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The uproar over Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens is obscuring another problem that is going to hurt the cause of conservatism: the mean-girl tone that too often emerges in prominent voices on the right.
It rang loudly in Tucker Carlson’s recent discussion with Megyn Kelly when he derided Liz Cheney as “repulsive” just days after her father’s death, giving pundits on the left the opportunity to bash both Carlson and Kelly. It was evidence anew that you don’t have to be a girl to sound like a mean girl.
The mean-girl vibe also erupted on Kelly’s show in September, when she berated Jemele Hill, not only for her reprehensible comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder, but about her looks, saying, “You can’t be both ugly on the outside and the inside, you need to choose one.”
Addressing Hill, Kelly also said, “You need a little work, and you should have them back off the camera a little bit because you are not attractive enough to have that extreme close-up. Push away your laptop, Jemele, and add a filter or two.”
To be fair, Kelly was running especially hot because this exchange happened the week after her friend’s murder. And also, Hill’s subsequent response was vulgar and over the top.
But people have been talking about the “MAGA mean girl” vibe since the spring; it’s not a new development, but one closely associated with the “own the libs” mentality that has been poisoning civil discourse for years. And there are now people on the left advising Democrats to be more mean, including Suzanne Lambert, who’s been compared to the bully in the 2004 “Mean Girls” movie.
A common rejoinder is that this is what it takes to repel the cultural tide that conservatives are up against. And that conservatives have made strides in the culture because of people like Donald Trump, who gets laughs with personal insults like Rush Limbaugh before him.
But the rise of new media allows the mean-girl vibe to flourish as more people like Carlson and Kelly strike out on their own, with no institutional guardrails in place. Yes, legacy media organizations have had their own problems, but without wise editors, it’s a short walk from “unleashed” to “unhinged” (which is what Carlson is being called these days by some on the right).
The mean-girl jabs are particularly unsettling when they come from people who are talking about their Christian faith in between vicious personal attacks.
Trump, of course, is the king of the personal insult, but he also seems to understand that his approach is not especially compatible with religious values having said he’s pretty sure he’s not going to heaven.
Is there a point at which the mean-girl schtick starts costing the GOP voters? Some would say no, pointing to Trump’s success. And there’s no question that Megyn Kelly’s escape from the corporate world has been successful. She’s now getting her own SiriusXM channel, populated with like-minded personalities that fit her brand, in addition to a podcast network her MK Media launched earlier this year.
“People can’t stand those stilted, censored conversations anymore, which is exactly why this medium is thriving,” Kelly said last month, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Fair enough. But people also can’t stand mean girls, which is why they are a meme.
Support marriage. Buy a happy-anniversary card
“Hallmark holidays” have been derided as artificial occasions in which we are encouraged to spend money for the benefit of greeting-card manufacturers, and you will never find me defending the existence of Valentine’s Day.
But lately I’ve softened on the subject of anniversary cards, in part because I now have a married son and feel the urge to support his marriage in every way that I can. Acknowledging his wedding date every year is a simple and inexpensive way to do that.
Now there is new research from the American Enterprise Institute that shows the importance of having this kind of support. Writing recently for American Storylines, Daniel Cox noted that plenty of people think about ending their marriage, but the people who stay together tend to have a strong community of people who support not just the couple as individuals, but their marriage as a separate and valuable entity.
The people who wind up divorced, conversely, tend to have friends who are divorced and are more likely to encourage divorce as an option. This is why divorce has been said to be contagious. But the flip side of that is that being happily married can be contagious as well.
“If you have an incredibly supportive community that is nurturing and encouraging you to work through relationship problems, that’s very different from if you have folks saying, ‘this guy’s not good enough for you,’ or ‘this woman is a problem and she’s always been a problem and you should just bail’,” Cox told me.
“We tend to think that for these big personal decisions we rely on our own experiences, but we are strongly affected by the people around us and what they think and encourage us to do or not do,” he said.
I used to think of wedding anniversaries as being something for a couple to celebrate on their own, but this research suggests otherwise, which is why those of us who value marriage, and want to reduce the risk of harms that come from divorce, should be actively looking for ways to support the marriages of people we love.
Remembering wedding dates and sending cards or gifts is one way; offering to watch children and/or pets so that young couples can go on a date or even enjoy a weekend away is another.
Conservatives have long derided the idea that it “takes a village” to raise children. Perhaps the village would be better off supporting the marriage so that both parents will be around to raise the children and set an example for them. As parenting guru John Rosemond famously says, the most important thing parents can give their children is a strong marriage. And the rest of us, this new research says, can help.
Recommended Reading
From Columbine to Sandy Hook to recent church shootings, Americans are becoming desensitized to violence, shifting our moral baseline, Steve Pierce writes.
“It’s not too late to alter this trajectory, to collectively pull ourselves back to the side of our better, gentler angels. But the path ahead demands more than numbed rage or fleeting gestures. We must rehumanize. We must rebuild our moral muscle.”
Let’s choose now to stop being (more) desensitized to violence
Cliff Smith examined the complicated legacy of former Vice President Dick Cheney and argues that the fact that Cheney was disliked on both sides of the aisle is a testament to his moral courage.
“What Cheney showed is that politics ebbs and flows. Sometimes unpopularity is inevitable. Better to stand by your convictions, and make a difference, than pander in a likely vain attempt to stay marginally more popular.”
Dick Cheney was disliked on both sides of the aisle. Here’s why he should be lauded
Emma Pitts looks at the issues surrounding modern feminism amid talk of the “Great Feminization” and “heterofatalism.”
“I recently asked my followers on social media if they identify as a radical feminist, a traditional feminist or don’t identify as a feminist at all, and surprisingly, many women said they don’t want to call themselves feminists because of the political connotations. It was just anecdotal, not a scientific sample, but the fact that women don’t want to call themselves a feminist — a term defined as a person who believes in equality between women and men — says something about the state of the feminist movement today."
The problem with feminism isn’t men — it’s meaning
End notes
Fox News host Mark Levin said this week that he would “rather debate a skunk” than Tucker Carlson, which reminded me of this great tweet by Deseret contributor Mike Kofoed earlier this year.
Skunks are a metaphor vastly underused in public discourse, but the garden-party skunks showed up en masse after President Trump floated the idea of a $2,000 tariff dividend for Americans, which seems unlikely to happen, according to his own treasury secretary.
Maybe don’t start dreaming about what you’ll do with an extra $2,000 just yet.