The fatal narcissism of American media

The so-called smart professionals made the Tucker-Putin interview all about Tucker. It wasn't about Tucker. It was about Putin. What was he trying to tell us?

I had planned to write on an entirely different topic this week, but as often happens, events overtook my plans. In this case, it was Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, which I watched with great interest yesterday. 

I am an amateur fan of international relations — it’s a compelling subject to me but one in which I do not have a lot of strong opinions. Partly because there’s a lot I do not know, but also because it seems very much like a topic in which opinions are of limited utility. This in great contrast to the topic I write most about, the Culture Wars, in which our opinions and the emotions they engender in us are the entire point, and so deserve to be taken seriously.

So I am not here to give a detailed analysis of what Putin said. I am here to point out that the American-Western reaction to the interview was yet more evidence of the great debasement of our public intellectual capabilities and output. 

There was, of course, the predictable outcry from the corporate hack class and the powers they serve. Hillary Clinton called Carlson a ‘useful idiot.’ Boris Johnson, perhaps trying to make us forget the role he played in scuppering a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, went hyperbolic, calling Carlson “a traitor to journalism” and “a stooge to the tyrant.”

Television talking heads duly took their cue, accusing Carlton of not being a real journalist but rather a purveyor of propaganda. How ironic. How predictable. 

The New York Times took a slightly more subtle tack, but it was dismissive and shallow nonetheless, writing: “Russia wants to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine, albeit on Russian terms.” Why would they want anything else other than to succeed on their own terms? Why would anyone want anything else? This a more oblique form of othering, but it is othering nonetheless. The framing is clear: anything that our adversary wants is scary, even if it’s what we ourselves would want. Quite apart from how annoyingly tendentious that is, it also begs a very important question: how can international relations proceed on such a basis? 

Unlike with domestic concerns about how our morally and socially broken our culture is today, I don’t see how moral value judgements work in international affairs — at least not when it comes to the timeless concerns of where borders should be drawn and national sovereignty.

To be sure, there is a substantial argument to be made against Putin. The problem the west now faces, however, is that many of the criticisms that can be fairly levelled against Putin, are uncomfortably applicable to what’s left of western hegemony and the progressive-neo-liberal elites who have abandoned all true liberal principles in an attempt to stave off their own demise. Don’t talk to me about political persecutions in a country like Russia — which I cannot begin to understand fully — when the Department of Justice is claiming traditional Catholics and concerned parents are domestic terrorists and political prosecutions abound. Don’t talk to me about the invasion of Ukraine when the US invaded Iraq on a far more tenuous and dishonest charge. Sorry. It’s just the truth. And other countries, including Russia and China, make a lot of hay out of this, using it as a fig-leaf to cover for their own human rights crimes, when those crimes are considerable. We in the west must clean up our own shambles of a room before we try to force these high-minded values onto other (very large, very old, very smart) powers. 

The most disappointing and irritating take I came across was from a well-known anti-woke media figure, Melissa Chen. In a tweet written yesterday, she did not outright called Tucker a stooge to a tyrant, but she came close enough. And she was downright aggressive in characterising the sympathy some conservative Americans — who are legitimately psychically brutalised by generals in drag and obviously senile leaders in the White House and the Congress — have for the traditional cultural values espoused by Russia. She accused Tucker’s viewership of “toe[ing] the line for Putin’s agenda” and urging them not to be “Putin’s cocksucker.”

This is an adolescent, try-hard thing to say. I have noticed that for many people who have made names for themselves by being anti-woke, there seems to be drive to put down populists and make facile ‘both sides’ arguments so that they appear objective. They want the accolades that come from the ‘smart-set’ for being brave enough to buck the worst of the woke insanity, but they ultimately they are libtard centrists in an era where - if you are to have any real integrity— you have to be brave enough to chose solidarity. Even with those you patently feel are inferior to you, as Chen clearly feels Tucker’s audience to be. 

But the worst thing about Chen’s tweet was not the snobbery. It was her accusing ordinary Americans of espousing Putin’s agenda without any comment at all as to WHAT that agenda is. I’m guessing this is because she would have little to no idea. Her fatal error, like all the corporate journalists, is to make Tucker’s interview with Putin all about Tucker. It’s not. It’s about Putin. But it’s much more challenging to decipher what Putin is saying, and the vast majority of American media types don’t have a clue how to go about doing that. Nor do they have the intellectual humility to admit it. So they fall back on the lowest-hanging fruit. This narcissism now appears to be the bedrock of American journalism, even on the supposedly independent side.

The smartest thing Tucker said in the course of his trip to Moscow was not in the interview itself. It was in his commentary afterward, when he stated that he would not be able to really process what Putin had told him for a year. Whatever about his performance when he was face-to-face with the Russian autocrat, about which good people can disagree — this was a wise thing to say. Putin was there to broadcast a series of signals, to be interpreted by an adversarial power and one of the biggest audiences in the English-speaking world. I’d be a bit skeptical of anyone in the media who right now professes confidence in decoding that immediately.

Personally, I was most interested in his comments about China. For the last several years, I have become more and more aware of growing Chinese influence in the United States and elsewhere in the west, including in my own backyard. I find this influence unnerving because it hides in plain sight. Last week, Bret Weinstein gave a chilling account of seeing a camp of military age Chinese men in central America, waiting to be taken across the US border, which is wide open. I remember the Russia-China “no limits” alliance that was announced weeks before the invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022. There was some coverage of this significant alliance, but the western establishment was too busy setting its hair on fire over the invasion and emoting over the stunning and brave Zelensky to fully analyse it. In this light, Tucker’s repeated questioning regarding Putin’s timing of the Ukraine invasion was important, because Putin did not answer it. That lack of an answer is meaningful. But he called Xi “my colleague and friend,” described the two countries as sharing a “centuries long history of coexistence,” and said China’s foreign policy was “not aggressive.” I could very well be off the mark, but these comments did nothing to assuage my growing fear that Russia and China are playing a game of Risk and encircling a hugely enfeebled United States, while the so-called smart American media professionals are too distracted by their feelings about Tucker Carlson and his audience to even notice.