Over the past year or so I allowed myself two copes. The first, Restore Britain, has now fallen. The second requires a little explanation. It was that Tucker Carlson, in some obscure way, is working for the American deep state to facilitate a de-Zionisation of top-line American politics. This would explain, among other things, his apparent immunity from all attacks. Now, Tucker has announced he is going to launch a new party with rumours abounding that he will run for President in 2028. Let me be blunt: I’m not getting behind this, I’m not excited by it, and I’m not going to be strung along by the next great democratic hope for the next two years. Sorry Tucker, there comes a point where one must stop collecting Fell For It Again Awards.

I happened to see some of Darryl Cooper’s recent appearance on Tucker’s show, and I’m afraid to say that I did not feel the same excitement as many other people seem to have. Honestly, I thought at times that they both sounded like they are from another planet. The discourse has become sort of abstract and disconnected. How many times can the concept of ‘Western Civilisation’ be evoked in one ten-minute period? In short, Tucker and his guests now seem to inhabit their own strange hyperreal space in which one strokes one’s chin talking about wars and whatnot over an impossibly expensive table. Tucker has become, somehow, otherworldly. I find it hard to believe he’s going to connect with average Americans in any election cycle now – and I always liked Tucker.

Let us think about what Tucker is asking us to do though. He more than anyone has exposed the system, given his audience every reason to be thoroughly disillusioned with politics, the democratic process, and the American state more generally. He now wants people to get their energy up ‘one last time’ for a new party and a new election? How does he imagine it’s going to work? The regime is just going to let him run on a massive anti-corruption, anti-lobbying, and anti-Israel ticket and then just hand him the keys to power? He is not that naïve, which makes the decision to launch this party a little perplexing. Is it a grift? Is it a nice landing site for his friends like Joe Kent, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie Taylor Greene? I don’t know, but I find it basically impossible to muster enthusiasm for it. My appetite for hare-brained slopulist political projects that aren’t going to go anywhere is at an all-time low.

Tucker’s propensity for indulging kookery also ensures that whatever this new party becomes, it would come packaged with all the same nonsense we saw from QAnon. Is Ian Carroll going to give stump speeches for Tucker on who really shot Charlie Kirk? What’s Tucker’s policy on aliens going to be? Will Candace Owens be made Minister of Information? Will the bizarre soap opera of feuding social media characters and their various dramas be part of the package too? Folks, I’m not doing it. Haven’t we all had enough of this? I know I have.

The deeper problem is not that Tucker is a grifter or that his circle includes cranks. It is that any vehicle launched under the current institutional settlement – ballot access rules, donor networks, media amplification thresholds, the permanent bureaucracy’s veto power, and the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus – will either be co-opted, starved, or forced to moderate into another managed protest faction. In other words, even the great Tucker Carlson will come face-to-face with the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Does he have an even remotely serious plan to overcome it? History does not show populist media figures converting audiences into durable counter-elite power without either a genuine fracture inside the existing elite (a real civil war among factions with resources) or the slow, unglamorous work of building parallel institutions, cadres, and material independence outside the electoral spectacle. Cheering a new party is simply the latest way of remaining inside the spectacle. The only non-cope moves left are the ones that do not require the regime’s permission: exit where possible, competence and loyalty networks where exit is not, and a ruthless refusal to treat the next charismatic broadcaster as a political saviour. Maybe Tucker has secretly done all these things and is, in fact, the mastermind of a vast organised underground network waiting to take over America properly – as per my original cope, it is possible. However, something tells me that it is improbable and I don’t think we should be pinning hopes on imaginary ‘white hats’ anymore.