Iran is too skewed to the Islamists without directly picking an opposing side and arming them. This has the potential of spilling over into a regional and potentially global war.
Iran has claimed to have inserted terror cells in the US. A cornered animal lashes out in unpredictable fury.
I think the term “woke right” is stupid. Certainly there is a group on the right that are isolationist and anti-Israel, but I think that’s a poor term for them.
“by the way Senor Grossi, says you missed a spot, was he ever a neocon, even when he worked for the Standard, I don’t think so, we can second guess the hope over experience that the Medicis engaged in both expeditions, even smart fellows like Rumsfeld made mistakes, were the likes of Colin Powell and Armitage more wise, one can’t say, was debaathification poorly managed probably we could concur on that point, did the likes of Suleimani take advantage of those opportunities, one can probably agree on that point,” — miguel cervantes
America, and the West in general, is facing a problem in that our elite class has a hard time believing, or even imagining, anything other than their own worldview and attitude. That was why so many of them thought that all we had to do was expose Iraqis (and Russians, and South Sudanese, and Chinese, and Afghans, and so on) to Western material goods and personal individual freedom and the current rulers would immediately lose support.
Above all else, that worldview has trouble imagining that anyone _believes_ in their religion.
The modern elite Western hyper-individualism and hyper-secularism is faltering at home. It’s not exportable. But when they come face to face with that, the reflex of the elite West is to retreat, or deny.
Could we have built a functioning state in Iraq that would have let us mostly pull out? Almost certainly. We’ve (or rather earlier generations of Americans) have done that sort of thing more than once in the past. The British did it before that.
But any such state would still have to have been at least compatible with Islam, and even if it was an improvement on Hussein it would still look sexist and theocratic to Westerners.
But this is problem we’ve had since the end of the Cold War. Whenever a new government rises, the ‘help’ the West sends tends to depend on whether the elite Left or the elite Right in in charge at the time. The former tries to get them to adopt practices that shred family life and conflict with core religious imperatives, the later tends to try to implement Randianism, or at least 19th century free market capitalism. (That happened in South Sudan and in Russia after Cold War.)
The former generates abject hatred and loathing, the latter tends to produce economic oligarchs and mass corruption, since both are out of their place and restraints.
again, we can never tell how these things turn up, who would have thought the Gulf War would in a round about way, end up in 3,000 dead in Lower Manhattan, by a player who had not been counted in the picture, supposedly from someone who was a beneficiary of that intervention,
the cost of the next interventions were nearly as high, in Mesopotamian branch, of course the British incursion from 1917-1925 should have given us pause, as would the three Afghan wars,
because of the nuclear umbrella that Pakistan extended, we were sort of piecemeal in our interventions in the NorthWest frontier, and as one of the Haqquani clan said, you have the watches but we have all the time,
history tells us, what we shouldn’t do, but the magic eightball is more unclear on what we should do and the chattering classes are little help on that score,
@Don:The Anglos who settled Texas (and later California) were settling an open land. Santa Annas’ war on them was ethnic cleansing.
LOL! Because every country should tolerate people crossing its borders without permission to settle land that isn’t being used, right! And Guerrero abolishing slavery in Texas in 1829, also an evil ethnic cleansing plot!
Not just their war against settlers but the continued border raids after they lost that war.
Way to ignore the 75 years of filibustering expeditions launched by Americans into Mexico both before and after the Mexican war…. not to mention Cuba and South America.
Don, you are saying the Anglos in Texas were *settlers*?!?!
That makes them almost as bad as Israeli jooos!
“…The British did it before that.…”
Well, yes and no.
One might make the case for India (though not so much for Pakistan).
WRT Iraq…how long did THAT last?
eight years even Winston had to cash out, Bagot Glubb was left to pick up the broken Crockery, why he caught a touch of spengler, after leaving the Arab legion,
there were so many interventions in so many corners of that part of the Subcontinent, they needed place holders, Buner Malakand Chitral, et al,where Enoch Powell picked up his cynicism along with his Urdu,
yes Buchanan, the other one, had clever schemes about acquiring Cuba and Santo Domingo, thats why he missed a little sneak preview called the Civil War, going back further a certain vice president William Rufus King had other clever notions,
Well yes, certainly.
