Step right up and welcome to Carnival of Fools! You may be wondering, much like Admiral James Stockdale’s famous debate moment of my youth, “Who am I? Why am I here?” The answer, of course, is that I am Jeffrey Blehar, National Review’s resident bedraggled cynic, and I’m only in it for the money. So please subscribe, posthaste — I’m not going to live forever, after all.
More accurately, the reason this newsletter has come into existence is that we’re all generally agreed around here that there is simply too much stupidity in the world of politics today, and nobody has enough time to cover it all. I’m not talking about your average run-of-the-mill Washington nonsense like sex scandals and graft and illegal arms deals with foreign countries — that healthy raincloud of political degeneracy every American kid should grow up under, drizzling down occasionally with news of Gary Hart canoodling with Donna Rice aboard the Monkey Business, back when sex scandals actually derailed presidential campaigns.
No, I’m referring, rather, to the new political zeitgeist, the sense of carnivalesque viral-video-driven meaninglessness that has infected all campaigns and guides the publicity-seeking behavior of Congress’s most visible (and risible) members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, Matt Gaetz, Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others. It’s a substanceless grist of talk rather than action, fed into a 24-hour news mill and spat out into a media ecosystem with such quickfire rapidity that responding to all of it is impossible, and a general sense of “LOL nothing matters” sinks in among political observers of an older generation.
Are you bothered by it? As one born in 1980 — thus with a life formed both before and after the internet revolution — I myself am horrified. One of my fundamental theories of human behavior is that the internet has warped (ruined?) everybody’s minds and permanently altered for the worse the way we consume news and teach ourselves knowledge. (You will see that theme return over and over again here if you stick around.)
You can’t beat ’em, and I’ll never join ’em; instead, I will be using this newsletter to mop up all the remaining spills and sticky puddles from the prior week’s media nonsense that I otherwise missed in my primary work, or about which felt I had something more to add. You might see some overarching philosophical arguments begin to emerge here over time, from installment to installment — it is my natural way of developing a theme.
In addition — you can consider this a bonus or a giant red flag, depending on your opinion of me — I’ll be using this spot to have fun on the side, building junk-sculptures out of all the other ridiculous pop-cultural flotsam and jetsam washing up on the shoreline of our uniquely liminal era. Movies, music, literature, the sublime epiphanies offered by a properly made “Chicago dog” — it’ll all eventually and inevitably find its way here alongside bemused comments about Taylor Swift’s love life and how I’ve learned to hate the Washington Commanders. (That said, if RFK Jr. is caught skeletonizing yet another large exotic mammal, that earns a piece all its own.)
Right now, I’m publishing this here on NRO, but we will soon be emailing it out weekly as well. You don’t want to miss out, do you? This is where I’m liable to make all my most memorable mistakes, after all! So if you enjoy circus shows where the clown is half-laughing and half-crying as he tumbles about clumsily like a distracted Pagliacci, then I hope you enjoy the Carnival of Fools — and I’ll spare you the introduction next time out. (Did I mention this is where you can sign up?)
If This Debate Doesn’t Matter, Then LOL Nothing Matters
And right off the bat, here I am rehearsing one of my running themes. In a political age whose refrain among detached observers is “LOL nothing matters” — witness the scandals that politicians nowadays regularly survive, or the trash-TV moments that would have in an earlier era been relegated to Jenny Jones — I’m here to say that the lone presidential debate, something that famously used to not matter, now matters a great deal.
Scarcity obviously creates its own market; Harris, who was switched into the nomination with only 100 days to go until the election, is running a campaign purposely organized around denying her to the press or to the American people outside of heavily curated events. Furthermore, the fact that we are living through one of the most bizarre election cycles in American history — you’d arguably now have to skip 1968 and head all the way back to 1860 for a weirder one, and joke’s on you, pal, because that one sparked the Civil War — means that we are primed for the lone confrontation between these two raggedy emblems of their parties’ ids.
So, yes, this debate genuinely matters. I’ll leave all the pregame strategizing to others. (My primary counsel to Trump: Avoid anything that plays like bullying a woman. My advice to Harris: Try to Freaky Friday yourself into the body of literally anyone else.) Others will be setting the stage today with the stakes, but, unless struck by a vehicle or personal catastrophe, I will be live-blogging the debate with the rest of the NR crew, and then perhaps mopping up the entrails later on. Given that an enormous amount rides on this, I recommend — if you really care — that you start drinking at least an hour before it begins.
Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance, and the Limits of Loyalty
Last week I wrote about Tucker Carlson with the resigned understanding that, given his continuing influence on a small but influential segment of young and future activists within the conservative movement, I’d no longer be able to ignore him or even wash my hands of him, at least not for a long time. And wouldn’t you know it, now I have to scratch some J. D. Vance out from under my fingernails as well, because as it turns out, the vice-presidential candidate — who I noted in my piece had already agreed to a podcast appearance with Carlson later this September — also sat down for a pre-recorded interview with Carlson just last week, on September 5, several days into the controversy over Carlson’s interview with a pro-Nazi crank “historian” and mere hours after the White House had officially made a statement about it. Vance justifies it by saying he’s not into cancel culture and won’t abandon a friend.
I may write yet about Liz Cheney and the agonizingly fine line across which opposition to Donald Trump (I am notably not a fan) simply turns into rejection of all conservative principle. Until then, however, it’s important to grasp that Vance’s attitude is entirely of a piece with Cheney’s, albeit through the mirror: In her case, principled opposition has curdled into mindless spite, to the point of proud and outright apostasy. (I’m not even talking about endorsing or not endorsing Kamala Harris but rather her support for Democrat Colin Allred, running in Texas to unseat Senator Ted Cruz.) In Vance’s case we see loyalty beyond reason.
