‘Been a bad little girl’: Bizarre pro-Trump rant reveals weird fringe of conservatism

Hold your nose. Grab a bucket. Whatever you need to do to restrain your nausea as you read these remarks.

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Hold your nose. Grab a bucket. Whatever you need to do to restrain your nausea.

Here we have remarks from the conservative media personality Tucker Carlson, once of Fox News, but since an inhabitant of the internet’s less palatable fringes.

They came during an event hosted by Turning Point USA, an organisation representing young conservatives in the United States.

Mr Carlson was stumping for Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president. He offered up an interesting metaphor for the state of his country.

Cheerful looking man.

“If you allow your two-year-old to smear the contents of his diaper on the wall of your living room, and you do nothing about it. If you allow your 14-year-old to do a joint at the breakfast table. If you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger. You’re going to get more of it,” Mr Carlson said.

“And those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for them. No! There has to be a point at which dad comes home.

“Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they are his children. They live in his house.

“But he is very disappointed in their behaviour, and he is going to have to let them know.

‘Get to your room right now, and think about what you did!’ And when dad gets home, you know what he says?”

(I promise you, you are not prepared for what dad says.)

“‘You have been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you are getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking, because you’ve been a bad girl.’”

Tucker Carlson speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters about the spanking of teenage girls and whatnot.

My my, what to make of this? One feels the need to enlist a psychiatrist.

Fortunately for Mr Carlson, he is one of the few people on this earth wealthy enough to afford the many, many hours of couch time it would require to properly unpack whatever the hell is going on in those quotes above.

The “hormone-addled” 15-year-old in this metaphor, the “bad little girl”, is the United States itself, or rather the slice of it that votes for the Democrats.

Mr Trump is dad, of course. He “loves” these 80 million or so Democratic-voting Americans, disobedient as they may be. But he is disappointed in their behaviour, and he shall have to let them know, via whatever one might define as the political equivalent of a vigorous spanking.

We shall set aside, I think, the fact that this metaphor is being offered by a 55-year-old man, talking about a theoretical 15-year-old girl. And that said 55-year-old was speaking with a mix of relish, glee and malice.

Appropriate, though, isn’t it, how the disobedient child here is a girl, being disciplined by a harsh father figure?

That does not strike me as remotely coincidental. It aligns too perfectly with how the macho-pilled Andrew Tate-adjacent right, of which Mr Carlson is a part, sees its political opposition: as pathetically feminine, and in need of stern male leadership to pull it back into line.

In this fantasy, the political left does not need to be debated, any more than a father needs to debate his teenage child. No, it needs to be punished, and instructed. To be put in its place. To be told who is boss. It’s a fundamentally authoritarian worldview, in policy and soul. And the subtext of sexism, bordering on misogyny, is not subtle.

The bad little girl needs to be slapped into submission. For her own good.

One does wonder what’s going on in that head on the left. Picture: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images via AFP

I recall a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Republican Party, and indeed conservatism on a global scale, proudly saw itself as the advocate of personal freedom and small government.

What is this vision put forth by the Tucker Carlsons of the world? The opposite. It’s paternalistic in the extreme. It elevates one man, at the head of an overweening, interventionist government, as the “father” of the nation, whose will and every whim must be obeyed or punishment will follow.

It’s the US president not as a servant of the people, but as their ruler. It’s a dream of government not as an instrument for bettering people’s lives, but for imposing one’s own views and values on others.

No, worse than that. It’s government as a weapon, with which to flagellate or even humiliate your political opponents.

What a monstrous perversion of conservatism. One willingly embraced by conservatives themselves, seemingly oblivious to what they have become. A political philosophy without dignity or anything resembling a noble purpose.

Tucker Carlson is no pariah. He is not relegated to fringe events with other internet weirdos. He is introducing the former, and possibly future US president at official events, and advising millions of credulous followers on how they should think about politics.

At least we’re not governed by hormone-addled women, though. That would be weird.

Twitter: @SamClench

Originally published as ‘Been a bad little girl’: Bizarre pro-Trump rant reveals weird fringe of conservatism