The Enlightenment had a good run - almost 300 years. But, it was a threat to American values, so it had to be dismantled. No one person could defeat the Enlightenment; it truly was a team effort. This is one of a series of articles celebrating the heroes of the battle for unenlightenment.
Maskless Freedom was the hill that many valiant warriors in the seemingly endless Culture War were willing to die on - literally, as well as figuratively. For good reason: this would prove to be one of the decisive battles in the War Against Enlightenment. At the time, however, it wasn't at all clear who would lead the charge.
The obvious choice would have been General Bill O'Reilly, who had been decorated so often for courage under libs fire that his ego threatened to collapse under the weight of his brass. Unfortunately, he had taken flak for sexual harassment a couple of years earlier, and the Commander of the Fox News Division of the Army of the Right decided to force him into early retirement.
General Rush Limbaugh would also have been a good choice to lead soldiers into the Battle of Maskless Freedom. Unfortunately (again!), he had died a couple of months before the battle began. Opposition propaganda (which they referred to as "facts") had some people believing that he had succumbed to lung cancer, but most Americans knew that there was no connection between smoking and cancer, and that he was actually assassinated in a cowardly attempt to keep his message of irrational thought from influencing the masses.
Thus, it fell to Colonel Tucker Carlson to fill the leadership void.
Carlson was not an obvious choice to lead the battle. With a degree from Trinity College, he appeared to be steeped in Enlightenment rationality. However, he quickly rose through the ranks as a Fox Division sniper, distinguishing himself as a platoon leader in such engagements as The Battle of Seussian Suspiciousness and the Campus Cancel Culture Insurgency.
As it happened, Carlson quickly proved to be an effectuve leader. For one thing, his doughy face gave him an everyman quality that his troops found unthreatening. "He's just like me," Christian Heffalump wrote on his Farcebook page, The Blood of Patridiots. "Except he has millions of followers. And, he's rich. But, I swear, looking at him is just like looking in the mirror!"
Carlson proved adept at crashing and burning rhetoric that rallied the troops. "Is George Soros funding a plot to have microchips implanted into the bloodstream of every American who gets a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine? Is George Clooney? Is George of the Jungle? When enough Americans have been vaccinated, will Hillary Clinton throw a switch that forces all vaccinated people to sing ‘Solidarity Forever' when they wake up in the morning and at random times during the day? Am I making statements, or am I merely asking questions that nobody else on a cable news network - any cable news network - is willing to ask?"
Carlson knew the answer to his questions: no. None of the ideas introduced in what he asked was empirically true. Fortunately for the cause of unenlightenment, his troops believed the answer to his questions was: yes, yes, oh, hell, yes.
It is worth remembering that Carlson was awarded command at a low point in the Culture Wars. A COVID vaccine had been rapidly developed, and vaccinations were being conducted at such a pace that America was in dire threat of achieving herd immunity, which would have been a decisive victory for Enlightenment forces. This would have meant that all those brave men and women who fought against getting vaccinated, not to mention the civilian collateral damage, would have died in vain.
Indeed, while Carlson's leadership certainly rallied the troops, it may not have turned the tide of the battle were it not for the fateful introduction of the Delta Variant into the theatre of war. His forces took heavy casualties owing to the Delta Variant, but he ensured that they held the line, staving off herd immunity in the larger community, which ate away at the credibility of the opposition.
"Are we locked in an epic battle for the soul of America?" Carlson asked at the height of the conflict. "Does mom's apple pie cure scurvy? If we give in to libs' ‘data' and ‘facts,' will we permanently lose the freedom that was America's greatest contribution to world history? When do questions go beyond being merely questions and become urgent facts that require immediate action if we don't want to lose all that we hold dear? I...I'm asking for a friend..."
As unlikely as it may seem from our current historical perspective, Tucker Carlson rose to the moment to become a true Hero of the Unenlightenment.