Tucker Carlson has changed. He has changed before, obviously: Originally a right-leaning but skeptical reporter, he evolved into a grotesquely racist, relentlessly dishonest authoritarian demagogue. In this incarnation, he attracted new followers while retaining many of his old ones and amassing, for a time, the largest audience in journalism.
Now, he has taken a decisive turn that has shed still more of his allies by denouncing Israel. Dedicated Trumpists like David Friedman, Joel Pollak, and David Reaboi have raised alarms. Jenna Ellis, the campaign attorney who assisted Trump’s efforts to secure an unelected second term, sadly observed that Carlson has become “very, very different than who he presented himself as on Fox News.” Eli Lake, in a Free Press essay, writes Carlson out of the respectable-conservative movement.
Any defection is welcome, and belated recognition of Carlson’s flaws is certainly preferable to none. You go to war with the semi-loyal Democrats you have, not the semi-loyal Democrats you want. The Trump era has made vividly clear that the Republican Party is oriented toward cohesion, and any weakening of its centripetal force is not to be taken for granted. It would be unrealistic to expect Republicans, especially those who have stood with Carlson to this late point in his long slide into semi-fascism, to undertake a full and thorough accounting of his flaws.
That said, even by realistic standards, Carlson’s conservative critics can’t offer a coherent account of why they have suddenly recognized his grossly bigoted nature just now.
Lake’s piece lays out in the most detail the case for how Carlson has crossed some important new moral line from skeptic to dupe. Lake presents his subject as, until recently, imperfect yet still worthy of support.
“Tucker was better than other hosts on [Trump’s election lies] at the time, challenging the claims of Trump election lawyer Sidney Powell that millions of votes were deliberately not counted,” Lake writes. “He did this on-air when it mattered, in late 2020, though he later indulged his audience’s desire to believe the election was a sham.”
He gives Carlson far too much credit. Yes, while at Fox, Carlson dismissed Powell as a kook. But she was dismissed by many supporters of, and participants in, Trump’s coup attempt. There were layers of craziness in the various stolen-election theories, and Powell occupied the molten core of absolute insanity. Even Rudy Giuliani rejected her wildest claims.
Carlson’s concern about Powell was that she was undermining the case for Trump’s having won the election. He texted a colleague that there was “no doubt there was fraud” in the election, continuing, “But at this point, Trump and Lin and Powell have so discredited their own case, and the rest of us to some extent, that it’s infuriating. Absolutely enrages me.” At the same time, Carlson was furiously urging his colleagues to placate Trump’s fans who were deserting the network for having called Joe Biden the winner. “We need to do something to reassure our core audience,” he pleaded with Bret Baier. “They’re our whole business model.”
Lake laments Carlson’s “descent into moral relativism,” citing his credulous interview with Vladimir Putin and rapturous description of the Moscow subway.
The thing is, there has been no descent, at least not since Carlson ceased to be, in Lake’s eyes, a force for good. Long before this “descent,” Carlson was repeating Russian propaganda so faithfully that Putin routinely broadcast his commentaries on Russian state-controlled media. Five years ago, Carlson said he was rooting for Russia to win. He walked it back as a “joke,” but his subsequent commentary made clear he was perfectly serious, or at least floating the provocative notion deliberately. Carlson has claimed Ukraine is “not a democracy” and presented the Russian dictator to his audience as more friendly than the hated Democratic Party. (“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?”)
Carlson’s moral relativism between Russia and the United States was not only there for years, but to even call it “moral relativism” ignores the degree to which he has long put Russia on a higher plane than the United States.
So what has really changed about Carlson? Lake doesn’t hide his main objection: The right-wing host turned against Israel, or at least hinted at turning against Israel.
Carlson hosted a Christian pastor living in Bethlehem who complained about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Lake lavishes several paragraphs of rebuttal and complaint upon this transgression, arguing that it’s the Palestinians who are oppressing Christians.
Lake’s strongest point is that Carlson ignored extremist sentiments his guest had uttered elsewhere. But the point that life under Israeli occupation is hard is actually quite indisputable. Lake similarly attacks Carlson for having failed to denounce Iran’s (ineffectual) air strike against Israel.
By the standards of Carlson’s offenses against truth and decency, these are almost comically mild. Carlson has referred to Iraqis as “semi-literate primitive monkeys,” claimed vaccines have killed vastly more people than authorities acknowledge, and endorsed the far-right “great replacement theory” by name.
A New York Times report found Fox News employees recognized Carlson’s strategy of appealing to right-wing extremists. “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” a former co-worker told the Times. A current employee summed up Carlson’s themes as “They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you.”
There is a leopards-eating-faces quality to the sudden dismay expressed by Carlson’s pro-Israel former admirers. They approved of his paranoid, racist rants until he hinted he might point his audience’s resentments toward Israel as well.
It is tempting to say this turn was inevitable, that a demagogue who took delight in mocking some minorities would eventually turn against Jews. But the truth is that far-right nationalist parties in Europe manage to maintain a stable equilibrium of support for Israel alongside rabid xenophobia against other minorities.
And Carlson’s shift away from support for Israel is, for the time being, relatively mild. This makes it all the more galling that pro-Israel conservatives have developed moral reservations about Carlson for the sin of denouncing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which richly deserves denunciation.
“Once Tucker was too smart to allow his ideological rivals to determine his opinions,” laments Lake. “Now he proudly apologizes for evil and calls it the truth.” The truth is that Carlson has been perfectly consistent. He has not crossed a new moral threshold. It is simply no longer convenient for his allies to ignore him.
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