I never read current political books, but this one was highly recommended by a relative, and I felt compelled to give it a shot. It wasn't exactly what I expected . . .Carlson is much more of a populist and less of a conservative than I anticipated. He addresses many of the issues where there is major contention in the U.S. between the progressives and the more extreme conservatives, and basically points out that the middle is being left out in the cold by the elites. He talks about a variety of topics - from war to feminism to environmentalism. I found myself agreeing with many, but not all of his observations (I'm more libertarian and more pro corporation - who knew), but the overriding theme is that the elites of this country are quite self serving, but at the same time want to feel good about themselves by taking meaningless moral stances that don't actually jive with the reality that normal Americans face. I thought he supported that thesis quite well. ( )

Introductory, but well researched. Plenty of examples of the high-low vs middle dichotomy that dominates our culture, particularly high vs middle, that would be too long and detailed to get into on a single segment of his show.

It's 90% what the problems are and only 10% solutions. But at least he absolutely does identify the main problems better than most, as far as the mainstream, tv/radio friendly right is concerned. ( )

I suspect I missed the message Tucker Carlson was trying to deliver in his book "Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution". More specifically, I guess I didn't follow his arguments or examples.

At the beginning of the book, Carlson talks about how "our leaders" are failing us, endangering democracy. He compares the behavior of "our leaders" to that of a knowledgeable and skilled ship's crew operating their ship, safely and efficiently delivering their cargo and passengers as expected. Then, for some reason, the crew lose their way, stop acting rationally, drifting aimlessly, giving themselves extravagant pay raises, and eating all the ships stores. The passengers, trapped, are being ill-treated and are not being taken to their destination as expected. He makes the point that our leaders are running amok, enriching themselves and ignoring us, the voters. He goes on to say that democracies can't continue on such a path. He goes on to say that at some point, voters will become fed up, and vote for somebody, anybody, who may be different, who may "right the boat".

At this point of his book, I was in agreement with Mr. Carlson. I was expecting to hear criticisms of "our (political?) leaders", get details of their misdeeds, and find out how we can get back on the path towards a successful democracy. But that expected message didn't get delivered, at least not to me.

Carlson talks about the disparity between the rich and poor having never been larger, and that it's only getting worse. Recognizing that fact, the 2016 election of President Trump was a sign of the dissatisfaction with the voting public with our leaders. Voters, even if they recognized the downside of electing Trump as president, did so anyway, feeling that the mainstream leaders are failing us, and there was a need to shake things up.

Carlson notes that authoritarian leaders fill the void when democracies begin to fail. Our leaders recognized Trump's authoritarian tendencies. But our leaders are continuing on the same path, not recognizing voter dissatisfaction as applying to themselves.

It's about here in the book that I started to feel I was missing Carlson's message. He goes on to ask what would an authoritarian leader do who wanted to weaken democracy. How would he go about doing that? Carlson suggests that he'd probably start by trying to control what people say and think. If people deviated from the mandated orthodoxy, he'd probably try to hurt them. He'd shame them on social media. He'd shout them down in public. He'd get them fired from their jobs. He'd make sure everyone was afraid to disagree with you. After that, he'd work to disarm the public. He'd take their guns. Then he'd systematically target any institution who would try to put the brakes on your policies. He'd be sure to crush them using laws and endless propaganda. After that lead in, Carlson asks "Sound familiar"? I thought for sure that he was talking about President Trump. Except for the taking of our guns, he's exhibited all these traits. He's constantly on Twitter, shaming his critics. He's pulled White House access from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, and publicly stated that heads of CNN and NBC should be fired. He tries to make anyone afraid to disagree with him, or risk being publicly ridiculed. And he systematically targets the Main Stream Media when they dare to criticize his policies. Yet I was surprised that Carlson doesn't see any of these criticism applicable to President Trump, but instead says the opposite. He stated that "For all his faults, Donald Trump isn't doing any of that. Our ruling class is doing this.

