MAGA Media Is Torn Over Hegseth’s Screwups 🍿
Plus: Joe Rogan’s guests debate the borders of kookland.
Hegseth hullabaloo
DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH HAS VOWED to bring “warfighters” back to the Pentagon. True to form, his ongoing leadership debacle has set off a narrative war between two conservative media titans: Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.
The dispute centers on three high-ranking Defense Department staffers ousted last week, reportedly as the result of a leak investigation. Since then, the three have been on an unusually high-profile redemption tour, issuing a joint statement saying they’re innocent.
Longtime Hegseth adviser Dan Caldwell, one of the staffers who got the boot, even paid a visit to Carlson’s hunting-lodge studio on Monday to argue his innocence. Carlson trumpeted Caldwell as a victim of a deep-state plot to go to war with Iran; his working theory is that because Caldwell opposes such a war, unknown entities at the Pentagon framed him and the two other men for leaking.
“Was Dan Caldwell fired because he opposed the push to war with Iran?” Carlson said. “You decide.” (Facebook users may find the question has been decided for them in advance: Carlson’s title for the video on that platform is “The Pentagon Didn’t Fire Dan Caldwell Over Leaks. They Fired Him for Opposing War With Iran.”)
As proof of his innocence, Caldwell said on Carlson’s show that no one at the Pentagon has inspected his phones or made him take a polygraph test.
Kelly, for one, isn’t buying it. On Tuesday, the mega-popular podcaster devoted her show to pushing back on the idea that Caldwell and the other two alleged leakers are innocent. While her former Fox News colleague Carlson presented Caldwell as a principled patriot entrapped by sinister forces, Kelly effectively said that the ousted trio should be looking to cut deals to avoid prosecution.
“The first one into the Pentagon to say ‘choose me’ is going to get a great [deal],” she said. “Anyone after that could be looking at prison time.”
As for the fact that no one has seized Caldwell’s devices yet? That, Kelly predicted, could all be solved soon with a search warrant.
“I’m not saying Caldwell leaked those top-secret documents to NBC News, but it certainly could’ve been him, and it looks like the Pentagon thinks it was him,” she said.
What explains the discrepancy here? Tough to say. But while the ouster of the Pentagon trio involves machinations around Hegseth that may have nothing to do with Iran, it is posing a challenge for the conservative narrative machine.
If you buy, as Kelly apparently does, that Caldwell was a leaker, that means that the America First movement had a mole at its heart—and that Hegseth was too oblivious to notice. At the same time, Carlson’s version of the story suggests that Hegseth is being manipulated into axing his closest advisers by entrenched groups pushing for a war.
Either explanation leads to a difficult admission for pro-Trump personalities: Pete Hegseth, a former Fox & Friends host, is in way over his head.
Rogan throwdown pits eggheads against podbros
THE RIGHT-WING COGNOSCENTI have been roiled for two weeks by a question: Is Joe Rogan too open to having crackpots on his show?
To me, the answer is obviously, yes. He just hosted a critic of the polio vaccine! But for some conservative intellectual types whose own platforms have rapidly grown thanks to appearances on Rogan’s podcast, his acceptance of conspiracy theorists and old-school antisemites is a relatively new and very unwelcome problem.
This debate kicked off two weeks ago, when Rogan hosted a discussion between British writer Douglas Murray and libertarian comedian Dave Smith about Israel and American support for Ukraine.
Murray kicked off the show by complaining, essentially, that Rogan hosts too many ignoramuses who feel entitled to hold forth about subjects about which they know nothing, a criticism he extended to Smith and another recent guest of Rogan’s, noted Churchill-hater Darryl Cooper. Murray argued that those guests followed a typical bad-faith pattern: They would make outrageous claims about politics or history, then retreat when pressed on them, stressing they were only comedians or podcasters. “There’s some point at which ‘I’m just raising questions’ is not a valid thing—you’re not raising questions, you’re not asking questions, you’re telling people something you think,” Murray said.
The Smith–Murray showdown became something like a Rorschach test among the very-online right, with each side’s partisans claiming their favored guest had won. Things got a little ruder in a follow-up episode last week when Rogan adopted a fake British accent to make fun of Murray’s defense of Israel.
The one person this volatile mix was missing is doubtlessly Canadian academic and life guru Jordan Peterson. But fortunately for everyone, he found his way into it soon enough. Peterson has been on a campaign to warn America that the right and left alike have been hijacked by “dark tetrad” psychopaths, and in a Monday appearance on Rogan’s show, he implied that the psychopaths are flourishing on The Joe Rogan Experience.
“How do you identify the psychopathic parasites—4 percent of the population—who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags, but who are only in it for narcissistic benefit?” Peterson said, calling on conservative media figures (like, ahem, Rogan) to do more to stop platforming these supposed vicious bad-faith actors—though he shied away from naming them.
This would all just be so much podcast drama, but it points to an increasing split between “heterodox” or “classical liberal” intellectuals and the broader MAGA movement.
Once known as the “Intellectual Dark Web,” this is a group that ranges from the Free Press’s Bari Weiss, to Peterson, to “anti-woke” personalities like James Lindsay. It’s challenging to paint such a varied group with a broad brush, but one unifying theme is that each of these figures claims to have been pushed right by the excesses of liberal wokeness.
Now, “wokeness” is in retreat, Trumpism is ascendant and that group finds itself at odds with the MAGA movement—especially conflict-eager podcasters, and especially over American support for Israel. Lindsay has dubbed MAGA personalities playing with antisemitism and white identity politics as the “woke right,” a term that’s picked up currency among his compatriots. By this he means that they “behave exactly like the woke,” including through “targeted influence campaigns” and a deep commitment to “identity politics,” but have replaced progressive beliefs and advocacy with reactionary beliefs and advocacy.
And while Peterson didn’t quite spell out that he meant right-wing critics of Israel are psychopaths, those critics certainly thought he was talking about them! Conspiracy theorist and former Rogan guest Ian Carroll claimed Peterson was “intimating” that Carroll and his ilk are the sociopaths he’s talking about, while podcaster Candace Owens likened Peterson to a Soviet doctor who diagnosed dissidents as insane as part of a larger program of political repression.
As long as the crackpots get the most views, Rogan will platform the crackpots and give them nice, genial interviews. I cannot fathom how so many people find 3 hour stretches of this entertaining, but they do. But, we are a nation where The History Channel has morphed into a litany of conspiracist crackpottery about ancient aliens and ghosts and where The Learning Channel became a reality showcase of weirdos and outliers. We turn everything potentially good into something tawdry and destructive.
*chortle* Love that they are chewing on each other.