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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Rise of the Tucker Carlson Politician
Two Republican Senate candidates field-test a new message honed in the cable-news studio.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/magazine/tucker-carlson-politician.html
https://archive.ph/Kc8Hm
There are legal rules that govern political ads say, the one that requires federal candidates to appear onscreen and approve this message and then there are aesthetic rules. A candidate whos touting education proposals, for instance, will invariably be shown sitting awkwardly in a kid-size chair, reading to elementary-school students. A promise to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States must be accompanied by footage of the candidate, preferably in a hard hat, nodding meaningfully at someone in a factory. The candidate should always appear with people talking, listening, shaking hands except when speaking directly to the viewer, which should be done from a living room, with a credenza cluttered with family photos in the background.
Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, ignores these rules. In a series of online videos for his campaign, he appears all by himself, far from hearth and home, to make a slew of dire pronouncements. In one, Masters stands in the desert, flanked by cactuses, and declares: Psychopaths are running the country right now. In another, hes in the middle of a hayfield, saying, Our military leadership is totally incompetent. In a third, he appears to have just walked out of a forest at twilight to announce, Our schools are making our kids dumber.
This is Masterss first campaign. He is 35, and before entering politics, he spent eight years working for the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The unsettlingly intense gaze and untucked chambray shirt in his videos leave him looking more like a venture capitalist than a politician; even his name sounds like something Bret Easton Ellis might have dreamed up for a Silicon Valley novel. Its clearly tempting to view Masterss videos through that tech- and Thiel-inflected lens. When they hit Twitter, a Motherboard writer joked that it seemed like Masters would flay you and wear your skin if Thiel commanded it, while The Washington Posts Michael Scherer observed that the spots were less like political ads and more like MoMA installations, made to broadcast on the museum wall. It is always dawn or dusk, the tech oracles have returned from space and half of your countrymen want to destroy you.
Link to tweet
But these campaign videos actually have a different, more prosaically political antecedent: Tucker Carlsons monologues. Five nights a week, Carlson offers his populist message to more than three million Fox News Channel viewers. He tells them that the people who run our country, namely Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, are a senile man and an imbecile; that our military leadership, in the person of Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is not just a pig, hes stupid; and that in our schools, your children are being taught by some of the most ignorant people in the country. Now Masters along with another former Thiel employee, J.D. Vance, whos running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Ohio is trying to convert this rhetoric into an actual political campaign.
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