Separated at Birth : Musk, Tucker and TikTok 'Influencers'

Attention Seekers Unite!

It might seem unfair to link such mega-celebrities as Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson with young women hawking skimpy bikinis on TikTok, but they all share a desperate need for attention. It’s kind of a modern, online egomania—”Attention Seekers Unite!”

In fact, as recent events have shown, Musk and Carlson are right up there on that “attention must be paid” scale, putting most TikTok ‘influencers’ to shame.

Elon has announced a new political party for the unrepresented masses of our country, presumably led by him, with the not terribly original name “America.” (Ironically, the late Abbie Hoffman named his son “America.”) Such luminaries as Mark Cuban and Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci have not surprisingly signed on. Musk sent out a tweet (can we still call it that?) asking his followers to choose a location for their first rendezvous, Mars not yet being available. That would come year three on Musk Time.

Meanwhile, the supposedly intrepid Tucker has interviewed the president of Iran. . He’s keeping us apprised of the truth about our enemies, with the not so subtle undertone that we may be in error. Vladimir Putin was not enough

Neither of these men are about to go off in the woods and meditate for a year—no matter what they tell us or pretences they may have. They are about as “in your face” as one can get—media critters.

The two, however, are not quite the same, despite the similarities. Elon Musk is an extraordinary entrepreneur having pioneered several companies of great originality with considerable influence on the future. Unfortunately, the obvious skills he had honed or was born with to do these things do not translate to politics where some degree of compromise comes with the territory. That he has made an ass of himself with his bravado is the least of it. It’s hard to see what he contributes to national discussion at this point. X, that he once laudably opened to free speech, has morphed into a home for the marshmallow-brained.

Did Donald Trump encourage this? A little. But Elon now behaves like the most pathetic of rejected sons. The America Party is an example of his flailing. I don’t know if it’s in the betting market yet but I would guess this party has somewhere around three weeks before its founder moves on to better things—like next year’s Tesla. He could be, already almost is, our Edison. Why is he wasting time on politics?

President Trump, who has a way of getting to the essence of a problem, responded this way when asked about Musk’s new political party: “It’s ridiculous.”

Tucker Carlson is a different story. When he did that Putin interview, I defended him even though he obviously didn’t know much about Russia. Having been there four times, twice for lengthy periods during the Soviet period as an officer of the first (probably only) writer’s organization on both sides of Iron Curtain, I was in a position to judge that. Tucker’s naivety during his visit to a Moscow supermarket was mind boggling, as if he had never heard of a “Potemkin village,” a propagandistic fake like a stage set. The supermarket may not have been exactly that—it was in a wealthier section of Moscow— but if he traveled even three kilometers away, let alone to rural Russia, to see how stores were stocked, he would have seen another situation entirely.

But the Putin interview was finally, in the words of LA Lakers’ Chick Hearn, “no harm, no foul” and excusable. Not so the interview with the very new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian. I have not seen this interview and do not intend to because the very thought of it nauseates me. Mr. Pezeshkia is a “Potemkin village” unto himself. Not only is it well known that his position exists only for propaganda purposes and has no real power—that belongs to the Ayatollah Khamenei, as virtually everyone realizes—this particular president is not even a member of the Assembly of Experts, the group of mullahs that elects the Ayatollah. (Some earlier presidents have been.)

Tucker’s desire to interview this man seems to stem from his own no longer hidden beliefs— a growing dislike for Israel, and possibly Jews. This has shocked me, since we were to some degree friends for a number of years. This new Tucker emerged over a year ago when he interviewed the internet historian Darryl Cooper who claimed Churchill, not Hitler, was “the chief villain of the Second World War”. How better to draw attention for an “internet historian”?

Carlson’s bias, or can we call it bigotry, also showed during an interview with Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac, a pastor in Bethlehem, who blamed the Israelis for the absence and mistreatment of Christians in the town of Christ’s birth.

Here again my personal experience contradicted Tucker’s apparent eagerness to believe this particular pastor. Since we are nearly thirty years apart, it is unlikely (he can correct me if I am wrong) that Carlson ever visited Bethlehem in the 1980s as I did. That was before the Oslo Accords when the town was still under Israeli control. Quite peaceful, it was teeming with Christian prelates from all over the world and, of course, tourists. After the accords, in the early nineties, Bethlehem went under the control of the Palestinian Authority and their military wing Fatah of Yassir Arafat terror fame. Not surprisingly, most Christian prelates fled, some to Israel proper, some across the globe. Those few that remained made their accommodation with the PA and Fatah and became their “face men,” blaming Israel as part of the bargain. One of those was clearly the prelate Tucker interviewed.He didn’t seem to notice or care. When I returned to Bethlehem in the late nineties it was an austere and more than slightly scary place, resembling Ramallah or Jenin, although considerably smaller. Tourism was naturally down.

As you can see, I am rather angry and hugely disappointed with Tucker. You can’t laugh off a man with his media power lying to the country (and himself). I imagine he thinks he isn’t, but he should do a little serious research, not through his producers eager for clicks, but on his own before he interviews the Iranian president, maybe read Amir Taheri’s biography of the original Ayatollah lo learn the ominous details of his Shia ideology or look into what happened to the freedom demonstrators in Evin Prison. (I did for a film and the evidence of torture was horrifying.) But I suspect he hasn’t. It’s all media flip-flam. In the long run, it won’t add up to much. Whether Tucker will return to his senses is a question I cannot answer. I hope he does.