Tucker Carlson and the Plight of the Yellow Vests

Guest Post by Tom Luongo

I have to hand out sincere kudos to Tucker Carlson. His opening salvo for 2019 was one for the ages. It was a broad-ranging, fifteen-minute rhetorical tour de force.

Tying together Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalism, unchecked immigration, political corruption and the destruction of the middle class family, Carlson laid out a story that if everyone took off their ideological blinders for a few minutes (myself included) would see as simply a horror show.

Carlson’s thesis is that the American family is disintegrating. He’s right. But it’s not just America. It’s everywhere globalism has been the watchword of public policy, ie. Europe as well.

The Yellow Vests in France began protesting over a rise in diesel fuel tax to support climate change initiatives and has morphed into a full-blown revolt against globalism, neoliberalism and French government institutions.

It is the next stage of the dreaded populist uprising of Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables.’ And it’s jumped borders. This is the kind of color revolution I can support, not the fake ones ginned up by oligarchs like George Soros.

But what I found interesting was how Carlson was tying together all of the strands of public policy decisions which has created this web of perverse incentives we live under.

In short, globalism has gentrified the cities and impoverished the countryside. Rural job prospects are gone in many areas, not just in the U.S. but also in France and Italy and Greece, etc.

But, at the same time the cost of living through excessive financialization of the economy in the cities has reached a point where middle class workers live like ants to survive the crushing expenses.

This is what the Yellow Vests are protesting about in France –and now Canada, Taiwan, Belgium and even for a brief moment, the U.K.

The only ones #winning in this environment are the ones who print, direct and disseminate the money — the Mitt Romneys, the Jamie Dimons and the Nancy Pelosis.

And if you notice any time someone proposes something rational about changing this dynamic they are denounced as ‘reactionary’ or ‘threatened’ or, in the worst case, ‘populist.’

This, to me, signals that this dynamic, this process, hasn’t been an accidental confluence of factors. That its not the unfortunate consequence of garden variety corruption of our political system but something far more sinister.

It was designed policy.

Which brings me back to Tucker Carlson. As a follow up to his first rant Carlson went off of Rick Wilson, a picture of vile punditry if there ever was one.

This is the next stage of the attack on rural America. First it was destroy their ability to live a stable life, raise children and pass wealth down through the generations.

Then it was import the worst people from the rest of the world, zip code targeting immigrants to flip certain states to destroy potential revolt through the ballot box.

And now we’re into the vilification stage, the dehumanization stage. This is the foundation our leaders always lay before going to war with someone.

In the past it’s always been some group of evil brown people across the ocean.

Today it’s the deplorable, ten-toothed white people who are too stupid to recognize why they need to be exterminated.

Hillary’s ‘basket of deplorables’ rant lost her the election, but today it is animating a large swath of the country to hate Trump voters, not just Trump.

So, that when the inevitable collapse of this system occurs it will be blamed first on Trump accompanied by the insufferable cries of “I told you so” and then on Trump voters.

Make no mistake, this was policy. This was the point of the long march through the institutions. And the collapse that is coming, that everyone on Wall St. and K Street are preparing for, needs a scapegoat.

Meanwhile, the real solution stares us in the face and if we want to avoid this outcome, we need to stop ab-reacting to the words people say and look for the reasons why they are saying them, the meaning behind them.

In a world saturated with communication, we are engaging in a stunning lack of it. As I touch on in this video, I don’t begrudge Carlson his rant against market capitalism being a religion. I know there’s a person there who is asking the right questions and is looking for solutions.

Because if we start talking to each other again versus at each other we may just figure out who was behind all this in the first place.

I’ve got my yellow vest, do you?

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