Tucker Carlson is not your friend
He's anti-Israel but not *for* anything decent.
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If you’re a liberal on social media, you might have noticed an increasing number of Tucker Carlson videos showing up in your timeline.
It’s not a glitch in the algorithm, nor has the former Fox News host experienced a moral epiphany and rejected his past odious views. Some progressives have not-so-subtly embraced Carlson over his positions on Israel and Donald Trump’s catastrophic Iran war. But this is not a good look or a smart move: Carlson is one of the clearest examples of how the “enemy of your enemy” is not in any reliable way your friend.
Earlier this month, The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes interviewed Carlson, and their heated exchange about Israel soon went viral. The consensus among the online left was that Carlson masterfully outmaneuvered Milton Beddoes, who struggled to defend or even define her own position. (Watch below.)
Scott Horton, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine who’s known for his work in human rights law, commented on social media, “The Economist’s interview with Tucker Carlson didn’t go very well for the Economist.” He wasn’t wrong.
Minton Beddoes asked Carlson if he believed in Israel’s “right to exist,” and Carlson replied, “What does that mean, a right to exist?” This caught her off guard, and Carlson pressed his advantage: “I don’t know what your question is. Are you asking does it have a right to exist? Do I want it to exist? Do I seek its destruction? … Of course, I don’t seek its destruction … I think Lebanon has a right to exist, I thought Gaza had a right to exist. But I notice as soon as we start apportioning rights only one country gets them."
Progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan shared a clip from the interview, which he called a “must watch” and claimed was the first time he’d seen “a major figure on an establishment media outlet question a journalist’s ’right to exist’ pro-Israel propaganda phrase.”
Hasan added, “I have waited years for someone to challenge this nonsense phrase on mainstream media. An indictment of the liberal PEP media that it took Tucker Carlson to do it. And he undeniably did it well.”
Perhaps it’s necessary to jog Hasan’s memory a little. Barely two years ago in 2024, when promoting his book “The Message,” progressive author Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged the premise of the “right to exist” question during an interview on CBS’s morning show. (Watch below.)
Coates is a far more consistent voice on human rights than Carlson, who’s infamous for his openly white supremacist rants both on and off Fox News. Admittedly, Coates is somewhat of an outlier, though, as the mainstream media doesn’t regularly platform progressives who are openly critical of Israel’s government. (There’s also the obvious observation that Coates is Black and Carlson is decidedly not.)
But none of that means progressives should elevate Tucker Carlson, of all people. It’s actually counterproductive because progressives risk aligning themselves with someone who’s more hostile toward Israel than he’s actually supportive of Gaza.
For instance, during their conversation, Carlson asked Minton Beddoes her opinion on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. She responded, “I went in there with the IDF, and what you see is a place that’s been razed to the ground. I think it’s a disaster for Israel’s future.”
Seizing on her somewhat callous remark, Carlson went for the knockout.
“Why do you describe it first as a disaster for Israel’s future?” he argued. “There are tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed, but for you it’s a disaster for Israel first and foremost? It’s a disaster primarily for the families of the children who were killed. The real problem with labeling people as antisemitic when they aren’t is accusing innocent people of a crime they didn’t commit. The real crime in Gaza is the killing of innocent people. Those are the real problems, but nobody can say that because you have to pretend and say, ‘Oh no, what about October 7th?’”
Progressives are latching onto Carlson’s statements that seemingly prioritize the Palestinian people and their suffering, while ignoring what’s barely hidden under the surface: his usual conspiracy mongering about an elite “other” that controls what we can say or do. You can’t reasonably interpret his comments about Israel, Gaza, and Trump’s Iran war without the key context of everything else he believes. After all, this is the same person who promoted the racist Great Replacement Theory that has now become the Trump administration’s entire immigration policy.
During his disgraceful Fox News tenure, Carlson spread flat-out lies, pro-Russian propaganda, and repulsive bigotry. He pushed false claims about the 2020 election. He suggested that January 6 suspect Ray Epps was a government plant — and that was on top of his grotesque perversion of January 6 footage he’d received from then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. It’s disappointing to see anyone sanewash him as a hard-hitting, truth-telling journalist.
