Book release media tours work. Or at least one worked on me because I hadn’t really considered reading Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools until I watched him make fun of Max Boot in three separate interviews. I thought I’d discover if Boot is really all that bad.
Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution is a written performance of Carlson’s last two years on television. With simple, conservative arguments, targeted criticisms of “elites,” and a few personal attacks added as salt for taste, Carlson offers everything that made his millions of nightly viewers fall in love with him in the first place.
Particularly in the book’s latter half, Carlson offers a strong rebuke to the most destructive parts of modern liberalism, especially its alternative gender theories and shaming tactics. His reflections resolve with a good, old-fashioned argument for gender complementarity.
“Men and women need each other,” he writes, which is true.
Ship also serves as a one-stop resource for those seeking a comprehensive catalog of all the most shocking cases of campus craziness. I had somehow forgotten there exists a play called “The Vagina Monologues” and that students at all-women’s Mount Holyoke College were going to perform it in 2015 but didn’t because its student-led theater board became aware that it was not inclusive enough to represent the experience of transgender students.
Carlson often simply recalls these stories, allowing their volume to make the argument itself: Modern liberalism is mostly rot, and America needs more preservatives, i.e., conservatives.
But what all this has to do with the selfish ruling class — whose composition, according to the book’s cover, includes Maxine Waters, Bill Kristol, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham (I think), Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, and Jeff Bezos — is not altogether clear.
There are a few obvious connections between the aforementioned liberal Democrats and the aforementioned cultural spoils. Those politicians have taken up arms to help fight, and in some cases win, the gender and environmental battles to which Carlson refers, but what about the rest of the list?
“The worst decisions always come from unquestioned bipartisan consensus, which over time is exactly what we got from leaders of both parties,” begins Chapter 1, titled, “The Convergence.”
One would expect an outline of bad policy decisions resulting from unquestioned bipartisan consensus, but Carlson instead writes a chapter lamenting how wealthy executives of Apple and Uber are, how bad their business models are, and how annoying their political activism is. Mark Zuckerberg’s existence also gets a strong rebuttal from Carlson. So does … Chelsea Clinton?
Carlson spends 10 pages on Chelsea Clinton, and she’s not even on the cover. She was given offers from elite colleges, she got jobs she wasn’t qualified for as a fresh graduate, and NBC paid her lots of money to be a special correspondent even though she had no journalism experience.
Okay, so her status as a first daughter helped her into a life of elitism, but what does this have to do with the Ship and the pending revolution?
Carlson takes up many pages to engage in what appears to be score-settling. Aside from the Chelsea Clinton bit, he calls former co-worker Bob Kagan an “idiot,” and his criticisms of the neoconservative Max Boot and Bill Kristol and their long-held positions on the Iraq War come off as much more personal than political. These are all people with whom he’s had testy exchanges, either on his show or elsewhere. It comes across like President Trump’s Twitter feed.
Overall, Carlson makes a compelling case that we have a thriving elite class much more interested in enriching itself than helping the populace, while also prepared to say all the right things but not practice what’s preached (Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio flying all around to lecture about climate change).
Even still, the book falls short of demonstrating that we’re approaching revolution or explaining the elites’ role in facilitating it.
What revolution? It’s more implied than defined. The closest Carlson comes to defining it is the election of Trump.
“Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump,” Carlson has said, which may be evidence. But for every person who voiced their vote for Trump as a vote against the whole elite establishment, another simply said, “He’s better than Hillary.”
Jeremy Beaman (@jeremywbeaman) is a former Student Free Press Association journalism fellow with the Washington Examiner commentary page.
