Brownstone Institute
This Was Tucker Carlson’s “Greatest Public Mistake”
From the Brownstone Institute
A new biography of Tucker Carlson offers a very interesting look at the intellectual odyssey of the most popular commentator in the US if not the world. Particularly interesting is his turnabout on the pandemic response.
Today he is a mighty critic of lockdowns and forced vaccination. But it was not always so. His voice was massively influential both in inspiring the lockdowns and warming conservatives up to the idea of panic.
Most devastatingly, in the first week of March, one week before the lockdowns, Tucker flew to Mar-a-Lago – his first time there – to meet with Trump and tell him that he was completely wrong that this pandemic required no extraordinary response. Instead he needed to act now.
The book explains:
The strength of Tucker’s bond with Trump was apparent on March 7, 2020, when he went to Mar-a-Lago to press his rising concerns about Covid-19 to the president personally. At the time almost all other conservative commentators were downplaying the threat of the virus — and their liberal counterparts, in a frenzy over the first Trump impeachment, were likewise giving it short shrift — but Tucker’s sources were telling him that Beijing was lying, the devastation in China was massive, and what was coming here was going to be catastrophic.
“I told him,” Carlson acknowledges now of his meeting with the president, “he could easily lose the election over Covid.” A couple of days later, he was sounding the warning in equally blunt terms to his audience. “People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” he said. “‘It’s just partisan politics,’ they say. ‘Calm down. In the end this was just like the flu and people die from that every year. Coronavirus will pass.”
Such people, he continued, were “wrong,” what was coming would be “major,” and “It’s definitely not just like the flu. . . . The Chinese coronavirus will get worse; its effects will be far more disruptive than they are right now. That is not a guess; it is inevitable no matter what they’re telling you. Let’s hope everyone stops lying about that, and soon.”
The timeline of events confirms Tucker’s influence on Trump but Trump surely had others leaning on him as well. Following the meeting, Trump was not fully persuaded and Tweeted out on March 9 that this would come and go like the flu.
The very next day, he had flipped in the other direction.
How much influence did Tucker have? Some and maybe much over Trump. Just as important was the way in which his show itself drove conservatives to the point of panic. Following lockdowns, and within weeks, he reversed himself.
A major part of the next two years of his show was dedicated to debunking all that he had contributed in February and half of March. The book reports that Tucker Carlson regards his panic over the virus as the “great public mistake he ever made.”
It’s not as if Tucker himself made up the idea that Covid was going to be Ebola but widespread. As this book reports, “Tucker’s sources were telling him” that this would be true.
Tucker himself elaborated on the events in an interview for Vanity Fair that appeared on March 17, 2020. He explains:
Well, in January is when we first started covering it on the show. And you know, there’ve been a number of epidemics to come out of China—the 1957 flu epidemic, which killed 100,000 people in this country. And so when these reports began to emerge, we covered it….
And then I happened to be speaking a couple of days later to someone who works in the U.S. government, a nonpolitical person with access to a lot of intelligence. He said the Chinese are lying about the extent of this. They won’t let international health inspectors in. They’re blocking WHO and this could infect millions of people, a high percentage of them. And this was a highly informed person, very informed, and again, a nonpolitical person with no reason to lie about it in either direction.
So that really got my attention.
It was at this point that he decided to tell Trump what he had heard.
I felt I had a moral obligation to be useful in whatever small way I could, and, you know, I don’t have any actual authority. I’m just a talk show host. But I felt—and my wife strongly felt—that I had a moral obligation to try and be helpful in whatever way possible. I’m not an adviser to the person or anyone else other than my children. And I mean that. And you can ask anybody in the White House or out how many times have I gone to the White House to give my opinion on things. Because I don’t do that. And in general I really disapprove of people straying too far outside their lanes and acting like just because they have solid ratings, they have a right to control public policy. I don’t believe that. I think it’s wrong.
I don’t want to be that guy, and I’m not that guy, but I felt under this circumstance that it was something small that I could do. And again, I felt a moral obligation to do it, and I kept it secret because I was embarrassed of it because I thought that it was on some level wrong.
And think about the timing of this fair and affectionate interview itself. It is from a very hostile venue but they let Tucker have his say, with no smears. That itself is suspicious. And this interview appeared the day following the lockdown edicts. It was obviously important to someone that Tucker Carlson, the hero of the right, bless this panic that led to the dismantling of the economic and social order.
At that point in the timeline, Tucker was still dedicated to his story. He even had Covid at the time. He would not go near his children. “Nope. I’m not gonna. I’m waving at them through glass right now.”
We should not underestimate Tucker’s influence on all of this. The lockdowns – the wrecking of American liberty – certainly needed bipartisan and broad ideological support. If this became a left-right issue, it simply could not work. Therefore someone or something believed it was extremely important that Tucker needed to be convinced. And it worked.
Tucker has never revealed his source. He has never said who this person is: “someone who works in the U.S. government, a nonpolitical person with access to a lot of intelligence.” It was clearly someone he trusted and perhaps someone everyone in his circles trusted. And why has Tucker not revealed the source? Most likely because it was someone with high-level security clearances who then swore him to eternal secrecy. As a man of principle, he has done that.
There is one major figure who fits this description, more than anyone else. It is Matthew Pottinger, a member of the National Security Council and a person with high-level security contacts. His role in the pandemic response is very well documented. Most famously, it was he who pulled Deborah Birx out of her work on AIDS to head Trump’s virus commission. Pottinger is a well-known figure in the DC cocktail circuit and widely trusted by the “China hawks” in Washington. His security clearances gave him access and credibility.
In September 2019, Pottinger was named Deputy National Security Advisor, second only to National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. From late January and following, he worked to spread alarm about the virus. He says that he spoke to medical doctors in China who told him that this was nothing like SARS-1 and has more in common with 1918. He went on to argue for lockdowns, universal masking, and even promoted the use of Remdesivir though he had no background at all in medicine or pharmaceuticals.
The most comprehensive study in print on Matthew Pottinger’s role is at Brownstone and written by Michael Senger. He sums up:
Pottinger may have simply been overly-trusting of his sources, thinking they were the little people in China trying to help their American friends. But why did Pottinger push so hard for sweeping Chinese policies like mask mandates that were far outside his field of expertise? Why did he so often breach protocol? Why seek out and appoint Deborah Birx?
It’s all very interesting but we should not underestimate the importance of this turn of events and the likely role of Pottinger in convincing Tucker of the case for tremendous alarm and panic. Without that, Trump might not have caved and the base would have rallied around him.
Instead, we got a response that effectively deleted the Bill of Rights, ruined economic and civil liberty, wrecked the Trump presidency, and triggered a new era in American life in which intelligence agencies and the administrative state under Biden have completely swamped the Founders’ vision of a self-governing people.
To Tucker’s credit, he sees this as his great mistake. But there is still more to know on how precisely this happened and why.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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From the Brownstone Institute
What War Means
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
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