This past Wednesday, Senator Ted Cruz mentioned in a Senate committee meeting that the people who breached the Capitol on 1/6 engaged in domestic terrorism.
This is correct. The definition of terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
What Cruz said on Wednesday was both accurate in factuality and context-correspondent. His statement was true, in every sense that matters for a statement of truth.
That evening, Tucker Carlson went on his show to say this:
Let's be honest, everyone who is conservative appreciates Ted Cruz. You may not like him, but you've got to appreciate him. He's legitimately smart. He's one of the more articulate people to serve in the Congress, maybe the most articulate. He doesn't use a single word by accident.
Every word Ted Cruz uses is used intentionally. He's a lawyer.
He described January 6th as a violent terrorist attack. Of all the things that January 6th was, it was definitely not a violent terrorist attack. It wasn't an insurrection. Was it a riot? Sure. It was not a violent terrorist attack. Sorry.
So why are you telling us that it was, Ted Cruz? And why are none of your Republican friends who are supposed to be representing us and all the people have been arrested during this purge saying anything? What the hell's going on here?
You're making us think maybe the Republican Party is as worthless as we suspected it was. That can't be true. Reassure us, please. Ted Cruz?
So Tucker’s entire third paragraph was simply his assertion, not backed up by any authority other than his own voice. He then parried that into a rhetorical challenge for Cruz, after spending precious TV seconds fluffing Cruz’ ego re-establishing Cruz’ bona fides for the audience and sprinkling in a dash conspiratorical fantasy for spice. (I’m setting aside Carlson’s last plea irrationally links a theoretical successful repudiation by Cruz as the one thing that can save conservatives’ faith in their own party. That’s a tall order, and a very narrowing either-or structuring of Cruz’ ultimate meaning here. I will leave that on the shelf for brevity’s sake.)
The next night, Carlson had an interview with Cruz set up, apparently in the interim, as a follow-up to the previous night’s rhetorical scolding.
So many reactions to this interview have focused on Cruz’ submissive demeanor. Fine, make fun of him. He’s obviously a good sport, considering that he volunteered to the segment in the first place and then went so far as to post it, as just mentioned, on his own official website. He’s amplifying the signal on his own apparent humilation. Why would he do that?
Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works and also of How Fascism Works, recently was interviewed on Amanpour & Co. The interview is excellent; I recommend a viewing in full. Michel Martin asked Stanley about some of the features of this burgeoning fascist movement, and he warned about one axis that is ripe for manipulation:
MARTIN: As we reflect on this moment, what do you see? Do you see any sense that others share your alarm at the current moment, that this slide toward authoritarianism, toward fascism, is being addressed? What do you see?
STANLEY: So you’ve left a crucial third party out, and that’s the many, many Republican politicians who are trying–and media personalities–who are trying neither to ignore nor to seek accountability, but to glorify. We have a political elite that’s openly pushing for people to arm themselves to steal an election; to arm themselves to protect a minority–a permanent, one-party state.
For any scholar–so my basic area is the philosophy of language and the study of violent rhetoric–what we are seeing is, we are seeing justifications for violence, 24/7. We see Kyle Rittenhouse [who] was paraded in front of multiple Republican audiences. At the Turning Points USA conference, they had a song all about him; he came out, they chanted, “Kyle! Kyle! Kyle!”
What is this saying to seventeen-year-olds across the country? It’s challenging their masculinity. It’s saying, “A real man goes into the Capitol. A real man gets a gun. A real man stands and fights for his leader, Donald Trump.” It’s challenging the people’s masculinity. What we are seeing is a glorification of January 6th, and a glorification of Kyle Rittenhouse. They’re stoking a large-scale, violent militia movement–not just organized militias, but individual actors like Kyle Rittenhouse–and they’re challenging them via their masculinity.
So, that’s what the legacy of January 6th is. They’re being transformed into heroes, and we need to stop that process as soon as possible. Every Republican politician needs to disassociate themselves from the mass attempt to create, and stoke, potential political violence.
I’ve emphasized the above because what Carlson did with Cruz was hoodwink his audience via a scripted back-and-forth with Cruz that on its face demonstrated a power imbalance. The vast majority of takes on the interview, at least that I’ve seen, have talked about how “weak” Cruz looked, how “emasculated” he was; “taken back to the woodshed”; “cucked”; et cetera. Well, that’s how it felt because that’s how it was designed to look. The two men tell us themselves that the interchange is scripted, in their first volley.
CARLSON: There are a lot of dumb people in Congress. You are not one of them. Smarter than I am. And you never use words carelessly. And yet you call this a terror attack when by no definition was it a terror attack. That was a lie. You told that lie on purpose, and I’m wondering why you did.
CRUZ: Thank you for having me on. When you aired your episode last night, I sent you a text shortly thereafter and said I would like to go on because the way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy and, frankly, dumb.
Cruz admits, unprompted, that he texted Carlson immediately after Carlson’s Wednesday show. That means that Cruz and Carlson apparently enjoy interpersonal access to each other that is rather inappropriate for a so-called member of the press and a standing senator to have. Cruz states this fact of texting explicitly yet offhandedly. As he does so and Carlson nods, the audience is swept away by what Cruz is ostensibly doing with Carlson—demonstrating contrition of some sort. The detail of this inappropriate press-Senate contact is swept away by the swift movement of the interview (as well as Carlson’s understanding nod indicating “go on . . . “).
