“I saw that and I was like, ‘Damn…These are actually really funny,” writer and strategist Jenny Chang said.
“They’re good!” Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick added. “He cooked a little bit.”
And what are they talking about? Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s merch, featuring hats that read “NEOCONS ARE GAY FOR ISRAEL” and mugs that read “I ♥ NICOTINE.” It’s a lot.
“He got points from the culturati for being on vernacular,” Ben Dietz observed. “But also it’s a sad state of affairs when everybody feels like they have the right to play in that level of slanguage and inside joke meme-ory. I guess the right has been winning the meme game for a long time, so we should expect it.”
“He’s not cool,” Jenny added. “He must have hired a young person to design this…I actually did a project about propaganda as it’s laundered through pop culture recently, and this is exactly it. You laugh at the mug. Maybe you order it ironically! But his bank account doesn’t care if you’re ordering it ironically. All it does is endear him to the mainstream, all it does is make him seem like he’s not endorsing incredibly harmful ideals. I think it’s incredibly dangerous and incredibly bleak that it is unfortunately very funny.”
“It is unfortunate that it is very cool,” Kyle said. “Dasha and Red Scare basically they were like back channeled and in their own like group chat they gave him free advice…The fingerprints are there: it’s a means tow make something that is abhorrent more palatable. I was actually talking to Grace Weinstein of Who Broke It about this. She asked me for some thoughts and I did a deep dive on it over the weekend: it has the same sort of effect as the clips about him that go viral on Twitter, and sometimes even other platforms, where it’s like him calling out Sam Altman for a former employee committing suicide or him calling out Mike Huckabee about really bad politics. That little clip where it’s like ‘Whoa! Tucker’s being so progressive. He is holding his own party accountable! I wish more actual journalists did this.’ In reality, it’s like this is one minute out of like an hour long conversation that was basically giving this person free reign to talk about whatever they want except for maybe that one moment. It functions in a similar way: it works on a clout level.”which is basically like
“The death of Charlie Kirk created a vacuum,” Jenny said. “Now all these people are looking to fill it, like looking to be like the more the hip, more moderate position that like gets young people into the right movement. But I saw a tweet that was like, ‘I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you do not by any under any circumstances have to hand it to Tucker Carlson.’”
“The one thing that I do think is notably successful in this is that it plays in a vernacular lane that is of the moment but it doesn’t reference the worlds outside of Tucker’s control,” Ben said. “If he did a riff on the I TOLD YA t-shirt, which is a dated reference…It would feel contrived, right? He’s just like ‘I love nicotine.’ and ‘I’m gay for Israel’: I’m putting myself on blast here.”
“And that’s these things are so successful because they don’t seem like political statements,” Jenny said. “It’s objectively funny to have a mug that says ‘I love nicotine.’”
What do you think of Tucker Carlson’s merch? Does it mean anything at all? Listen to more on this above and on YouTube, where we dive into the fall of Labubu, the Carolyn Bessette Kennedy trend, and the loss of life markers for the young.
Find more from HIP REPLACEMENT on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. Be sure to follow Ben Dietz over on SIC and Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick over on The Trend Report™ too.