Just a quibble, though:
“…after
leavinggetting kicked out of the Arab legion…”I appreciate that Carlson has conversations with folks from a wide range of political positions. Sometimes I do wish at times he would engage in some pushback, but I don’t think Tucker is an expert in some of these areas.
==
He’s a presenter and opinion journalist. He’s not an expert in any area other than putting on a talk show. He should have better judgment about who he books as a guest. (See what’s happened to The Unz Review). Daryl Cooper is Joe Blow off the sidewalks of Stockton, California, not someone you should interview as if he had published historical works with proper citations to primary sources.
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938. At some point in the future it’s not going to be realistic to expect to prevent any country that wants to from developing what is essentially 1940s technology. I don’t know what that world looks like.
The logic of nuclear deterrence is that you know who to nuke after the first one goes off. If people start putting them in shipping containers or commercial aircraft that’s going to be a lot harder thing to manage.
This year it seems Israel can mostly shut down Iran’s nuclear program. For how many more years is that going to be true, and for how many countries? I wonder who’s thinking about that, and what they are coming up with.
But much the same is true for chemical and biological weapons. Assad used them in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Iran. And certainly they can be loaded into shipping containers and commercial aircraft. Either someone is managing the threat somehow in a way that’s not very public, or nobody’s trying very hard to carry out such a threat.
well tomato, tomatoe, Cooper is an odd character, as he’s looked too deeply into the bloodlands and assorted provinces, what Stalin wrought all through out Eastern Europe,
Colonel Kemp is a wise man, but hes been in Ireland in Bosnia and Iraq, which should temper his optimism, of the three only one really turned out halfway decently and Ireland is not the one, blood feuds can happen anywhere in Falls Road, in Sarajevo, or Peshawar, nearly 80 years after the Partition, they are still complaining about that,
@miguel cervantes
Sure but that’s not why he is being “Skeptical.” I frankly don’t think he’s being skeptical in much the same way his having Darryl Cooper on was really “asking questions.”
And as if there weren’t other settlers in the neighborhood.
Maybe but that’s only because of how abysmally low the track record for that is when it comes to the Arab League. And even then I’d argue Spain and Mexico were on par with or worse than Lebanon and (Trans)Jordan and comparable with Egypt in that regards, complete with sponsoring terrorist attacks and “incursions” into American soil complete with willful disregard for civilian losses. Jackson had to go rogue to invade Spanish Florida in part to try and stop the problem.
Santa Ana was only ever part of the problem. Probably the most egregious and unscrupulous part of course, but still. On Texas he broadly represented the consensus among the Mexican political elite on both sides of the Centralist/Federalist lines, and that made Texian support of him against Bustamante when Santa Ana feigned at being a Federalist all the more jarring. Santa Ana was in one of his many humiliating exiles when Mexican troops attacked US troops and went on to unsuccessfully attack Fort Texas for instance, and it was only after the humiliating defeats of previous management as a result of that that he came back in.
Agreed there.
A fair point.
I doubt the Gulf War can really be said to fit that. At most it was a contributing factor but the flavor of lunacy involved predated it as the people talking about the network to oppose the Soviets in Afghanistan shows.
I mean the British were reacting to an Afghan invasion of British India, which I think tends to be overlooked, as does their success rate after the catastrophic first invasion of Afghanistan. Moreover the Taliban allowing Osama a safe base with which to plot 9/11 and the like and Saddam’s support of them made it worse.
Agreed, and I think that’s a problem. The more I think of it the more I believe Pakistan Was a Mistake, and allowing it to go nuclear even moreso.
Agreed, but it’s made worse by the fact that many people read history very differently.
He probably did far more breaking than picking up, as his role in the genocide of the oldest contiguous Jewish population in the world in the Old City of Jerusalem attests in 1948-9.
Indeed. And it’s more sobering when you realize the British were doubtless the most successful of the recent Western interventionists in Afghanistan.
To be fair he didn’t miss it as much, but he was indecisive about how to do it as a moderate slaveholder.
