In which the pond does the usual dalliance with the far right authoritarian-loving Caterist and the far right authoritarian-loving Major, with a few detours for fun ...

 

The pond has been disappointed by the reptiles' refusal to cover the visit of Tuckyo Carlson, though the tradition of outsiders dropping by, or black sheep on a tour of the colonies, is a long established one.

This morning, for example, the reptiles featured Sir Frank Lowy phoning in from Tel Aviv, on the basis that the country that he loves is the country that he left ... and is therefore entitled to a phone-in opinion about it ...

Luckily Graeme Wood, a Tuckyo specialist, remedied the Tuckyo void in The Atlantic, with Why Tucker Carlson Thinks Australia Is Being ‘Taken Away’, In Melbourne, the commentator warned native Australians that immigrants would dispossess them. (paywall)

On Monday, Tucker Carlson wrapped up the seventh in a series of speeches to right-wing Australian audiences. To attend the event, I had to walk under a bright-pink sign acknowledging that the “traditional owners” of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre are an Aboriginal people, the Wurundjeri Wol Wurrung. Judging by the speech I heard, this sign was not put up at Carlson’s request. “Anyone who tells you this is not your country plans to take it away from you,” Carlson said, to approving Aussie yawps (“Yeah! Tuck-ah!”). He loved Australia, he said, and proved it by delivering a heartfelt description of how he had recently held a koala and inhaled its musk. Australians’ biggest fault, he told them, was that “you’re too happy; you don’t pause to think how bad it could get.” Someone was plotting to take all of this away. “The only way you could wreck a country like this is on purpose.”
The whole evening was haunted by a question: Who, exactly, is wrecking Australia on purpose and planning to “take it away”? Probably not the Wurundjeri Wol Wurrung. The very fact that Carlson, an American, was there suggested that whoever it was had done some wrecking in America too. Carlson said, in a couple of carefully worded asides, that he was an emissary from the future, to warn native Australians of the coming dispossession. “I’m here from a country that’s further down the road,” he said, in his role as Ghost of Nativism Future. “It doesn’t end well.”
Carlson was fired by Fox News last year but has not faded from public life, as many assumed he would. After his decades as a fixture of conservative media on CNN, PBS, and even MSNBC, Fox allegedly found his tendencies corrosive to its brand, as well as a possible legal liability. He has subsequently started his own show on X and scored an interview with Vladimir Putin —a journalistic coup that many Putin haters considered a wasted opportunity to give the Russian president a KGB-style interrogation, but that was, to me, a riveting and revelatory interview anyway. Almost any hours-long conversation with the tormentor of Ukraine and NATO would be. As Carlson speaks freely, it has become clear that his true views are even more Trumpian than they previously appeared, and that if any commentator reflects the Republican presidential nominee’s view of the world—nationalist, antiglobalism, anti-immigration, opposed to wars even (or especially) in defense of America’s allies—it is Carlson. So when he speaks, even (or especially?) to an obscure audience in Australia, what he says has relevance to the future of American politics as well.
The crowd seemed pretty sure of the identity of the soon-to-be-dispossessed. It was them. Their bleats of approval and occasional outbursts conveyed a vivid sense that their government had rewarded their past patriotism by encroaching on their freedoms and looting their patrimony. Most of all, they despised the politicians who had denied them jobs and roles in public after they refused COVID-19 vaccines. A mention of Professor John Skerritt, the Australian version of Anthony Fauci, aroused the crowd to hooting rage.
Their savior in this crusade against immunity was the evening’s host, Clive Palmer, the mining billionaire and minor politician who arranged Carlson’s tour. His introductory speech began with an audio malfunction, possibly due to placement of the clip-on mic too low, toward the southern hemisphere of his belly, far from his mouth. Once he got going, the speech was quite fun. He declared that he remained unvaccinated and told the story of how he’d caught COVID, nearly died, and threatened to beat doctors with a metal chair when they tried to save his life with the antiviral drug remdesivir. He ended his speech as only a billionaire can, with a baffling and irrelevant monologue that aides to a less powerful man would surely have prevailed on him to skip, in which he presented an illustrated plan to build a full-scale replica of the Titanic...

