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During a 23 year career with the BBC, and 43 years in journalism, (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor Welshman Phil Parry, it has always been paramount to know where the political fault lines lie, and who is IN and who is OUT of favour, which is now shown in spades today by MORE splits in Donald Trump’s right wing MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement.
Left and Right splits are different.
The Left usually splits over a ‘correct’ idealogical interpretation, whereas the Right tends to have rows based on personality.
For the Right these rows are often dressed up as a difference of opinion over policy, but really they are about the people concerned.
In the centre Left or centre Right, it is more difficult to establish the root cause because the arguments are kept well hidden, as parties are paramoid about appearing divided to the electorate
Because of this a bland statement is invariably issued after an important meeting which needs to be interpreted by people like me; “a frank exchange of views”, for example, means there was an enormous dispute.
Nowhere is this more evident today than in the United States of America (USA), where one-time Donald Trump loyalists go in and out of favour with dizzying speed.
The latest ones are the right wing talk show host, and media executive Tucker Carlson, as well as the former Congresswoman, conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene.
These are only the LATEST ones, however, because we have also had Steve Bannon as well as Elon Musk in the past!
Let’s, though, look at Mr Carlson and Ms Greene as an example of this rule in action.
Recently Ms Greene has announced that she is finished backing the Republican party, aligning herself with Mr Carlson, just months ahead of the midterm elections.
He has said (perhaps presciently) that he had been “a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican party. If I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out”.
People, it seems, like Ms Greene, who has declared in a social media post: “Tucker is not the only one who is done supporting the Republican Party… there is A LOT of us that are absolutely fed up and will not support a party that betrays its voters and country”.
Mr Carlson, a former Fox News host, and Ms Greene, a one-time Georgia Congresswoman, have both emerged as vocal critics of Mr Trump’s second term. Their objections have (outwardly), focused on the conflict with Iran and what they see as a failure to prioritise domestic concerns such as inflation. Yet both have been fierce (if controversial) supporters of Mr Trump in the past.
In the case of Ms Greene, as well as backing the President, it has been alleged on Wikipedia that she has previously promoted Islamophobic, Antisemitic, white supremacist views (including the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory), and QAnon.
It has been said that she has amplified absurd theories alleging government involvement in mass shootings in the USA, implicated the Clinton family in murder, and suggested the attacks of 9/11 were a hoax.
As a Congresswoman, she equated the Democratic Party with Nazis, and compared COVID-19 safety measures to the persecution of Jews, but later apologised for this comparison, and during the invasion of Ukraine, Ms Greene promoted Russian propaganda as well as praising Vladimir Putin.
Now her erstwhile ally Mr Trump calls her “neurotic” and a “ranting lunatic”.
Mr Carlson (like Ms Greene) is evidently not a fan of measures to combat COVD either.
In 2021 he set off fact-checkers’ alarm bells when he said on his show that “3,362 people apparently died after getting the COVID vaccine in the United States” since late December 2020, but as PolitiFact pointed out, he was citing unverified and unreliable self-reported data from the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and improperly implying causation.
In 2018 more than a dozen companies stopped advertising on his show Tucker Carlson Tonight after comments Mr Carlson made about immigration, and the following year the non-profit organisation Media Matters for America (MMA), put centre stage some of the remarks he uttered years earlier on a radio show when transcripts showed he had used the word ‘pig’ to describe women, and called rape shield laws unfair, according to The Washington Post.
In 2018 more than a dozen companies stopped advertising on his show Now though he and Ms Greene have quit the Republican Party because they don’t appear to like what Mr Trump is doing.
They follow a long line – expect more splits on the Right!
Truths like these by Phil, who was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Next week – news that Russian hacking is increasing, Vladimir Putin has declared Ukraine opened a “Pandora’s box” with its increasingly successful drone attacks, and that the country’s polls suggest anxiety is growing, all highlight once again how The Eye has also been targeted.