I’ve searched many articles and several online reactions. I found only one personality, Farron Cousins (of Farron Balanced on YouTube) who called out this relationship. I hope others in the media pick up on this aspect of the story. It has gone under the radar.
But beyond that, what Carlson and Cruz engaged in was what I call “power pretense.”
The scene between them was, to me, obviously staged. Before Carlson’s show Wednesday, he or someone on his team would have reached out to Cruz and ran that portion of his monologue to Cruz in anticipation of an advance statement; either way, a heads-up is standard journalistic practice. Cruz would have known in advance about Wednesday’s monologue; if true, that means that the niceties of sending the text would show themselves as pantomime, actions done merely for a concrete sense of sequence or narrative value.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, however, that Cruz did not receive that advance warning before Wednesday’s taping and that he indeed texted Carlson personally and asked to address Carlson’s reservations on Carlson’s very next show. (For the record, Mediaite says Cruz asked Alice Stewart at CNN to go between.) He knew before going on-set that the point of contention was that he had accurately described January 6th as domestic terrorism, and that on the other side Carlson had flatly declared that to be a lie. No wiggle room: truth or lie.
CARLSON: I don’t buy that. Whoa, whoa, whoa! I’ve known you a long time, since before you went to the Senate. You were a Supreme Court contender. You take words as seriously as anyone in the Senate. You repeated that phrase. I do not believe you used that accidentally. I just don’t.
CRUZ: Tucker, as a result of my sloppy phrasing it’s caused a lot of people to misunderstand what I meant. Let me tell you what I meant to say. What I was referring to are the limited number of people who engaged in violent attacks against police officers. I think you and I agree that if you assault a police officer, you should go to jail. That is who I was talking about. [...]
Cruz never defended his use of the terminology on truth grounds at all. This meant that Cruz helped Carlson create confusion about not just what constitutes truth in this one instance, but what the very definition of what a “lie” is (and thus, by extension, what truth is).
In December 1940, the New York Times ran a story that featured Ernst Kris’ analysis of Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda machine (“Expert Analyzes Nazi Propaganda: Viennese Psychologist Sees Hitler Technique Turning on Hypnotizing of Audience,” behind a paywall).
Much of what Goebbels orchestrated, with his Ministry of Propaganda, were social-hygiene and other films that utilized self-reinforcement of message through structure of medium: by using film and radio, the propaganda itself, situated within a narrative, the audience accepts the “dialogue” as dialogue but also reads in just as loudly tone, cues, facial expressions—that is, every element of drama. That dramatic subtext becomes a parallel source of meaning:
It was necessary to embed social-hygiene messages within a dramatic framework, to slip themes of warning and scientific instruction into narratives of love, melodrama, and suspense. (“What Is an Enlightenment Film?”, p. 113)
Ultimately, the minister adopted a position in favor of what he called “invisible propaganda”, which “pervades the entire public, without the public becoming aware at all of all of the initiative of propaganda” (Poore 2007: 112). Such formulations are reflected clearly in the making of I Accuse, the euthanasia film in which Goebbels took a close interest, whose didactic content is embedded within a highly melodramatic narrative. (Ibid., p. 122)
What distinguishes it [The Inheritance] from others of the type is its self-referential dimension. . . . No film of this genre goes further in thematizing the film experience or in stressing the conditions of its own reception. The format of a film-within-a-film functions here in an explicitly prophylactic sense: by drawing attention to its own making and reception, the film stages as part of its content the didactic process that is its raison d’etre. By thematizing the filmic medium The Inheritance attempts to ensure its correct reading by audience members. (Ibid., pp. 122-123, diarist’s emphasis in bold)
In other words, by making the acting itself part of the message, the films reinforced the messages most important to the ministry in terms of dissemination, with the most indirect delivery method so as to aid in audience consumption. Propaganda and meta-propaganda correspond at once, in order to strengthen both.
It is in this context that we must view the exchange between Carlson and Cruz. Their interaction, just the body language and tone, informed most of the (male) audience members of Cruz’ capitulation to Carlson rhetorically instead of the actual information the two together were conveying.
This was performative propaganda of the masculinist flavor, a power pretense of pantomime, to confuse the viewer at home as to what a “lie” is; additionally, it serves to muddy the water as to how to classify or frame January 6th. The performance had nothing to do with underlying facts about January 6th, historically; nothing to do with the accuracy of Cruz’ depiction, which we’ve already established was precise and accurate (all the high praise Carlson lays so thickly onto Cruz in his segments).
Later, if a future Cruz somehow tosses a rhetorical Mortal-Kombat fatality upon someone in the political arena, his critics today will then say, “Well, he had that awful cucking with Tucker that one time, but he totally redeemed himself today.” That’ll be all he will need to do re-establish his masculine bona fides.
Meanwhile, Carlson gets to appear to savage a sitting a “highly respected” and “smart” senator (Carlson’s words). The 1/6 narrative that Carlson monetized in the form of alternate history, “Patriot Purge,” has, with the help of Cruz, been made whole on live TV; they together establish, by not challenging Carlson’s underlying assumptions, that the insurrection wasn’t terrorism. Carlson gets to play the lion, maybe even christened Kingmaker by some of his media colleagues.
I think a lot of people got played.