And so on, but this is the Monday after, and Tuckyo has gone, disappeared into the cornfield by the reptiles at the lizard Oz ... and so the pond must turn to another blow-in, a migrant basher of migrants, a far right enabler of authoritarians and fascists, and no doubt a lover of Vichy France and the Pétainists ...

It takes a remarkable amount of chutzpah to denounce Joe Barnes and the UK Tory-loving Telegraph, but when you're a member of the authoritarian far right, a maroon blathering about a clash of visions, you do what must be done ...

Perhaps this is what triggered the authoritarian Caterist ... (just a short reptile excerpt to source the agitation, the Graudian has its usual live coverage here).

Meanwhile, the illustrations accompanying the Caterist were priceless, no doubt designed to trigger the libs - with the snap of Nigel as a shottie-wielding boofhead gun-loving thug just one of a gallery of far right authoritarians in the Caterist pantheon ...

The pond regrets not being able to show the Caterist's pantheon of far right authoritarian heroes and heroines in the original gargantuan size ... authoritarians do like grandiose portraits, as Adolf did, always checking himself in the mirror before posing before Speer's grand buildings ...but there's a lot more blather to go ...

Oh dear, it seems that the Caterist might have phoned it in before the latest poll ... to return to that reptile source to take note of the figures ...

Never mind dearie, the Caterist still loves ya ... just as he loves authoritarian far right figures elsewhere, a migrant who hates migrants ...

If only we'd been able to decide on which Poms enter the country and the conditions upon which they are welcomed ... but as the Caterist is scribbling for a United States owned organisation, it's probably fair dibs for nationalists deploring cosmopolitanism, internationalism and free trade ...

No doubt with the revival of nationalism, we can look forward to a third world war soon enough, but at least the Caterist has now revealed his true colours, and the only pity is that he couldn't find the space to celebrate brave nationalists of the Vlad the sociopath and Viktor Orbán kind ...

These are heroes of Tuckyo Rose and is it wrong to sample a little more of that delicious Wood coverage of the tour down under before turning to the Major?

Far more mortifying was the warm-up act from the American conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who was piped in digitally to introduce 2000 Mules, his documentary film about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election. It used crackpot statistical methods to show that several thousand people had been visiting ballot boxes in patterns unlikely to be random, and therefore surely the work of a paid Democratic conspiracy. The film is so batshit crazy that even its distributor dropped it and apologized for its errors. The audience seemed no more than polite during the screening. This lukewarm reaction came to me as a relief, because the people I spoke with seemed nice and reasonably intelligent, and to believe the conspiracy alleged in the documentary, one would have to have a brain the size of a peach pit. This stuff makes Michael Moore sound like Mycroft Holmes.
And it made Tucker Carlson sound like a prodigy—which I suppose might have been the point of the juxtaposition. The night’s Aussie emcee introduced him as “Tuck-ah—a truth seek-ah and a truth speak-ah!” When D’Souza doesn’t come across as an imbecile, he resembles a reptilian sociopath, willing to utter any lie necessary to advance his claims. Carlson, to the relief of everyone around me, sounded like a precocious and excited child, pleased to come Down Under for the first time, to ogle and sniff the local fauna and learn to say wanker and other exotic slang. To a crowd of nationalists, few things are more titillating than the admiration of one’s country by a foreign dignitary. This Tucker is Tucker the ingenue, the character who marveled at the greatness of Russian grocery stores. I do not think the marveling is scripted or a pose. It is an expression of an open-minded and charming man who knows that to persuade people to join your side, it helps to be funny and generous. Maybe he took a Dale Carnegie course. Whatever it is, it worked on this audience, which decided within the first minute that their $100 tickets were worth it.
His message began with an endorsement of Australian pride, or shamelessness. Britain, he said, had much to answer for in her management of the empire. But not Australia. “​​What exactly were your sins?” he asked. “You have nothing to apologize for.” (I would have liked to hear from any Wurundjeri Wol Wurrung on this point.) Australia’s settlers had built beautiful and majestic cities, he said; his listeners deserved to feel pride in the fact that they lived in paradise and not in the slums of Birmingham or Manchester. Perth and Melbourne were “like San Francisco, but without the drug addicts.” Australians had learned to live in peace with weird and poisonous animals, he said, and neither feared them nor tried to hunt them to extinction. What a people! Carlson’s pet cause is, well, pets, and he said that treatment of animals is “a measure of character,” so “that should be the standard for who you bring into your country”—whether they have enough humanity to treat even nonhumans with dignity.
I understood these words as a dog whistle, if you will, summoning to his side anyone skittish about the influence of the dog-eating mainland Chinese, whose cynophagy he later singled out, along with “murdering people for their organs,” as “deeply offensive” behavior. Twice he suggested that he might get arrested if he said what he really thought. Australia has laws against racial incitement that punish speech in ways that would be unconstitutional in the United States. He said that if he were the leader of China, his first act would be to invade Australia and seize Clive Palmer’s mineral wealth. Those who were currently selling Australian resources to China, he said, “hate you.”
Carlson told the Australians that he, an outsider from 10,000 miles away, would never presume to lecture them about their country. “When Bono comes to my country and starts lecturing, I think, Go back to Dublin.” Carlson then proceeded, through his series of impressions of Australia, to lecture Australians on Australian politics, and the inferences to be drawn from his happy fortnight here. He said he thought that if he “ever made any money,” he might get a place in Sydney, so he browsed real-estate listings and saw prices so high that he wondered if they were denominated “in lira or pesos or something.” “I was like, How does anybody live here?” (He must have been relying on the audience’s ignorance of the reports that he made more than $15 million a year at Fox, well above the median income in Sydney.)