Au contraire, if anything I’d say Cooper has not looked deeply enough into the Bloodlands. Or rather he only looks at the places that can justify his particular brand of pro-Fascist anti-Jewish lunacy, hence his whitewashing of the al-Husseinis in Israel and of Franco and Hitler. Anybody who believes the Soviet POW Death toll in 1941 was due to lack of preparation is woefully ignorant.
N. C., Excellent question.
Quite possibly—since Stuxnet proved ultimately to be insufficient—“deterrence”, in the future, will have to take a slightly different form…
@Art Deco:Daryl Cooper is Joe Blow off the sidewalks of Stockton, California, not someone you should interview as if he had published historical works with proper citations to primary sources.
I cared less about that, than that his position failed to make sense of known historical facts. Churchill was not empowered to make peace with Hitler. Hitler was a dictator and had the power to make peace and war in his own hands. Churchill was kept out of power as long the people of Britain considered peace possible. Once they had a war, and it was going badly, they brought Churchill in to fight it. Once victory over Germany was accomplished they fired him. Had Churchill tried to accept Hitler’s peace overtures after the Fall of France they’d have replaced him with someone else.
LOL! Because every country should tolerate people crossing its borders without permission to settle land that isn’t being used, right! And Guerrero abolishing slavery in Texas in 1829, also an evil ethnic cleansing plot!
Many Anglos settled Texas with permission. Mexicans were not much interested in doing that. Mexican failure to settle land they claimed (on the thin basis of claims from Spanish explorers) is why Mexico lost the southwest. They were already in the process of losing California before Polk decided it should become part of the US.
Santa anna was in fact engaging in ethnic cleansing. He had a point, an Anglo dominated Texas would be a serious problem for Mexico in the long run. But he failed, was defeated by (outnumbered) Anglo settlers, and set in motion the loss of the rest of the US southwest from Mexico.
@Don: I personally think that you are whitewashing that history; but it’s way off topic and I have contributed to that more than I should have. I will say only this last bit.
Regardless of rights and wrongs on whichever side, the thing is done, and has been done for a long time, and cannot be undone without worse injustice than was done to begin with.
The people who lived back then who actually did it, some of them approved and some of them disapproved. So do consider that even to the people at the time it was not a one-sided issue: some of the names on record opposing it include Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Ulysses S. Grant, not known for lack of patriotism, said in 1879
I noticed a long time ago when Qatarlson was still on Fox he was always silent on Israel even during three eruptions with Hamas – 2010, 2012, and 2014. I suspected that it was because his views were in sync with the God-awful Pat Buchanan but he realized that Fox viewers were overwhelmingly pro Israel so he decided to avoid the subject all together. Carlson and his smarmy face has become a stooge for Putin and Qatar, and once he got fired from Fox he was able to out himself as a full fledged antisemite in the tradition of the Old Right.
@Niketas Choniates
Nah, I think that owes more to how obscure the history is and how shaded it is by a mixture of Dovish sentiment (including by such luminaries as Abe Lincoln, who admittedly I believe was utterly wrong on Mexico) and Hispanic shaded Pity Parties about how victimized they were. The average American has virtually no idea what Spain’s role in the War of 1812 Was or its sponsorship of the Seminole Raids, or of where the Thornton Incident was. We were far better neighbors than Mexico or Spain were and it is just that we mostly held the whip hand for most of the relevant history.
I disagree, in that the Iranian regime as it exists is a mortal threat to us and a sworn enemy. It’s also a historical aberration in terms of how godawful it is regarding Iran, which is probably in part because it’s from an extremely reactionary part of Iranian society that rarely held overall power (the clergy) whose regime founders marinated in a mixture of third world Marxism and Islamist politics while in exile. Decapitating the Iranian regime and replacing it would probably be a much better situation, especially since whatever comes after it would almost certainly be better, not just from an American or Israeli POV but also from an Iranian one.
It might not be a Jeffersonian Republic, sure. But some kind of Banana Republic, Moderate Military Dictatorship, or Mild Semi-Constitutional or even Absolute but Secular Monarchy would be much less likely to sponsor terrorism abroad or try to end the world with nuclear fire.
Iraq we found something better to Saddam but not by much and the lack of a union sacree behind the wars helped allow Iran to puppeteer it, while with Afghanistan we largely failed to prove Our Guys were better than the Taliban, so the Taliban came in.
