Tucker Carlson’s Latest Lie Shows There’s No Upside to Appeasing Crackpots
The Right's neverventionist strain, and its false choice between Bush 2.0 and Ron Paul reborn, needs to be vanquished.
This week, noted phony Tucker Carlson interviewed fake presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy about the weekend’s Hamas attack on Israel (which inspired the guest to shift stances on aid to the Jewish state yet again). At one point, Carlson took a bizarre swipe at Ron DeSantis without naming him:
People are outraged by what happened in Israel, and again, I want to add my voice to that, because I’m a human being. But the scale of the outrage among Republican presidential candidates was so much more intense. One of them took to a bullhorn and started yelling about it. I get it, but no one would ever think to do that over the 100,000 American young people who are murdered every year, and they are murdered, honestly.
If the man the Heritage Foundation celebrated as a truth-teller back in April actually cared about the truth of the event, it would’ve taken seconds to inform his audience that DeSantis was speaking into a bullhorn to be heard by an overflow crowd at a campaign stop, and that video of it is readily available—video which no sane or honest viewer would describe as “yelling.”
To normal people, it might seem sleazy to take a public figure who has given one engaging interviews and excessive praise, and more importantly is an effective champion for the values of freedom, family, and cultural sanity one claims to care about, and randomly misrepresent him as unhinged, complete with a baseless insinuation he cares more about foreign suffering than American.
But Tucker Carlson isn’t a normal person. He’s a professional crank whisperer whose chosen niche is to play to the shallowest, seediest, and most sanity-challenged elements of what may loosely be described as the American Right, but on his favorite hobbyhorse, foreign policy, has more in common with the hard Left. Naturally, his target audiences overlap with diehard fans of DeSantis’s presidential primary opponent Donald Trump, whom Carlson interviews indistinguishably from Chris Matthews addressing Barack Obama, has endorsed for 2024, and publicly claims to “love,” despite privately admitting “I hate him passionately” after the 2020 election.
Who cares about honesty when there’s a ravenous audience for demagogic caricatures? Why credit a principled and substantive understanding of a conflict when it’s so much more emotionally satisfying and click-driving to stoke resentment of foreigners with false choices between international crises and domestic problems? (Just take a moment to reflect on the sheer idiocy of the idea that if only Israel and/or Ukraine weren’t in fights for survival right now, Democrats and moderate Republicans would magically take an interest in securing our borders, reforming our schools, or cleaning up our streets.)
Tucker’s sleazy swipe does, however, helpfully illustrates the mess DeSantis made for himself with his initial Ukraine position statement, which opted to pander to the populist strain Carlson represents with word choices he later had to clean up, and now have him locked in a pattern of saying as little concrete as possible on the issue to avoid contradicting himself or risking alienation in either direction, instead of impressing voters with his actual in-depth understanding of what Putin wants in the region and how it relates to U.S. interests.
Admittedly, expressing his authentic Reaganite self and letting the chips fall where they may would have been a gamble, as it’s not entirely clear how deep the GOP electorate’s neverventionist sentiment really is and how much of it is merely amplified by the loudest voices, but it’s clear DeSantis’s current approach isn’t getting him anything from the committed extremes of either foreign policy wing, nor has it dissuaded the cranks from smearing him as a warmonger anyway.
Nevertheless, this mess is yet another reason why Trump needs to be vanquished by DeSantis: so DeSantis can pursue a foreign policy that is neither Bush 2.0 nor Ron Paul reborn, and in the process begin to clean up the confusion and false choices that have festered for years, all-but destroyed a segment of the Right’s ability to comprehend that bad guys doing bad things to others cross the ocean can in fact affect us in America, cemented an article of faith that the U.S. can do nothing for itself or others abroad without needless bloodshed, and given cretinous commentators ways to enrich themselves by encouraging their audiences to be dumber, angrier, and more envious of their fellow man.