2:07:18 video

Watching Tucker Carlson at work interviewing Vlad Grozny in his Kremlin lair is quite an experience. Tucker is 54 years old and still downright pretty. You kind of marvel that he is apparently straight. And, bow tie or four-in-hand, you have to give it to him, he makes an excellent tie. St. George School clearly grounds its graduates in at least some of the important fundamentals.

But when we watch Tucker go up against Vladimir Putin, the current Grand Duke of the Empire of Muscovy, self-made Tsar, and stone cold killer, we are bound to feel some astonishment at just how far out of his depth Tucker is.

Watching Putin delivering that lengthy and self-flattering version of the history of the Muscovite Despotism to the gapingly naive and historically clueless Tucker was more than a little sad and sent me struggling for a comparison case of the innocent bourgeois herbivore conversing with the monster predator who is, just for now, managing to refrain from making him into an amuse bouche.

One pictures Tucker as another Bilbo sitting and interviewing the Dragon Smaug about his current dwarf policies and his friction with the Rivertown. Or as Jonathan Harker listening to Count Dracula boast of his descent from Attila the Hun and victories over the Turk. I kept waiting to hear the howling of wolves nearby briefly interrupt the conversation, and expecting Putin to remark: “The Children of the Night! What music they make!”

But neither Bilbo nor Jonathan Harker were anywhere nearly as oblivious to the real nature of their interlocutor. Nor did either publish his own account, failing as Tucker Carlson does, to comment on the disingenuity of the Big Bad Wolf complaining of the possible installation of guard dogs at the neighboring sheep flock as an example of aggression against himself.

I suppose though that, had Tucker pointed out the irony of Putin’s demands that Ukraine “denazify” by banning praise of, or memorials to, various Ukrainian nationalists like Stepan Bandera who sided with Germany against Russia in WWII, when Putin’s Russia has never itself actually de-Bolshevized or repudiated the memory of the communists guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity on an even larger scale than Nazi Germany’s, in that event, poor Tucker might very possibly have found himself getting arrested like Even Gershkovich, charged with spying, and frog-marched to the Lubyanka or simply bumped off like Yevgeny Prigozhin and so many of the others who dared to offend Putin.

Interviewing monsters is a tricky business. One doesn’t want to die obviously, but one should also have reservations about lending aid and support.

Mediate story

It’s all over the news today. Not surprising. It’s a big deal.

We get no explanation. Was he blamed for reckless accusations against Dominion and Smartmatic that have already cost Fox News $787.5 million and will cost more to come?

Is Fox changing sides from Right to Left the way Drudge Report, Little Green Footballs, Balloon Juice did?

He can’t really have left because of a better television offer. There is nowhere but Fox for him to go. I suppose he could move to AM Radio and try to take the place previously occupied by Rush Limbaugh, but Tucker Carlson would probably feel that moving to radio would be a waste of his boyish good looks and preppy attire.

All in all, this is seriously bad news.

pic.twitter.com/reenwuelHY

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2020

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Daily Mail:

Trump tweets video of Chinese professor claiming that Beijing can swing US policy because it has ‘people at the top of America’s core inner circle of power’ in clip that has been deleted from social media in China

Di Dongsheng, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, appeared on a Chinese television show about Wall Street and international trade last month.

The video was deleted from Chinese social media soon after being uploaded but copies were made which have since been circulating including YouTube.

Professor Di stated how China had ‘people at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence’ for years.

Di said the relationship was true for decades until President Trump came along.

He also notes how the Obama administration was easy to manipulate.

Di believes the old ties between China and the U.S. will be restored once President Biden is in the White House.

Excerpts of the video were tweeted by President Trump on Monday night after Tucker Carlson shared a clip on his show.

Decius identified as Michael Anton, the figure on the right

Claremont Institute last Fall made a major splash by publishing a revolutionary manifesto by a Trump-supporting intellectual, who struck learned, classical poses while championing Alt-Right demands for a new blend of Populism and Nationalism to replace the Conservative Movement and the politics of Goldwater, Buckley, and Reagan.