I do think it is something to consider when the other side has initiate it.
Fair, but I’d point to how the Iranian regime has killed more Americans abroad than any other government by a fair margin.
Pace
Virtually none of the “Anglos” crossed into “Tejas” without permission. The Spanish and then Mexican governments actively sought such settlement, and even then mostly turned a blind eye to things like the illegal arrival of the slave system that had nominally been abandoned in Mexico (nominally because in practice their peonage systems on the haciendas were little different). What really got things sour was Texas being swept up into wider Mexican Civil Wars between Centralistas and Federalists, in which Texas joined something like a third or half of Mexico revolting against an authoritarian centralist dictatorship, made worse by attempts to clamp down on what the local Anglos thought (rightfully or wrongly) were their Legal and/or Godgiven Rights (ironically the person most responsible for triggering it I think was a Centralista Loyalist and American-Mexican Immigrant, Juan Bradburn)
Pace “Don” he’s wrong that Santa Ana’s war was “Ethnic Cleansing”, it was instead Santa Ana betraying his former Federalist allies and trying to crush them, mostly successfully, but unsuccessfully in Texas and the Yucatan. Which gradually coarsened due to years of quasi-war even after Santa Ana’s capture and disposition where his treaty with Texas was repudiated.
But the idea that Anglos were the worst actors in here is just wrong.
More it was just a hypocritical, dead letter law that was widely ignored not just in Texas but also throughout much of Mexico. It might have been partially motivated to try and check Anglo immigration into Texas, but by any metric that utterly failed and it was probably motivated at least as much by an attempt to curry favor among Amerindians in the Southeast. It was of SOME consternation to the Anglo-Hispanic Plantocracy in Tejas, but since it was scantily enforced there (especially after it became obvious it was a choice between mostly Anglo settlers or the Comanches, and that was an easy choice) it was just a tertiary problem for them, unlike the seizure of firearms and martial law after Bustamante’s centralista coup.
It’s mostly dug up now in a dishonest attempt to paint the Texan Revolution as being about preserving slavery and to peddle the Poor Widdle Mexico school of “Historiography”.
This is a fair point, but that also ignores how the US Federal Government worked hard to crack down on the filibusters. It also ignores the at-least-as-lengthy-if-not-more history of Spanish and Mexican filibustering (including against each other, often using American mercenaries, but also against the US and Central America). But talking about the Spanish Crown hiring the Seminoles to conduct genocidal raids in Southern Georgia using British Money or trying to literally starve upper American settlers doesn’t fit well with “The Narrative”.
IIRC, the population of Mexican peninsulares, criollos, mestizos, and mission Indians in Texas in 1836 was about 3,000. The Anglophone population was about 10,000. In California, there were about 20,000 Mexicans ca. 1846. There were about 50,000 living in what is today New Mexico. Sacramento and Santa Fe were the only towns with a four-digit population.
@Don
Mostly true, but they did congregate around what few population centers there were. And in any case they did it with the endorsement of first Spain and then Mexico.
Not really. As far as I can tell for all the atrocities the Centralistas would commit over the course of the wars (which were NUMEROUS) they seem not to have given a fig about ethnicity unless you were certain groups of Amerindians like the Mayo. Indeed I have heard Santa Ana’s finest sharpshooter in the Texas Campaign was an American Mercenary, and “Juan”/John Davis Bradburn was the man who kicked off the original rounds of repression before even Santa Ana took over.
Agreed there, though to be fair the Texians had also launched plenty of raids to try and stake a claim on territory they claimed, and the US largely inherited those. Which helped lead to the Thornton Ambush.
Agreed there.
@Turtler
“Anybody who believes the Soviet POW Death toll in 1941 was due to lack of preparation is woefully ignorant.”
Correct. German Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner estimated in the Spring of 1941 a few months before Operation Barbarossa commenced on June 22, 1941 that the Wehrmacht would take around 2 million Red army prisoners in the first first few months of the war.
