“My first thought is I’m not going nowhere to fight none of these wars for these politicians,” he said. “I’m staying at home, and when the war comes to Arkansas, I will dig my boots in the ground, and I will die for everything I love. And I will not retreat. If this country is invaded and everybody’s saying, well, we’ve got to evacuate, we got to leave, I will not. I will dig my boots in the Arkansas soil, and I will fight for the people that I love, for the land that I love and the way of life that I love.”
A noble sentiment, certainly, though a tangential one. No one is asking Mitchell or any other American to fight in Ukraine, and there is no obvious path to doing so: The United States has not engaged any forces in Ukraine (at least overtly), and there’s certainly no call to conscript civilians to do so. Mitchell is righteously indignant about something that has no real prospect of becoming reality.
Mitchell continued.
“I don’t know what’s going on to be honest, brother, I really don’t,” he said. “There’s so much stuff — and I don’t think nobody knows what’s going on fully. There’s been so much political corruption in that area. You got Biden and his son making a … ton of money off of and using our tax dollars to bribe their people. That’s treasonous, in my opinion. … He shouldn’t be giving our tax dollars to that country anyway! We got veterans out here sleeping on the street, and you’re going to give our … tax dollars to these Ukrainians?”
Here it starts to coalesce. Mitchell’s view of Ukraine has obviously been colored by right-wing commentary about President Biden and his son Hunter. You’ll recall from a few years ago that Hunter Biden’s legitimately questionable role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company was spun into a broad narrative of alleged wrongdoing on the part of his father, centered on a willful misinterpretation of a U.S. government effort to fight corruption in Ukraine. Biden, as vice president, threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Ukraine didn’t fire a prosecutor understood to be corrupt; the prosecutor was fired — and then exacted his revenge by helping to cobble together a story about Biden trying to protect his son. But this is the rub: Years of rhetoric attacking Biden and Ukraine in defense of Donald Trump bubbles up in the form of an overstated anti-interventionism.
Soon after Mitchell was done speaking, his no war/no Biden riff started to spread on social media. Right-wing pundit Glenn Greenwald shared it with his millions of followers on Twitter, writing how it was “amazing what you hear when you listen to people who don’t pay constant attention to politics for a living and therefore don’t have their basic values corrupted and perceptions warped by constant propaganda.”
There’s certainly evidence that Mitchell doesn’t pay constant attention to politics, but also certainly evidence that his perceptions have been warped by propaganda — from the political right.
Mitchell is not a particularly well-known celebrity, but he is a celebrity. He’s not a regular American; he’s a guy who regularly sits down at a microphone and is asked to opine on things. And he’s someone whom the political right has celebrated in the past for espousing sympathetic opinions. As when he disparaged wearing masks to combat the coronavirus in November 2020 or when, in December 2019, he offered to parlay his fighting skills into attacks on D.C. politicians, should Trump make such a request.
Then the other shoe dropped.
On Tuesday night, Mitchell appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program. And, under Carlson’s skilled direction, Mitchell became a symbol not of the right’s skepticism of Biden but a near martyr for an invented oppression by American elites.
Carlson began by showing part of Mitchell’s response to the original question, the part about defending Arkansas. The host marveled that most people you see on TV wouldn’t stick around to fight — the sniveling cowards! — as somehow proven by “polling.” Then he cast Mitchell as a noble truth-teller, paying an enormous cost.
Check out this nifty bit of footwork from Carlson:
“People who say what you have said are often denounced as unpatriotic or traitors to their country. Does that confuse you since the first thing you said was ‘I will fight and die for Arkansas’?”
He doesn’t identify anyone who actually called Mitchell a traitor since it seems likely no one did. Why would they, given precisely the reason Carlson offers? But then he has Mitchell respond as though he had been called a traitor.
Mitchell said dying for America would be “the greatest thing I could do,” but added that he was not going to “waste my life fighting for some of these battles that I don’t even believe in,” which, again, no one is asking him to do and no one is going to ask him to do. Then Mitchell went a step further: “I believe our leaders, a lot of these elites are guilty of treason. What they’ve done is just treasonous. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about a little bit.”
Carlson didn’t reply to that, but he did riff on it: “It’s funny that they’re accusing you of treason.”
Who is? Who accused him of treason? Carlson’s jumped from “people like you” to “you” to amplify the idea that Mitchell represents a broad, oppressed mass of people who the elites are trying to cajole into engaging in a shooting war with Russia.
Carlson had already set the stage for this by asking Mitchell how he could “get to be so honest when everyone else is afraid to say what they think.” Again, who would be afraid to say “I will fight for my home, my family and values?” I’ll say that: I will fight for my home, my family and values. I, too, would not be excited to be conscripted to fight in Ukraine against Russia. Typing those words was not scary for me. But Carlson won’t hail me as clarion voice of honesty because I am one of those “elites” he hates (though, of course, not as much as he is).
Asked to describe how his friends were responding to his viral fame, Mitchell said that they were “coming out of the woodwork and just supporting me” — but also “telling me you need to load your guns up because somebody is going to come out there and try to take you out for what you’re saying.” This, perhaps more than anything, reflects how far into the right-wing cinematic universe Mitchell is operating: because he says something that the right likes, he must be risking unemployment (as he said others might) or violence. Even if what he says is some combination of anodyne and misinformed.
It’s useful to point out the irony of Fox News inviting an athlete to offer his unfiltered assessment of the world. In the conversation with Carlson, Mitchell presented his thoughts on a number of different issues. On how pandemic restrictions were a sign that “evil has took over this nation,” for example. And, in one lengthy riff, how Biden “used our tax dollars to bribe [his son] a job,” how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should have been arrested for insider trading, how they “closed down all of our pipelines and wonder why the price of oil has gone through the roof,” how “our actual currency is controlled by a small group called the Federal Reserve, that ain’t federal and ain’t a reserve.”
He had a theory why this was all happening.
“These people are trying to destroy our country because they are profiting off the downfall of our country,” he said, later adding that “it’s insidious in nature. It’s made to control.”
“It’s amazing what you’re saying,” Carlson replied, “all of which is, in my view, true.”
This is not the position the network’s hosts have taken when other athletes have weighed in on current events. You’ve heard this segment mentioned in the past, but it really bears watching in the context of the interview with Mitchell.
Bryce Mitchell is welcome to his opinions. He is welcome to share his opinions, and he has a platform to do so. His opinions are broadly misinformed and clearly a function of the influential right-wing media world, but, recognizing that as context, he has every right to present them.
What’s important here is not what he said. What’s important is how what he said became an emblem of something else entirely, of an oppressed truth-teller being targeted by nebulous elites who, at an extreme, might wish to see him harmed. He became exactly what the right has warned about for so long, a Real American who offers an opinion that those in power must suppress.
He was conscripted into a war after all: Tucker Carlson’s profitable war against elite straw men.
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