The View from the Trash Heap of History
The amply populated trash heap of history patiently awaits those who sell their souls to evildoers. Tucker Carlson and Elise Stefanik - pay attention.
Evicted from a dinner in honor of Vice President Richard Nixon in 1956, Senator Joe McCarthy was found by a reporter in a Milwaukee alley, crying uncontrollably, now a shunned reprobate. Packing away a bottle of vodka a day, he sank deeper into paranoia, even imagining that he was being pursued by snakes. In late April 1957, he entered Bethesda Naval Hospital with yellow jaundiced skin and most of his liver shot, and died at 48. Stripped of his powerful subcommittee chair, censured and shunned by his Senate colleagues, McCarthy, who rode a wave of communist witch-hunting in the early 1950s, is viewed by historians today as a loathed and aberrant figure, a prime example of abuse of power.
Mildred Gillars died alone, broke and spurned by her countrymen in an Ohio convent in 1988. Known to the world as “Axis Sally,” Gillars served 12 years in prison for treason. She was a paid shill for Joseph Goebbels, broadcasting propaganda aimed at demoralizing U.S. troops. “A defeat for Germany would mean a defeat for America. I say damn Roosevelt and Churchill, and all of their Jews who have made this war possible. I, as an American girl, will stay over here on this side of the fence because it’s the right side,” she once said. Her name lives on as a synonym for traitor.
Irish-American William “Lord Haw Haw” Joyce likewise broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin throughout the war. He began his broadcasts with “Germany Calling! Germany Calling!” He was convicted of treason by a British court and hanged in 1946. U.S. citizen Iva “Tokyo Rose” Toguri D’Aquino broadcast for Imperial Japan. Having served six years of a ten-year sentence, she lived out her life in obscurity and shame. And Mussolini propagandist and vicious antisemite Ezra Pound, a renowned American poet before the war, spent 13 years in a ward for the criminally insane after the war, escaping court action for treason on grounds of insanity.
With an audience of an estimated 29 million listeners, in a U.S. population of some 130 million, “radio priest” Charles Coughlin was the Rush Limbaugh of the pre-World War II era. An antisemite and Hitler apologist, his listening audience was the largest in the world, possibly the largest of all time. By contrast, Limbaugh’s audience peaked at around 20 million out of a total population of under 300 million; and Tucker Carlson’s popular Fox program averaged around 3 million. Pearl Harbor brought an end to the America First movement and Coughlin’s career as a propagandist. Finally sidelined by the Catholic Church, he spent the last three-and-a-half decades of his life as an obscure parish priest, followed by a reclusive retirement.
Huey Long’s political career has been described by historians as “the closest thing to a dictatorship that America has ever known” and “the first true dictator out of the soil of America”; Franklin Roosevelt dubbed him “one of the two most dangerous men in America” (the other being Gen. Douglas MacArthur). The populist governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 described as his political philosophy, “I used to try to get things done by saying ‘please.’ Now... I dynamite ‘em out of my path.” Facing impeachment charges for corruption, conviction of which would have barred him from holding public office again, Long steamrolled and bribed enough state senators to derail the effort. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1930 in a campaign marked by rampant voter fraud, Long chose to concurrently remain as governor by ordering National Guard troops to surround the Capitol to block the lieutenant governor from assuming that office. He referred to media critics as the “lying press.” Long’s fast rising political career was ended by an assassin’s bullet in 1935 when he was only 42.
In my last piece on this platform, I wrote about discredited New York Times Moscow correspondent in the 1930s, Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose reporting white-washed Stalin’s brutal rule. The Times later judged it “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” Duranty is held up today as a model of amoral opportunistic journalism.
What do all these folks have in common? They ended up on the trash heap of history.
Which gets us to Tucker Carlson, Elise Stefanik and ilk — heirs to their antecedents’ infamy.
So, Tucker Carlson turns up this week — where else? — but Moscow to interview his idol Vladimir Putin. Echoing every lie from Moscow about the Russo-Ukraine conflict — from nonexistent U.S. germ warfare labs in Ukraine to Zelensky being hopelessly corrupt — Carlson has taken on the mantle of his treasonous predecessors, clearly oblivious of their ignominious fates, apparently convinced his “fame” will live on indefinitely among MAGA’s zombie legions. “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia, which I am?” he once told his Fox viewers.
Reviews of his two-hour session with Putin are scathing, with criticism centering on his soft-ball questions and Putin mopping the floor with him, even congratulating Carlson for having been rejected for employment by the CIA.
On the political side, Elise Stefanik did what many opportunistic politicians with no core principles do. She stuck a wet finger in the air to ascertain the direction of the political winds and changed direction to go with the flow. There’s no set of policies or ideology for her and fellow Vichy Republicans to grab onto, for the philosophical body of Trumpism comprises nothing more than grunts, sneers, lies and brain farts. But her toe-sucking sycophancy has served her well — for now. She became the third-ranking leader in the GOP House caucus after the party purged Lynn Cheney for her anti-Trump stance, and is now the most powerful woman in Congress.
I have a fascination with smart people who sell their souls to evildoers. I examined them in a two-part “Do Not Feed the Whores” essay during the Trump presidency: “Why Do So Many Really Smart People Work for a Dumbass Like Trump?” and “Why Have So Many Really Smart Journalists Sold Their Souls to Trump?”
I can accept as genuine true believers, for example, in “Trumpism” folks like Pillow Guy Lindell, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Matt Pedo Gaetz — those whose flamboyant mendacity is exceeded only by their bottomless stupidity. It’s the Ivy Leaguers and equivalents like Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham — those who suddenly switched from being serious journalists to raving propaganda mouthpieces, utterly unashamed to spout any manner of outrageous lie and hate-filled doggerel for fame and riches that get my goat. The timing of their transformation coincides neatly with when the Devil cashed in the pawn ticket for their soul.
As a propagator of lies and useful idiot to a foreign dictator, Tucker Carlson leaves Axis Sally, Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose in the dust. He’s much smarter and much more self-serving than any of them. In other words, he knows better. But time inevitably catches up with such people. Their comeuppance arrives eventually in the form of public scorn and lonely obscurity. The judgment of history for such people acts as a vandalized grave marker on their reputation. As Mephistopheles told Dr. Faustus: “Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell.”
And the amply populated trash heap of history patiently awaits them.
Fascinating. I had not heard of Coughlin before. I am not sure if I feel reassured democracy has lived through people like Trump and his ilk before, or unsettled that even if he and his are vanquished this time, there will be another of his kind before too long.