Iraq we found something better to Saddam but not by much
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Iraq is a country with security issues (the Arab portion thereof has a homicide rate shy of 20 per 100,000, unusual outside of Latin America), political violence (currently running at about 1,600 deaths per year, about 70% of them combatants), and has had a vapid economic recovery since 2002 (about a 40% increase in GDP per capita (PPP). Its political system features abnormally long times to accomplish certain tasks. However, it is not a totalitarian hellhole and is not fixing to conquer the entire Arab Near East.
@Turtler: You have me at a disadvantage, sir, since I have already said I think the conversation on Mexico is off-topic and that I wouldn’t contribute more to it, but should we discuss it further on another occasion I think you will find that our positions are not so far apart as you seem to suppose, because I don’t share what you call the “Poor Widdle Mexico” school of historiography. I probably was overreacting to Don for my part, thinking his position more extreme than it really was.
Not really. As far as I can tell for all the atrocities the Centralistas would commit over the course of the wars (which were NUMEROUS) they seem not to have given a fig about ethnicity unless you were certain groups of Amerindians like the Mayo.
It was done to specifically drive out Anglo settlers. It isn’t so much that the intent was to kill every single last Anglo, but it was to drive out Anglo settlers and it was hence ethnic cleansing.
Niketas: “Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938. At some point in the future it’s not going to be realistic to expect to prevent any country that wants to from developing what is essentially 1940s technology.”
Not true…what the problem is, and remains, is to extract enough U235 to make a bomb. That takes more than is needed for a simple reactor and it has to be at a high level of purity so the fast reaction is not poisoned. Unless someone comes up with a way of extracting the 0.72% U235 out of the uranium ore that doesn’t involve numerous centrifuges or huge accelerators with large magnets, those facilities are not easy to come by, or operate, or hidden.
I was trying to make an imperfect parallel between the American and Israeli experience, was the formation of our beloved country, perfect, not by any means,
the leadership of the government at different times, took advantage of the vanity ofSanta Ana or Valeriano Weyler at different points, I forget who was the relevant Spanish prime minister at the time, Canovas I think, the war hawks in the McKinley cabinet took advantage of the Maine Incident, which was not really Spains fault for an application of Mahans naval warfare thesis, that run aground in the jungles of the Phillipines, where Pershing made his mark,
one could argue in the mountain west it didn’t go terribly great, see custer in the total fiasco, and covington, in the tragic disaster category, of Sand Creek, but the Army did continue on the oath,
could the US have straightened out the
French German wars the ones over the Caucasus and the Balkans we had our hands full, in the Western stretches,
@HC68
Can’t agree. I’ve talked about (and flamed) Buchanan and his “work” a fair bit here and will have to try and do so in more detail later, but his particular flavor of isolationism, Jew hatred, and Anglohatred makes him dumb.
I’m less generous. These people seem to have no freaking clue what the World from the 1870s to the 1940s was actually like. It’s at this point that I note that the US fought what was effectively an extremely tense Cold War over the Caribbean Basin and the Pacific with Spain until 1898 (And while 1898 was so decisive and onesided, we’re wont to forget that for much of this period Spain was stronger than us, such as with the Virginius Affair, where the US Atlantic Seaboard was briefly held hostage by the crippled-but-state-of-the-art Spanish Ironclad Arapiles taking on storm repairs in New York City Harbor). And just after that we got into an incredibly onesided and bizarre Cold War with the German Government, that took a radically anti-American turn sometime between the 1880s and 1898, leading to them drawing up a series of war plans to invade the US mainland that their Nazi successors largely revisited, while later the Bolsheviks planned to undermine us.
Though to what little defense can be made of them, this was while the US was engaged in highly interventionist affairs in its “Near Abroad” and if anything struggling to prevent private filibusters from being even more interventionist.
All of which but especially the fact that “There were people across the sea that already hated us and wanted to destroy us” factor is “conveniently” ignored or whitewashed by Buchanan, who if anything has an unhealthy fetish with dicksucking anti-British, anti-Jewish, anti-American German totalitarians of both the Second and Third Reich variants, many of whose objections to the US had rather little to do with its interventions or imperial misadventures so much as the fact that it was a capitalist democratic republic.