Great fun and a reminder that for real fun you have to read the likes of The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

But that's not the pond's lot. Instead the pond must endure the likes of The Major ... who opens with an open declaration of his devotion to the orange Jesus ...

The pond has long thought that both men were too old, with one also far too demented, but if in doubt the pond would prefer four years of a Bernie in the chair than four years with the mango Mussolini ...

It's not that there isn't comedy to be found in the coverage ... David Masciotra did an amusing piece for Salon, MSNBC in disarray: Biden's debate crisis meets liberal self-delusion. 

He was remarkably unkind in a way that the Major might envy ...

..Nicolle Wallace, former White House director of communications under George W. Bush and now a liberal talking head, claimed that a “big event” the next day might undo the damage of the debate, implying that Biden’s failure was just a “bad night,” rather than a catastrophic dismantling of his case for a second term. Let's remember that the Biden team wanted to schedule this debate early in the election cycle in order to prove the president's lucidity and competence. 

Nicolle Wallace and her MSNBC colleagues reacted to the generic scripted address Biden delivered in Raleigh as if it were Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg.

Biden sought to create Wallace’s "big event" by reading a 15-minute speech from a teleprompter the next morning in Raleigh, North Carolina. She and her MSNBC colleagues reacted to this generic scripted address as if it were Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg. They neglected to note that Biden’s supposedly stunning performance in Raleigh undermined another popular excuse for his debate disaster: MSNBC hosts Alex Wagner, Lawrence O’Donnell and Ari Melber had all previously argued that Biden fared poorly in Atlanta because he had a cold. 

The common cold is not an exotic disease with unpredictable symptoms. We've all had it without descending into mumbling gibberish. 

Al Sharpton, who receives the kind of deference from his MSNBC colleagues typically reserved for gods in ancient myths, actually suggested that the debate might endear Biden to the voting public, because everyone can relate to overcoming adversity. It is rare to hear an argument so ridiculous that no rebuttal is necessary. 

The trouble, of course, is that the Major never gets out enough ... if he did, he'd have discovered such scribbling instead of hewing to the likes of the WSJ and Matt Taibbi, gone barking mad after he left the rock music rag ...

The real Major mischief is that the Major never does both siderism. A fair piece would have listed the mango Mussolini's dementia and what it portends.

If the Major had visited Salon, he would have also had a chance to read Amanda Marcotte's Project 2025 was supposed to boost Donald Trump's campaign - but it may be backfiring instead.

If you followed one of Marcotte's links, you would have landed on another Salon piece, Andra Watkins' Project 2025 is more than a playbook for Trumpism, it’s the Christian Nationalist manifesto, The right intends to force every American to live their definition of a good life through government edict.

When Jack Posobiec took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) ahead of Donald Trump last week and called for the overthrow of American democracy, he held up a Christian symbol, a cross, making clear that like many on today’s far-right, his goal is to replace democracy with a Christo-fascist regime.

One could argue they’ve already made this goal the Republican Party’s platform. They’ve been generous enough to spell it out in a Christian Nationalist manifesto from the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025.

