The Impossible Purity Tests of the Alt-Right
As readers of this blog are well aware, I am way too online in a way that is probably terrible for my mental health. Morbid curiosity is the engine that powers most of my doom-scrolling. I love to see what the worst people in the world are thinking and Facebook and Reddit are wonderful in that respect.
I’ve long been fascinated by the insane, impossible purity tests of the Alt-Right. All it takes is deviating from the party line as laid down by Donald Trump in ANY WAY for a sizable segment of the right to assume that a former ally has instantly but incontrovertibly become a hated foe.
As is generally the case, Trump cultists take their cues from their leader and Trump has turned on his beloved FOX News whenever they’ve done anything to displease him or counter his narrative that he won a sacred landslide reelection in 2020 that was cruelly taken from him but more importantly his supporters and the American people by the usual villains.
I don’t think Trump will ever forgive Fox for asserting that Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020, giving him the election in the process. For Trump, this is an unforgivable sin, something that he could never forgive or forget because it directly contradicts his oft-stated assertion that he DEFINITELY was re-elected President BY A LOT but that Twitter, Oprah Winfrey and the Deep State threw the election to Biden, who maybe got seventy total votes at most. I’m not talking about electoral votes: I’m talking about total votes.
When Tucker Carlson was fired recently despite being one of the most popular television personalities in the world and a massive cash cow for FOX I foolishly assume that Carlson fans might understand that if someone as successful as Carlson was fired it was because he had cost his employers literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS after Dominion won its defamation suit to the tune of seven hundred and eighty seven MILLION dollars and burned so many bridges that his firing was inevitable.
That was not how some Carlson fans saw it, of course. In the comment section for an article about his firing I was inundated with outraged supporters angrily insisting that Carlson had exposed too many explosive truths that his employers are intent on suppressing and that’s why they cynically fired arguably their main guy.
I suppose I should not be surprised. Carlson has spent decades cultivating a persona as a muckraking truth-teller who isn’t afraid to speak truth to power. When Carlson was fired his acolytes understandably assumed that the truths he was going to expose involved Fox’s corruption.
I have no doubt that Fox is, in fact, INCREDIBLY corrupt but not in the way that Alt-Right critics/Carlson defenders think.
When I went to the 2016 Republican National Convention for 7 Days in Ohio I would see Carlson leaving the press area and taking pictures with adoring fans every day. I knew damn well that Carlson is extremely successful, and also on television but my brain still peevishly inquired, “Why on earth would anyone want to have their picture taken with that dude? He fucking sucks.”
On a similar note, when world-class jackass James O’Keefe was recently fired by Project Veritas, an organization he founded, it similarly prompted defensive comments arguing that if O’Keefe was being very publicly fired from Project Veritas it’s because he, like Carlson, was exposing too many explosive truths and the Powers That Be had to stop him.
Then again O’Keefe, like Carlson, has very aggressively, successfully and lucratively cultivated a persona as a muckraking truth teller, a real life spy who went undercover to get the left to reveal their unhinged evil.
For O’Keefe fans, it’s easier to believe that Project Veritas is now an evil, possibly Communist organization being paid to pretend that O’Keefe is anything other than a hero by the Biden Administration than it is to concede that O’Keefe is too big of an asshole even for an organization he started in his own obnoxious image.
This curious delusion that if a Conservative media personality gets into trouble it’s invariably because they’re exposing provocative truths the establishment doesn’t want the public to know about even extends to Steven Crowder.
Crowder recently attracted an avalanche of bad publicity when footage of him verbally and emotionally abusing his deeply pregnant wife was leaked online. Crowder’s actions were seemingly indefensible but that didn’t keep his fans from defending them.
The Bill O’Reilly sidekick’s cult once again pointed an angry finger at Conservative media and argued that the only reason he was being criticized was because, you guessed it, he was exposing corruption and powerful people didn’t like that and felt that he had to be stopped.
This is not just true of the right, of course. There are plenty of folks on the left ready, even eager, to dump longtime allies over perceived slights.
The internet has made us all brittle, bitter, reflexively defensive partisans ready to judge people harshly for the most minor of infractions.
We all need to chill the fuck out and realize that if someone agrees with us about 98 percent of the time on important things then maybe that other 2 percent doesn’t matter, or at least shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.
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