And before that, to the early Republic? Uh…. we trade out foreign governments intentionally seeking our destruction for ideological reasons in favor of those trying to prey upon us, whether the Barbary Pirates, the British, the French, or the Spanish, which we generally manage to hold off while engaging in some shotgun diplomacy of our own. Though this comes to a nadir with the US Civil War and the resulting foreign European reinvasions of the Americas (most infamously in Mexico with their Austrian Habsburg Monarch under French support, but also elsewhere).
The past may be a foreign country, but I find it is often peoples’ conception of the past that is an entirely different world or universe. The existence of the US was already a product of a shrinking world that brought European and African settlers to the Eastern Americas, and where nations and empires had to think globally. That was already true in the 1600s, let alone the 1700s. It only got more painfully true with the steam engine and telegraph in the 1800s and more in the early 1900s.
The latest bunch of shrinking exacerbated things but did little to actually cause them.
Rather we wiped out that network of peer powers because we recognized them as a threat, potentially to our own existence and then to our primacy. I think if anything we went too far in de-nading our Western European colonial/imperial allies like the British, French, Dutch, and Belgians, which is one reason I’m broadly sympathetic to DeGaulle, but anyone who studied what the French did to the crew of the Cincinnatus during the Revolutionary Wars should understand why we distrusted them.
I mean the Richmond-DC Transport wasn’t so long even back in the day, it was more the giant amounts of armies in the way that hindered travel.
Yeah, that’s flat out untrue even with Tsar Bomba.
It also ignores the fact that there are some powers and players that do not want America to “Retreat” or “pull back” but to cease to exist.
>blockquote> Their craving for that world has caused them to starting sounding like the Left sounded during the Cold War, assuming that America is instigating every conflict and that if we just pull back things will be peaceful. I’ve recently seen supposed MAGA conservatives basically echo McGovern’s infamous speech from the 1972 Dem convention about turning inward. I’m not sure he even realized it.
Agreed there.
I’m more than slightly tired of hearing them whine about neocons, too. I supported the removal of Hussein, and given what was known at that time, I was _right_ to do so.
I _never_ believed in the ‘welcomed with open arms’ idea, or that we could easily Westernize Iraq, and I was scared to death that the people in charge would let the effort to build some kind of functional state so we could safely leave turn into something like that (which of course they did).
Agreed.
To be honest I don't think it is unworkable In some ways we succeeded, partially for the best but partially for the worst. And moreover Saddam himself represented a partial Westernization with his own particular brand of Sunni Supremacism, Nazi LARP, and "Arab Socialism" Quasi-Communism.
Agreed.
I’d also point out that these people generally ignore what the pre-WWII world actually was like, with the destruction of the US being an actively discussed and desires in Berlin and Moscow. Hitler’s Unpublished Second Book is probably one of the most well known (to the extent of even that) today, but it was continuing on a long and sordid history. It’s also something Buchanan goes out of his way to ignore the existence and implications of, like with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Operation Plan III.
I’d say it never even existed in the first place, which is one reason why the likes of Buchanan, Carlson, and Cooper have to flat out ignore information that does not flatter their conceits.
Agreed.
Heck, we did it up to a point. That’s one reason why we pulled out when we did from Iraq. The mission largely was accomplished, even if the underlying rot was not entirely done. It is just we badly overestimated the stability of the wider region and underestimated the bitterness of the Sunnis, the power hunger of the Shiites, and the ability of Iran to wedge things open.
Agreed.
Indeed, the alternative being some attempt to tackle Islam as a whole, which is something very few have an appetite for.
Agreed. It also doesn’t help these societies tend not to have the same divisions of powers or restraints that we take almost for granted here even as they are eroding.
That results in bad things. As awful as the Post-Jan 6th Witch Hunts were here, Russia and Sudan and the PRC can do far worse at least for now.
I used to think Tucker was amusing and informative at one time. He has changed in the last several years and I had to stop watching him. I never had the impression he was antisemitic before but he is now saying/doing some strange things e.g. that bizarre trip to Moscow when he seemed to be describing paradise. He was on Megyn Kelly’s show a while back and he was complaining about being labeled antisemitic to the point where he contacted some people in Israel and asked them to stop the accusations. (Sorry, this is to the best of my recollection. Maybe I misunderstood.) I got the impression that he wasn’t so much anti Israel as he was pro America and by that I mean we shouldn’t devote one dime or one minute to anyone or anything until we get our own house in order, especially regarding the border. Since then he has done some things that are just plain puzzling.
