He might hate Trump now, but Tucker Carlson is not your friend

In a late-night Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump lashed out at his “stupid, low IQ” former MAGA disciples, but he reserved first position for Carlson: “Hand flailing fool… who couldn’t even finish college, he was a broken man when he got fired from Fox, and he’s never been the same, perhaps he should see a good psychiatrist!”

Meanwhile, a slew of bien-pensant so-called progressives have praised the demagogic former Fox News presenter for his own fanatical ravings about Trump being the anti-Christ. Carlson said: “Who do you think you are? You’re tweeting out the F-word on Easter morning? We are not God.

“This is not a mockery of Islam. This is a mockery of Christianity… To send a tweet with the F word on Easter morning promising the murder of civilians and then saying ‘praise be to Allah’. You are mocking every other Christian and me.

“That is evil. That is an intentional desecration of beauty and truth, which is the definition of evil.”

The chorus of progressive approval includes British-American new media entrepreneur Mehdi Hasan, former Obama speechwriter turned podcaster Jon Favreau and Canadian writer Jeet Heer of US left-leaning magazine The Nation. The Putin-pandering former Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald – once a hero of the left – has also rushed in with praise to heap praise.

Hasan, who runs leftist media company Zeteo and has built a huge following for his combative YouTube interviews, retweeted the notoriously antisemitic account “Muslim mum” while lauding Carlson’s bizarre anti-Christ speech, saying: “Ok this is actually pretty good, not just because he is pushing back against the rightwing mockery of Islam but, for the first time, Tucker is breaking with Trump, directly criticizing him. That’s bold, given his base.”

Earlier this year, Hasan praised Carlson’s foreign policy rantings in an interview where he waffled and shrieked when asked whether he supported Israel’s right to exist: “I have waited years for someone to challenge this nonsense phrase on mainstream media… and he undeniably did it well. I hate to say this but Carlson is 100% correct here,” wrote Hasan.

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He has also said: “I am not a fan of Tucker Carlson… but as an interviewer, Carlson actually, brilliantly, asks follow-up questions…”

Your enemy’s enemy is not your friend. Carlson is sending all the signals he wants to run for the Republican nomination in 2028, and the applause from parts of the populist left only strengthens that positioning. Last month, Greenwald predicted the emergence of an anti-Israel GOP candidate and said he “hopes” it will be Carlson.

Is everyone forgetting that this is the former Fox News presenter who knew full well that Trump’s claims about 2020 election fraud and Dominion voting machines were utterly fictitious? He said so privately, but publicly, he amplified them. 

Internal messages later revealed that senior figures at Fox, including Carlson, did not believe the allegations but continued airing them. Fox ultimately paid $787.5 million to settle the case. Carlson was fired days later.

He is also a gesticulating Bible basher who has descended vertiginously into conspiracism, to the point of openly entertaining flat earth theories. “Well, I’m open to anything… there’s been so much deception that you can’t trust your preconceptions,” he said in 2023.

Conspiracy Watch, a French-based research group tracking conspiracy theories and their proponents for nearly two decades, has documented Carlson’s trajectory – particularly since October 7, 2023 – towards increasingly extreme narratives, notably when it comes to Jews and Israel. And his views hold sway. Carlson now reaches tens of millions across platforms, including YouTube and X.

In 2024, Carlson travelled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin and gave him a cushy platform to spread conspiracy propaganda against Ukraine and the West. Most egregiously, and without eliciting any pushback, Carlson allowed Putin to blame Poland for the outbreak of world war two. According to Putin, in a brazen distortion of the historical record, the “uncooperative” Poles “forced” Hitler to act.

When Putin said, “Hitler had nothing left to do but to start implementing his plan with Poland,” Carlson did not challenge the claim.

“Deep State” theories, long a staple of Carlson’s own commentary, ran through the exchange. Putin described a system controlled by unelected elites. Carlson leaned into it: “So, it sounds like you’re describing a system that’s not run by the people who are elected in your telling?” 

“That’s right,” Putin replied. Carlson allowed the murderous Russian dictator to speak at length, including an extended historical monologue, largely uninterrupted.

Last month, Carlson praised 1930s fascist leader Oswald Mosley, who married at Joseph Goebbels’ home, describing him as one of Britain’s “great war heroes” and presenting the British Union of Fascists as the “opposition”. He again besmirched Winston Churchill, saying that the world is “required to deify” a man who “presided over the imprisonment of his opposition party during the entire length of the war, and their families, and their wives.” Mosley’s “only crime was being the opposition”, Carlson said.

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Then there is his preference for hosting Holocaust deniers. In two separate interviews, Carlson presented Nazi apologist podcaster Darryl Cooper as a serious historical voice. Cooper argued that deaths in concentration camps were the result of mismanagement and shortages rather than deliberate extermination, and that Churchill, not Hitler, was at fault for how the war unfolded. Again, Carlson did not challenge these claims.

And before his rift with the president, at an October 2024 Turning Point USA event during the election campaign, he described a potential Trump return to the White House in explicitly disciplinary and creepily cult-like terms:

“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home. And he’s pissed… ‘You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now… it’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me’.”

He repeated the same framing days later on the campaign trail, including at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally just before the vote, delivering a rambling and highly charged speech that cast the election in apocalyptic and civilisational terms, while gesturing like Chaplin’s Great Dictator.

Since Carlson has turned his ire directly on the president over Iran, the conspiracysphere from the far left and far right has jumped on his bandwagon, reducing the entire argument to Israel and pushing the same tropes about Jewish plots to control the globe.

This strange coalition includes Moscow-based hate influencer Jackson Hinkle, who wrote: “Why can’t this president, or any president, say no to Israel? Why does this tiny country have so much control over our government?”

Wajahat Ali, a liberal commentator who has converged with Carlson on Israel, added: “It’s embarrassing for Democratic leaders and their donors that Tucker is the one saying it and not them. Just pathetic.”

Meanwhile, Carlson’s fellow MAGA defectors like Greene, Jones and Kelly now turn on Trump as if they were not part of building the movement, and delivering the mango madman as a planetary dictator. They have not for one inch resiled from their xenophobia, Christian nationalism and conspiracy peddling. Infowars conspiracy theorist Jones has suggested Trump is under “mind control”.

Perhaps. But like Joe Kent, who quit his counterterrorism job in Trump’s administration with a resignation letter that included antisemitic tropes (and of course went straight on Carlson’s show), these people are are no friends to liberals, the centre left or the so-called radical centre. They built the ecosystem and will carry it on, Trump or no Trump.

So no, the fact that Carlson now takes the moral high ground on the Trump monster he helped create, or opposes strikes on Iran, does not make him a moral authority. He remains a moral vacuum.

Emma-Kate Symons is an Australian journalist based in Paris, who regularly appears on the France24 channel