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President Donald Trump’s unpopular war with Iran has aroused opposition among plenty of his conservative supporters, including commentator Tucker Carlson. Yet just because Carlson agrees with liberals about Trump and Iran, one expert warned, that does not mean he is their ally.
“What’s happening here is obvious: Carlson and his ilk are savvy operators, well-practiced in the art of sneaking their rhetorical f—— into the day’s prevailing political winds,” wrote The Nation's Rafi Schwartz on Thursday. “Public opposition to American-Israeli military action is an opportunity for them to launder an ideology of racial and religious hierarchy through a sanitized lens of politically expedient isolationism.”
He added, “None of these people are bothering to hide this. It’s just that liberals don’t seem too inclined to look.”
Schwartz cited as example former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and prominent Democrats and Democrat-adjacent accounts, such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Headquarters Newsroom, who are quick to praise Carlson and other anti-war conservatives like commentator Candace Owens and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
But “Tucker Carlson hasn’t suddenly grown a morally fortified spine, and Candace Owens isn’t ‘shredding’ the president out of any sense of the common good,” Schwartz pointed out. “Their complaints, such as they are, are about Trump’s challenges in enacting a MAGA agenda they wholeheartedly endorse. That is to say, their criticism of Trump’s wartime conduct is fundamentally constructive, offered in the hopes of seeing the agenda that drew them to Trump in the first place fulfilled. They don’t 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.”
Schwartz added that conflating the conservative opposition to the Iran war with the liberal and moderate opposition legitimizes bad faith arguments.
“By repeatedly framing Carlson’s anti-war broadcasts as laudatory and worth watching, the implication is that people on the left should look rightward for inspiration,” Schwartz opined. “Compare the framing for Pod Save America’s recent interview with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, which Favreau shared on Bluesky by threading the episode after quoting Ezra Klein’s recent assertion that “conversation is not a reward to be bestowed upon those with whom we agree.”
He concluded, “Liberal audiences are, in essence, being told that conservative anti-war rhetoric riddled with bad-faith propaganda and fueled partially by inward-facing, right-wing score-settling is as legitimate and worthwhile as anything from the left—including, by extrapolation, the rest of the messaging coming from the same blue-tinged media figures sharing Carlson in the first place.”
But Carlson is "a bigot and a hypocrite and a vector for misery and harm across multiple communities," said Schwartz. Worse, "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 seem more palatable for an audience primed by popular podcasters to be receptive and open-minded to his polished propaganda."
"Tucker Carlson isn’t your anti-war buddy," said Schwartz. "He’s not your strange bedfellow during unprecedented times. He’s not your friend. And anyone who tells you that he and his ilk are the anti-war voices worth listening to above all others? They’re probably not your friend either."