So it was here when I realized I wasn't following Carlson's arguments, but was curious to read more. Who are these people in "our ruling class" that are doing these things, and what examples would he offer? I'm still puzzled by this.

He feels that things started to go wrong when both political parties started to agree with each other. Those who make the essential decisions, about the economy, the government, going to war, started to agree with each other, just not the public. He notes that our leaders enrich themselves, public be damned. Our leaders are fools. This book is about "them", not about Trump, not about GOP leaders, and not even about the left.

So let's see who "them" is. He starts with Uber, talking about how they treat their "employees" poorly, and call them contractors without benefits. And he asks, "Where are those on the left who point out the exploitation of the Uber drivers?" Their obedient business press lets them ride (so he says). But a quick Google search showed me that USA Today, NPR radio, academics at MIT etc. published many of the same points Colson makes, so it's unclear to me why he states there's a lack of criticism. Instead, Colson claims that virtually no one called them on it. And if they do criticize Uber, their outrages instead about Uber management. Who's protecting the workers. Labor unions used to fill that role. He goes on to talk about other business failures, but CEOs still get rich.

His point at this point seems to be that Liberals don't scrutinize power like they used to. He goes on to discuss Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook. He says that "the left" / progressives never take him on. He says no lawmaker is proposing any legislation to address social media abuses or how it's harming society. But Zuckerburg has appeared before Congress, and Facebook executives have met with Congressional leaders many times to answer questions. Facebook has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the past year following a number of data breaches and questions over user privacy. https://techcentral.co.za/zuckerberg-hits-out-at-facebooks-critics/87207/ .
And a recent book "Zucked", by Roger McNamee tells the story of how a noted tech venture capitalist, an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and investor in his company, woke up to the serious damage Facebook was doing to our society and set out to try to stop it.
So my initial expectation of a critique of Congress or our Political Leaders soon evolved into a criticism of social media executives, liberals and the left, but none of that seemed to follow seamlessly from the books beginning.

I had the feeling that I missed several important chapters in the book to ties things together. ( )

Tucker Carlson cherry picks all of his example. His research, although factual, may have been taken completely out of context. Also, his book is no way annotated, so we don't know exactly where to find all of his information nor do we know how reputable or established his resources are. However, Carlson does provide some compelling arguments about the status of an American elitist ruling class of citizens and how they are literally bringing the rest of the 95% of the country to its knees. Furthermore, his underlying and often unspoken yearning of returning to an earlier time of civil, reasonable political discourse and former values of both traditional conservatism and liberalism is truly felt and definitely widely shared, especially by this reader. ( )

This is actually a book which primarily argues for the restoration of a two party system with actual ideological differences (environmentalism vs business, labor vs employers, etc), rather than the neoliberal/neoconservative status quo (elites vs everyone else). Ironically of course the author (and most readers, and myself) benefit from the current situation as members of these elites.

There are definitely parts people will disagree with for ideological reasons, but the fundamental point is that we need political debate and opposition over those issues, as nothing else causes moderation and compromise. The immigration/identity politics part is probably the most contentious, but it is argued in an economic way, and the counter is the pro immigration economic argument.

My biggest concern with the author is there isn’t a really a clear point where he would stop fighting against economic progress (elimination of many classes of jobs, efficiency, etc) for social status quo; the argument for accepting change and then compensating the losers, vs hindering change, needs to be made, both on rate of change and absolute change basis. (There are probably some areas where values other than economic efficiency should always triumph, as a way to hedge against truly existential risks (keeping domestic capacity in the case of war, building in some inventory and strategic reserve in the case of disaster), as well as a level of fairness for children (whether or not provided by the state), but others where it is better to merely compensate a truck driver who has lost his job to automation to retrain, rather than holding back progress forever.)

Totally not the book I would have expected from a Fox News talk show host, but a great book for the country today. ( )