This provocative writer chose to be anonymous, appearing in the mode of 18th century polemicists under a Classical pen-name, in his case: Publius Decius Mus, a 4th century B.C. Roman consul who, according to Livy, facing imminent defeat, deliberately sacrificed himself in battle, having first offered up himself and the enemy to the gods of the Underworld and the Earth, thus gaining for Rome the victory.

Several further articles by Decius appeared during the course of the electoral campaign, and word leaked out in Conservative circles that Decius was none other than Tucker Carlson, who needed to be anonymous because he was right on the verge of a major new deal with Fox News. I, like a lot of people, believed those rumors, but we all politely kept our mouths shut, thinking that, despite our disagreements, the author was entitled to his privacy and his career opportunities.

It appears that it was just as well that nobody went public with the Tucker Carlson rumor, because here is Michael Warren, in the Weekly Standard, telling us that Mousey is a completely different guy, a fellow named Michael Anton.

On a late January afternoon, as press secretary Sean Spicer walked into the White House media briefing room, a tall, thin, bespectacled man poked his head in the doorway for a moment before turning around and heading back into the West Wing. Later that week, at another briefing, the man stayed longer, standing in the corner behind the podium, out of view of the array of television cameras.

The reporters peppering Spicer with questions were unlikely to know it, but the wallflower watching over the proceedings happened to be the leading conservative intellectual to argue for the election of Donald Trump. His pseudonymous essays during the campaign sparked more discussion—and disputation—among thinkers on the right than just about anyone else’s. Rush Limbaugh spent hours on his radio show promoting what he hailed as the writer’s “shaming” of the Never Trump conservatives. Leading conservative opponents of Trump, like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, published critical responses to his most widely read essay. The writer even granted a postelection interview to the New Yorker, on the condition that his real identity not be revealed. The magazine described him as among those trying “to build a governing ideology” around Trump.

Now he’s helping to implement that governing ideology directly. The writer is a senior national-security official in the Trump White House, nearly a decade after serving in a similar role for George W. Bush. His unmasking ends one of the remaining mysteries of last year’s crazy and unpredictable election.

The enigmatic writer’s real name is Michael Anton, and he’s a fast-talking 47-year-old intellectual who, unlike most of his colleagues, can readily quote Roman histories and Renaissance thinkers. But readers knew him throughout 2016 as Publius Decius Mus, first at a now-defunct website called the Journal of American Greatness and later in the online pages of the Claremont Review of Books. As Decius, Anton insisted that electing Trump and implementing Trumpism was the best and only way to stave off American decline—making a cerebral case to make America great again.

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Looking up Michael Anton on the Internet proved tricky.

There appeared to be three of them: one Michael Anton wrote articles for Claremont Review under his real name; one Michael Anton (Michael Anton Mansour) attended Auburn, played football there, and then went to Hollywood where he became an actor, writer, and filmmaker; the third Michael Anton is a sort of contemporary Beau Brummel, a style-maker expert on masculine tailoring and haberdashery, who has written a book, The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style under the pen-name Nicholas Antongiavanni.

Michael Anton Number 3 is all over the place on the Internet, pontificating pompously on male clothing. Photos of him, I believe, are up there misidentified as being of the actor-writer-filmmaker Michael Anton Number 2.

My own guess is that Michael Anton Number 1, Alt-Right Trump supporter and Claremont Review’s Decius, is the same as Michael Anton Number 3, the clothes horse. Compare the photo below to the one above.

Mens’ Tailoring Expert Michael Anton

Roger Simon and Charles Johnson never got those Ferraris everyone thought they’d soon be driving back when Pajamas Media launched.

PJM, at least, survived, but nobody got rich. Heck, Charles Johnson even lost his good sense, changed sides, and now devotes his blogging activity to defending Warmism, enforcing political correctness, and bashing conservatives. Sad, very sad.

Let’s hope Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, launching today, proves more fortunate.

DC has been described as intended to represent “a conservative answer to Huffington Post.” Arianna Huffington responded to the launch with a gracious post, observing amusingly that her own Huffpo was founded as “the progressive answer to Drudge.”