Mainstream media outlets have begun to expose Project 2025’s radical vision: A gutted federal government; immigrants rounded up in work camps and deported; a military response to peaceful demonstrations; oppression of women, minorities, the poor and the disadvantaged. For the media, it is simply an extreme conservative plan.

When I read Project 2025, I recognized immediately that it is a 1,000-page Christo-fascist screed.

How do I know? I am a product of Christian Nationalism. 

In 1975, my parents joined a southern Christian Nationalist church and enrolled me in their kindergarten. For thirteen years, I was indoctrinated with Christian Nationalist, Moral Majority-era dogma: America is a white, Christian nation; the founders intended for Christianity to be our national religion; it was our responsibility as Christians to compel everyone to live by the truths of the Bible; I might one day have to fight and maybe die to defend my faith.

It has been a 20-year process to deprogram that worldview. As hard as it is to follow the news and read online articles, nothing prepared me for how thoroughly Project 2025 hammers home the religious indoctrination of my earlier life.

From the very beginning, Project 2025 invokes Christo-fascist language. In its preamble, Project 2025’s director Paul Dans calls for plans to “move out upon the President’s utterance of the words ‘so help me God’ on Inauguration Day.”

Dans closes his introduction with: “As Americans living at the approach of our nation’s 250th birthday, we have been given much. As conservatives, we are as much required to steward this precious heritage for the next generation.”

I know from my Bible studies he is channeling Luke 12:48: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.”

Project 2025 is riddled with this type of Christo-fascist language. Christian Nationalists do not write or speak without referencing the Bible. It is a language American voters would do well to understand before November, or it will be the language of our government.

To help the cause, I have been writing about the religious dogma underpinning Project 2025. Take Project 2025’s opening salvo, their so-called Conservative Promise—which they assert are the “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.”

Promise 1: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

“The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics— the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.” - Project 2025, page 4

Project 2025’s use of natural and unnatural is deliberate Christo-fascist language, drawn directly from the Bible:

“For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another.” -Romans 1:26-27 KJV

To a Christian Nationalist, marriage can only exist between one man and one unrelated woman. A man’s natural use is as husband and head of the home. He is the breadwinner. A woman’s natural use is to stay home, have and rear children, and submit to her husband. Project 2025 intends to impose this Christian Nationalist view of marriage and family nationwide.

According to their Bibles, a woman’s God-given purpose is to be a wife and mother without human intervention. This is the basis for their opposition to abortion, IVF and even hormonal birth control. It is also the foundation for their goal to end no-fault divorce.

Promise 2: Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

“The next conservative President must possess the courage to relentlessly put the interests of the everyday American over the desires of the ruling elite. Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored.” - Project 2025, page 9

The media has highlighted Project 2025’s promise to gut the federal government- but they are not explaining its Christo-fascist designs.

Christian Nationalists believe the Bible is God’s infallible law and so it should be the basis for all laws. They will not compromise this position because they believe God commands them to follow his perfect law to the letter.

This is why they disregard unfavorable voting outcomes like the Ohio referendum on abortion. They don’t care about polls or what American voters support. It’s why they are willing to ignore judicial decisions and election results they don’t feel serve God’s commands.They believe their Bibles give them the right to deny anyone and anything that conflicts with their interpretation of God’s law. They are already governing this way in many red states; it is how they will govern nationally if they win in November.

Promise 3: Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats. 

“Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity.” - Project 2025, page 10

In Project 2025’s draconian section on immigration, they buried this gem: Their book of human nature is the Bible. It is yet another veiled statement that the Bible should be the basis for our laws.

This is also why Christian Nationalists deplore education and expertise. They believe everything God meant for humans to know is contained in the Bible, so there is no need for any other means of enlightenment.

This is the basis for their attacks on public school classrooms and libraries, as well as secular colleges and universities. These are heretical places that teach humans to question their Bible...

There's more at the link, and it helps explain why many would prefer a Bernie in the chair than the orange Jesus, but you won't find any of this in the Major ... he's all in for the orange Jesus and never mind 2025 attempting a re-do of 1984...

Perhaps the Major missed the Luckovich cartoon featured in the AJC (paywall), and previously noted by the pond ...

And so to the final Major effort, thankfully very short ...

