Liberals are delighted by the MAGA titan’s opposition to the Iran war. All they do is bolster the credibility of an unrepentant, pathologically dishonest, bad-faith bigot.
Don’t trust this man.
(YouTube) Pop quiz, hotshot: Who has the best, most inspiring anti-war message in America today? Is this a religious leader? A work organizer? A rock star? No? What if I told you he was a high-profile, unapologetic bigot? Or the other? Or the other another, if you really want to recover the full regressive set?
As strange as it may seem, this is the subtext of some of the messages we receive from the liberal side these days. If you’ve spent more than a minute on social media in the last week, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed an increase in the number of online media personalities, presumably of liberal leanings, encouraging you to engage with a growing list of MAGA notables who can’t wait to tell you how offended they are by Trump’s war in Iran. Just for fun, try logging into your social media platform of choice, searching for some iteration of “I can’t believe I agree with Carlson” and watching your browser sizzle and crash. Be careful not to find yourself buried under a avalanche of “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Good Point” JPEG files while you’re at it.
The “entire” 43-minute anti-Iran war monologue from Carlson’s April 6 episode “is worth watching,” Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter turned podcaster, told his 1.3 million followers, sharing a more than two-hour episode of Carlson’s eponymous show.
Quarterly Newsroom, the liberal media built from the ignominious remains of Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, has been equally enthusiastic every time MAGA media Oprichniks express rare, and often pointedly tempered, discontent with the regime’s Iranian adventurism; “Candace Owens quotes our message while ripping Donald Trump into pieces in new video,” boasted a recent Message from the blue skypreceded by three other posts focused on Owens. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna went even further: credit Owens, Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene – and no one else – by name, along with other unnamed “progressive activists and conservative anti-war voices,” he says, pushed Trump out of Iran’s atomic pit. To date, his post has around 2.3 million views.
So what’s going on? Should we now welcome these previously verboten characters into our lives? Should we make a place for them in the anti-war vanguard?
The answer to these questions is no.
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What’s going on here is obvious: Carlson and his ilk are savvy operators, well trained in the art of slipping their rhetorical farts into the prevailing political winds of the moment. Public opposition to US-Israeli military action is an opportunity for them to whitewash an ideology of racial and religious hierarchy through the sanitized prism of politically expedient isolationism.
None of these people bother to hide this. It’s just that liberals don’t seem too inclined to look into it. For example, that episode of Carlson that Jon Favreau eagerly pushed to his legions of followers? It also featured segments such as “Why is corruption so prevalent in American Protestant churches?” » and “Attempts to introduce the Antichrist”. Less than a week later, Carlson readily admitted that the reason he opposed the Israeli assault on Beirut was that the city’s Christian residents “may not be the majority, but they are in charge.” For Carlson, Beirut’s value lies simply in being the RIGHT a kind of theocracy.
But to win more converts, Carlson, Owens and their ilk need partners to help them in this whitewashing, on the other side of the ideological aisle. It turns out that a number of left-wing enablers are willing to meet with Carlson and his colleagues. midway.
In a perfect, frictionless world, where perpetual motion is possible and no one cares about restarting FireflyI suppose I could understand the underlying logic apparently at play here: who wouldn’t want to revel in the knowledge that their anti-war cause is so righteous and pure that it can convert demons from the pits of MAGA hell? Who doesn’t feel good knowing that he has chosen a side so overwhelming in its rightness that even someone like Carlson Understood ?
The problem, of course, is that this is a fantasy for babies and the liberal consultant-turned-influencer class (a frequent overlap). Tucker Carlson didn’t suddenly develop a morally fortified spine, and Candace Owens doesn’t “shred” the president by stripping him of a sense of the common good. Their complaints, such as they are, are about Trump’s difficulties implementing a MAGA agenda that they wholeheartedly support. In other words, their criticism of Trump’s wartime conduct is fundamentally constructiveproposed in the hope of seeing the program that attracted them to Trump realized. They do not want the war to end because it is fundamentally immoral, but because they see its execution as having become detrimental to their broader ultranationalist cause.
They are professional colonizers of the attention economy who manage to infiltrate spaces well beyond the ossified limits of their usual activities. X.com to go out. They are not your allies. They are parasites of opportunity, jumping on a series of interlocking interests in which their racially motivated projects of ultranational ethno-religious homogeneity can be sublimated under a more palatable anti-war umbrella.
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There’s a danger here, beyond that of seriously annoying people (me) every time Tucker’s smirk is shoved into my timeline. These liberal media enablers – people and groups with whom I am supposed to feel some sense of common cause – are only cutting themselves off from themselves and their supposed positions of authority.
By repeatedly calling Carlson’s anti-war shows glowing and worth watching, the implication is that people on the left should look to the right for inspiration. Compare the framing for Save America Pod’s recent interview with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, which Favreau shared on Bluesky while streaming the episode after citing Ezra Klein’s recent assertion that “conversation is not a reward to be given to those with whom we agree.”
In essence, the liberal public is being told that conservative anti-war rhetoric is riddled with bad faith propaganda and fueled in part by an inward-looking attitude, right-wing settling of scores is as legitimate and valid as anything coming from the left – including, by extrapolation, the rest of the message coming from the same blue-tinted media figures sharing Carlson in the first place.
The fractures exposed by Carlson and company on the right are political pressure points to exploit, to be sure, but it is a far cry from wholeheartedly elevating proponents of the Great Replacement theory and other flavors of white nationalism as voices worthy of consideration in their own right. Creating false parity between sincere anti-war sentiment and right-wing opportunism serves to diminish sincere voices from the left. And for what? Increase in the number of followers? More engagement on Bluesky and Threads? There is a trade-off here, but it is unbalanced.
Tucker Carlson is a lot of things. He is a bigot and a hypocrite and a vector of misery and harm in many communities. We know he’s willing to hold his nose and work to achieve Trump’s agenda despite his personal qualms, because that’s exactly what he’s done in the past: declaring how much he “passionately” hates the president in leaked texts, while working hand in hand to expand Trump’s political footprint. For him to pretend to agree in principle – but not the details – with something so obviously indefensible as a voluntary war of imperial adventurism is hardly worth the damage he will surely inflict with the newfound reach and authority he hopes to gain through this superficial pacifism. He and those like him want nothing more than to be seen and cited by liberals as a moral authority – all to make his immoral philosophy appear more palatable to an audience prepared by popular podcasters to be receptive and open-minded to his polished propaganda.
Let me be clear: If you are opposed to the war in Iran, you do not agree with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene or any of the other MAGA stalwarts seeking to restore their reputations. On the contrary, they agree with you. With us. Along with those who haven’t spent years laying the groundwork for Trump to do exactly what they now claim to vehemently oppose. The territory has already been ceded. Progress is already being made. But why should someone like Carlson receive undue credit for arriving late to where many of us have been for ages? Why are we asked to give him this?
Tucker Carlson is not your anti-war buddy. He’s not your strange bedfellow in unprecedented times. He’s not your friend. What about someone who tells you that he and his ilk are the anti-war voices worth listening to above all others? They’re probably not your friends either.
Rafi Schwartz Rafi Schwartz is a Twin Cities-based writer and co-owner of Speech blog.