A few weeks ago, British media commentator Mike Galwsorthy posted a clip of Carlson’s interview with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. The glowing caption read, “Tucker Carlson *absolutely* nails Mike Huckabee here.”
Mehdi Hasan shared a clip from the Tucker Carlson Network in which Carlson challenges Huckabee to explain “on what basis does” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “have the right to be here … it’s a big question.” Hasan wrote, “Indeed it is. And astonishing that until Carlson of all people came along, no senior US official echoing the Zionist/Israeli government narrative had ever been asked this question or pressed on this issue.”
It’s true that few Democratic politicians speak as bluntly about Israel as Carlson does, but it’s dangerous to suggest this somehow makes him a principled actor. His concern for Palestinians is conditional, to the extent it genuinely exists: He’s pointed out that the US provides more direct aid to Israel than to Palestinian Christians. When Carlson questions Netanyahu’s “right to be here” (in Israel), he’s questioning his right to be anywhere — a common antisemitic attack.
After the deadly (and unlawful) US bombing of an Iranian school that killed more than 100 children, Carlson posted on Facebook, “When civilians are killed in large numbers and it becomes public, the United States military, going back hundreds of years, has felt a moral obligation, being a Western, not an Eastern country, to apologize for the death of innocents and punish the people responsible. It's happened a lot. Because we don't do things like that. Israel does do things like that. Israel sets off pagers in the pockets of people that they can't identify. They're just out there. They're going to go off and they'll kill some terrorists and maybe some others, which they did. And that's a price they're willing to pay. That's not a price that we're willing to pay, because we're not Israel.”
Carlson makes no distinction between Israel the nation and its government, while simultaneously equating a higher moral stature to the United States overall — one the current government certainly doesn’t deserve. He also summarily rejects Israel as part of western civilization, which he’s previously described as “our birthright” that “makes all good things possible.”
Unlike Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlson doesn’t criticize Israel because he opposes ethnonationalism in any form. He is an ethnonationalist. Carlson recently freaked out his MAGA brethren when he seemingly praised Islamic societies, stating they were more “advanced” than the west thanks to “Sharia Law.”
This was consistent with Carlson’s long-held position that liberal secularism has diminished western civilization. He laments that white Christians in America are ashamed of their heritage and culture, and this self-hatred holds them back compared to other societies whose cultural homogeneity he’d like to see implemented at home.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who walked into Carlson’s rhetorical buzz saw last year, now condemns him as “the single most dangerous demagogue in this country.” (That conveniently ignores the current White House occupant.) Although Cruz shifts with the political winds, he is at least correct to call out Carlson’s rampant antisemitism, which includes platforming Holocaust deniers, Hitler apologists, and outright Nazis. Meanwhile, some progressives have started treating Carlson as a serious presidential contender. This is alarming, even if couched as concern over mainstream Democrats’ positions on Israel.
Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote, “If [the 2028 election] was [Josh] Shapiro vs. Tucker, I could imagine a significant number of progressives, young people, Arabs, and Muslims sitting it out or actually voting for Tucker.” Hamid’s hypothetical would require an immeasurable level of collective amnesia, coupled with self-sabotaging stupidity: Carlson’s documented history of anti-progressive, anti-democratic positions are almost too numerous to list.
Carlson regularly spouted racist, homophobic, and anti-trans hate on his Fox News show, and he’s still at it today. Last December, he repeated the right-wing smear that Rep. Ilhan Omar is here illegally and “married her brother.” There is also a direct line from his unhinged rhetoric about a “Somali invasion” in Minnesota and Trump’s ICE occupation of Minneapolis starting that same month. (Watch below.)
If Shapiro’s pro-Israel position is enough for progressives and young liberals to vote for Carlson or sit out the election (thus enabling his victory), it suggests that blinding antisemitism is taking root within the progressive movement and the Democratic Party.
Yes, Carlson is anti-Israel but he’s also not for anything decent. If progressives want to maintain a morally clear position on Israel and Gaza, they’ll stop clogging our feeds with Tucker Carlson clips. He’s not helping. He’s only part of the problem.
That’s it for today
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I never thought he was, to be honest. Can't abide him.
Very well said, Stephen. Thank you.