Exactly so, though in the Major's case he never needs to write about what he could hear and see, as he has neither the ears to hear nor the eyes to see ...as you might expect of a lover of authoritarian far right figures intent on producing a 2025 that would astonish and appall anyone remotely interested in a democratic future ...

And for a closer, another bit of the Wood coverage about an event that the Major apparently neither heard nor saw, what with Tuckyo having been banished from the Murdochian realm ...

...The reason for the high costs, he said, was simple: There are more people than houses. If he were running things, he said, his “main goal” would be to create households for a new generation of Australians or Americans, because “if it becomes too difficult or expensive for your children to buy a house in the country they were born in—you’re going to be erased.” Why does this happen? he asked. “There’s only one reason: immigration.” He added that he rather liked immigrants themselves—what could be more relatable than the desire to move to a nice country?—but condemned those who let them in, and who lead this country with “policies making it impossible for our children to live here.” The contempt for these dispossessing policy makers should remain nonviolent, he affirmed at the end of his speech, with conviction. “There is literally nothing you can do to make me” hurt anybody, he said. The correct path is civil disobedience. “You really have to decide that you’re not just not going to harm anybody,” Carlson said, “but you are willing to be harmed.”

The question for all of these populists is who the we is—whose children count as the ones who get to live here and afford a house in the Sydney or Melbourne suburbs, and who the they are who do not. At this point, I could not refrain from noticing that the crowd was pretty much entirely white. I felt not the slightest hostility, as a person with nonwhite ancestry that might suggest a taste for dog meat. But the whiteness of the audience was, shall we say, statistically unlikely to be random.

Melbourne is the Australian city most marked by recent immigration, and improved by it. Carlson is new to Australia, but I’ve been coming here for 35 years—and I am proud to have distant Australian cousins going back to the early settler generations, including a sunburnt ethnographer who was among the first to study and describe the Wurundjeri Wol Wurrung. Australians are right to be enraged by housing costs, but immigration has been a blessing that, far from erasing Australia, has created and enriched it. When Carlson said that Australia is being “taken away,” I was truly confused about how he thinks the country that so enchanted him came to be what it is. Not by being pillaged by the Chinese, surely, or by letting in uncontrolled streams of people whose cherished values include torture of animals and people. But periodic, nutrient-rich infusions of immigration have changed Australia and prevented it from becoming a stagnant outpost of a crumbling empire, Norfolk with a high rate of melanoma.

At the Melbourne airport last weekend, I’d spoken with Uyghurs and Arabs; downtown, the block after block of clean prosperity (“San Francisco without the addicts”) that Carlson rightly praised was filled with immigrants of all types, in no visible way burdening the Australians of longer standing. I asked the attendees of the speech what I should eat while in town, and most suggested Asian restaurants. Melbourne and Perth both have plenty of addicts, and if their residents could get rid of either them or the immigrants, I assume they would choose the former. (Perth, incidentally, is Australia’s meth capital. Carlson’s hotel must not have been in the areas where you find shirtless, sweaty white guys twitching angrily on street corners.) Varied international dining options are of course a cosmetic matter, the kind of thing a rootless cosmopolitan visitor like me might appreciate. But it is simply a fact that Australia, like it or not, is a result of many years of work by people with a range of origins not well represented by Monday’s audience at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Carlson flew back to America the next morning, to a country in the acute crisis of having a president he considered “demented” and “clearly incapable of making toast.” He accused America’s shadow rulers of having murdered John F. Kennedy. (Clive Palmer, who was interviewing him onstage at the time, did not request any elaboration on this accusation. It was that kind of night.) Carlson said he felt “guilty” for being away from his homeland while the country was falling apart. He did not, I noticed, say what he would do to end this catastrophe. I have long wondered whether he will enter politics himself. These speeches had stump elements to them, like practice for the big show back home. Were he to join the Trump ticket—and only seldom does a short list of possible running mates include him—he would at least increase the number of major-party candidates not in dire need of a neurological evaluation. In the present circumstances, that would count as an upgrade to the health of our political system. But that says more about our political system than it does about him.

And that yarn, in its own way, says a lot more about the lizards at the reptile Oz and the rotating pantheon of far right authoritarians and populists in their midst than it does about Tuckyo Carlson ... and so to close with an immortal Rowe, celebrating the current situation ...