Tucker Carlson begged his entire listenership to pay close attention for 90 minutes as he slavishly licked the boot soles of the “most important historian in the United States,” nodding along as an avowed Hitler sympathizer argued that Eastern Front atrocities — and the Holocaust itself — were mere accidents, that Winston Churchill was in fact the greatest villain of the Second World War, and that he was propped up in his villainy by sinister Jewish financiers. Carlson was an active participant in this conversation, not as a critic but as a fan, smiling and nodding and attaboying the entire time. This is not “just asking questions” stuff; this is the standard method all truly vile liars use to wittingly inject poison into the bloodstream of our discourse.
Carlson could have taken the tape of this conversation and simply thrown it away if he’d wanted to. Instead he wants you to ask yourself whether Hitler and the Nazis might have been the good guys after all, just wildly misunderstood. If you’re stupid enough to be taken in by this transparent imposture, then that is your problem; I reserve the right, however, to point out what it is Carlson is actually trying to do versus what he says he is doing. (Even though I think he is now sincere in his anti-Americanism, he remains a supremely skilled liar, merely deploying those talents for other purposes.)
So I have to ask J. D. Vance: Is this man really your friend? The personal is not political, this I’ll grant, but have you ever asked Carlson, the way Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee recently did, “Hey bro, cool show and all, but why did you just smile and nod and praise the Nazi dude last week?”
“It is what it is,” said a Trump campaign official in response to the news of Vance’s sit-down with Carlson after the latter went partway-Nazi. I hope I have the presence of mind to display a similar equanimity should I find myself mounting a gibbet I constructed for myself.
Greta Thunberg Recedes into Cliché
Remember Greta Thunberg, everyone’s favorite vinegar-rictused teenage eco-scold, shrieking at us at the United Nations about stolen dreams and Big Oil and whatnot? (“Like Björk being led to the hangman in Dancer in the Dark,” to quote an old line I’ll probably never top.) She more or less disappeared from American media coverage after her big 2019–21 moment. To remind you of how big she once was: Thunberg was named Time’s “Person of the Year” in 2019, and though the title has been degraded in value ever since they awarded it to me back in 2006, at that time it was still a measure of cultural significance. Last I heard, Thunberg had traded in her eco-panic for pro-Hamas gear, moving to where the new heat — and media attention — is. So now she’s getting “arrested” (always for cameras, never in any meaningful sense) for Gaza, Hamas, and demanding the dissolution of the Jewish state.
I won’t link to the photographs of these (many, many) recent stunts simply because that is what she wants. I just invite you to ponder this one photograph of Thunberg arresting herself, handcuffed to the microphone of a podcast she has joined with a smile and a keffiyeh. Understand the seriousness of Greta Thunberg — and the level of moral conviction of an entire generation of activists — through that one picture alone, and you won’t go terribly wrong.
The End of the Internet Archive’s Digital Lending
Sad news from the world of knowledge piracy:
In a swift decision, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously affirmed a March 2023 lower court decision finding the Internet Archive’s program to scan and lend print library books is copyright infringement. In an emphatic 64-page decision, released on September 4, the court rejected the Internet Archive’s fair use defense, as well as the novel protocol known as “controlled digital lending” on which the Archive’s scanning and lending is based.
“This appeal presents the following question: Is it ‘fair use’ for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no,” the decision states.
This is a truly niche concern — I doubt that many readers even realized that such treasures had for many years been available at the Internet Archive, free to all with an account. (I noticed that certain works — those whose publishers were more legally aggressive — disappeared more quickly than others; now presumably they all will.) But it is an enormous loss for me personally, on an intellectual level, as I have gained so much knowledge from borrowing otherwise inaccessible and wildly expensive books.
The Internet Archive really opened its library doors fully once Covid lockdowns went into effect in 2020. The entire period of “lockdown” is a dark, angry place in my mind. As the parent of a toddler in Chicago, I’m beset by memories I wish never to return to and regrets that can never be requited. But what I had back then was this endless resource of knowledge with which to keep myself sane. I understand the importance of copyright, and don’t even question the validity of the ruling. I simply lament the loss of easily available knowledge — real, serious knowledge, available to all who search it out intentionally — in an era rapidly and increasingly turning toward the demotic. We’re already becoming a stupid-enough culture in the age of social media. I suppose a great way to emphasize the divide between elite access to knowledge and mass ignorance is to wall off academic history behind $100+ price tags for slim, specialist, hard-copy monographs.
A Thought for Lara Trump during Her Tenure at the RNC
Please do not continue to spend campaign money on professionally videotaping and editing your singing lessons. We’ll circle back to this later if necessary.
Twitter Moment of the Week: Nikki Haley
This might become a regular feature, or it might not; it really depends on how Extremely Online our current class of politicians continues to be. A moment can be good, or it can be despairingly, irrevocably bad. (Just ask the U.K. Labour Party’s Ed Balls.) But given the revelations about Tenet media — the Russian propaganda outfit created by Lauren Chen using recruits like Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and others to unwittingly mouth Russian propaganda that she hand-fed to them — I figured it was time to salute Nikki Haley for mentioning something I omitted in my piece: Chen’s appalling tendency — as a Canadian, no less — to accuse Republican politicians supporting Ukraine or Israel of “dual loyalties.” She clearly has dual loyalties as well — except, as it turns out, neither of them was to the United States. I’ll let Ambassador Haley have the last word:
