Last Friday, I attended The Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary Gala, a sprawling and swanky affair featuring many fine presentations, a surprise Dierks Bentley mini-concert for the country music enthusiasts (yours truly among them), and an extravagant post-dinner fireworks show over the Potomac River. But the highlight of the evening, bar none, was former Fox News star Tucker Carlson‘s electric keynote address and his (all-too-brief) colloquy on stage afterward with Heritage’s exceptional new president, Kevin Roberts.
Carlson’s speech was both wildly entertaining and poignant, at times slapstick funny and at other times humorously self-deprecating about his Episcopalian faith. But as Carlson began to reach his peroration, the key substantive takeaway he wished to impart unto his audience became clear. The relevant political and cultural battle lines in the year 2023 are not those befitting a civil and polite discussion where both sides are reasonable, both sides pursue their own version of the common good, and the best think tank white paper wins out in the end, Carlson cautioned. No, our current civilizational struggle is not reflective of a refined policy debate between amicable partisans; rather, it is one that implicates fundamentally distinct theological and anthropological visions of mankind—of man’s very biology and his relation with his fellow man, the state, and God Himself.
I immediately hearkened back to an interview Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams did with The Atlantic in October 2021, where Williams had this provocative (but accurate) line about America’s contemporary fault lines: “Even during the Civil War—I think we’re more divided now than we were then. As Lincoln said, we all prayed to the same God. We all believed in the same Constitution. We just differed over the question of slavery.” This is the precise sentiment that Carlson was getting at in his keynote speech at the Heritage gala last Friday.
We in the audience did not know it yet, at the time of Carlson’s speech—nor did Carlson, for that matter—but the broadcasting star had already given his last searing monologue for Fox News. In a stunning development, Fox News broke the news to their highest-rated host on Monday morning that he was fired. Hopefully, Carlson will retain something approximating his exceptional level of cultural and political influence in whatever role he next serves, because his witness to truth and civilizational sanity has never been more necessary.
This is perhaps most clearly true when it comes to gender ideology and transgenderism, which is the issue most directly implicated by Carlson’s framing of America’s fundamental divide as a struggle between differing theological and anthropological conceptions of man.
By Josh Hammer
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