Also, Megyn Kelly is a fan of his but when he was on her show recently, she (in my opinion) seemed somewhat uncomfortable with some things he was saying although she didn’t confront him about them. Maybe Fox kept him on a short leash all those years and now he’s going off to wherever.
The people who lived back then who actually did it, some of them approved and some of them disapproved. So do consider that even to the people at the time it was not a one-sided issue: some of the names on record opposing it include Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Ulysses S. Grant, not known for lack of patriotism, said in 1879
This is mostly a factor of the slave debate. All of the above opposed adding another slave state to the US. They are not considering the issue on it’s merits but in the larger context.
Tucker has no firm principles. Tucker is a shape shifter in it for Tucker. Remember the T-1000 in Terminator? Tucker is the T-.00001.
@physicsguy: Unless someone comes up with a way of extracting the 0.72% U235 out of the uranium ore that doesn’t involve numerous centrifuges or huge accelerators with large magnets, those facilities are not easy to come by, or operate, or hidden.
Precisely my point. I don’t think we can expect that state of things to persist forever. Several other ways already exist; they may not be the best or most efficient. The history of the Israeli and South African nuclear weapons programs may shed some light on this, but it’s not easy to say how much deniable help they had from Western nuclear powers vs what they got away with vs what was turned a blind eye to.
certainly Israel got some aid from the French, before they had the falling out with
DeGaulle, who turned Arabist to assuage sentiments from the Algerian war, his successors like Pompidou and Chiraq followed suit, South Africa seems to have gotten some aid from Israel, in their early work, much as Pakistan had imput from China, as well as what AQ Khan could derive from URENCO the Dutch plant
i still don’t see any instance where the IAEA flagged any one of these programs before they reached critical mas,
arlson, along with the Buchananite New Conservative, is Isolationist. And a dedicated non-interventionist.
By contrast, Trump is a mire pragmatic American Exceptionalist consercative. Exactly what one would expect of a Military School in sight of West Point, pre-Vietnam War era.
Chazzand avers “I used to think Tucker was amusing and informative at one time. He has changed in the last several years and I had to stop watching him.”
No, he hasn’t changed. See his 2018 book “Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution.”
@miguel: i still don’t see any instance where the IAEA flagged any one of these programs before they reached critical mass
Captain Renault took a while to detect gambling going on at the Cafe Americain, too.
I think if anything we went too far in de-nading our Western European colonial/imperial allies like the British, French, Dutch, and Belgians
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I doubt that any of these powers had the productive capacity to retain their portfolio of dependencies for long. Piecemeal divestiture over a period of 40-50 years might have been beneficial for the African and Asian territories, but that doesn’t mean it would have been feasible, especially with Soviet subversion. See the decomposition of the Portuguese Empire (1961-75). OTOH, if you look at what France was able to retain, you could argue that Britain was too insistent on divestiture. Except for Djibouti and French India, France retained all insular and coastal dependencies with populations in 1960 under 400,000. Britain retained only those with populations under 60,000 and it divested itself of a few of those as well.
Having read all of these well-informed comments, I am left with the impression that relying on historical precedents to predict the future is as good as relying on a Magic Eightball. For every lesson drawn out of some historical event or person, a counter-lesson is just as easily drawn. Makes one wonder about the value of studying the past at all.
@Steve:Makes one wonder about the value of studying the past at all.
It has value but not much for guiding the present. Arguing from “the lessons of history” is a flavor of anecdotal evidence.
Even worse when what people think of as history is not really a collection of facts, but a collection of narratives. I first started to realize this when reading the history of science, nothing was discovered in the “right” order, and some narratives are practically fraudulent. I’d put Mendeleev’s “discovery” of the periodic table in this category, as he was not the first one to come up with one, and that in addition to predicting undiscovered elements he also predicted impossible elements as well as denying the existence of elements that didn’t fit it. Another fraudulent narrative is the death of Evariste Galois, the romantic elements of which were practically made up of whole cloth in the 1930s.