I was surprised to see Conor McGregor, Malachy Steenson and superstar of the American right, Tucker Carlson, walking through Dublin on Tuesday morning. I was more surprised to conclude that this was a good thing.
For those among us who don’t much like the McGregors and Carlsons of the world – I suspect that is many of you – we can read this not as a galvanising moment for the Irish hard-right, but instead as a moment that its frivolity was exposed.
McGregor – who is appealing a High Court civil jury’s finding that he raped a woman in a Dublin hotel – needs little introduction. He has good claim to be the most famous Irish person in the world right now. Steenson, the relatively high-profile anti-immigration councillor from Dublin 1, is a sideshow in the whole affair. But for the uninitiated, it is Carlson’s profile that makes my case.
For a long time Carlson was a Fox News host with credibility – he was of the right; ventured close to but never over the line of full-fat conspiracy; he was an effective communicator of some hare-brained ideas in spite of his impossibly American teeth and Kermit the Frog cadence he had a charm.
I was glad to see Conor McGregor mixing with Tucker Carlson. His stock is now even lower
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In 2023, he was suddenly ousted in a hazy workplace dispute and turned – as they all do – to the self-publishing route. His influence has narrowed, but we cannot lie to ourselves and pretend it is insignificant: he has three million subscribers on YouTube, 16.1 million on X. And since leaving Fox he adopted the preferred medium of fellow new-right personalities: sprawling, long-form interviews with vague titles: The Truth about the 2008 Financial Crisis and Who’s Running Our Foreign Policy?
So far, so standard. What we have witnessed in Carlson’s evolution is something pretty common: the ascension of the mainstream persona into the swivel-eyed right. Last year he conducted a speaking tour of the United States, filling several thousand-seater venues, joined at one point by the British celebrity Russell Brand – a convert from the slightly edgy left to the conspiratorial new-right.
In September, Carlson interviewed Darryl Cooper – “the most important historian in the United States,” he claimed – who contended that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of the second World War. It was too much even for Elon Musk, who allegedly deleted a tweet in which he called the video “very interesting”.
All of this is to say that these men – Carlson, Brand, Musk, Alex Jones (I will excuse Joe Rogan from this list as a case study in a different kind of oddball) – may be nasty, offensive and unpleasant, but they are not serious people.
Consorting with Carlson does not lend McGregor credibility, it removes it. And that goes both ways: Carlson might deepen respect with his narrow base by interviewing McGregor, but all of this is an exercise in alienation of a wider audience.
Carlson has ended up in a self-radicalising doom loop, cleaving ever more extreme to maintain interest, narrowing his audience in the process. I remember when Brand used to host rallies in Parliament Square, London, to protest against austerity.
Now the comedian preaches – messianically – about the Great Reset, the profiteering military-industrial complex, and Russia. He marked his conversion to Christianity with a near-naked photo of him being baptised in the Thames.
Jordan Peterson – a less offensive case study – was once a charismatic psychology professor at Toronto University. Now he’s writing books so strange and unmoored from reality that the London Times declared a recent one so “repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad” that it “repels the reader’s attention at the level of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Sometimes even at the level of the word”. Peterson also proselytises about his all-beef diet. These are weird people whose cultural power is increasingly overstated.
On the harder end of things, I didn’t like the sight of McGregor in the White House last month. He was there to condemn what he called the Irish Government’s “zero-accountability” approach to immigration, adding that the “illegal immigration racket is running ravage on the country”.
It’s more concerning seeing McGregor on the central stage of global politics than it is seeing him wander around with Carlson, but I also cannot help but think the danger of the moment was overstated. Most of the world sees Donald Trump for what he is now – a kind of despotic bully driven by caprice and rudimentary economic foresight. McGregor’s stock in Ireland – the place where it actually matters – is not aided by his association with Trump either.
We didn’t need to be handed a list of explanations about McGregor’s unsuitability for office – he makes the case evident himself, and was never going to be President of Ireland anyway. But I like to judge people by the company they keep – call me shallow, naive – and McGregor could not find much worse.
