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As the drums of war beat ever louder and Donald Trump weighs whether to launch strikes in the Middle East, an unlikely anti-war firebrand has emerged.
Welcome to the resistance… Tucker Carlson?
In the past two weeks, the former Fox News host has become the loudest and most effective opponent of the push for the United States to join Israel’s war against Iran.
Carlson, a longtime Trump ally and sometime informal adviser to the president, has taken to the airwaves, toured MAGA podcasts and used his own media network to argue against U.S. intervention.
He has turned on former allies, accused Trump of being “complicit” in Israel’s attack on Iran and warned that a “full-scale war” could end his presidency.
But Carlson is not just any peacenik, preaching to the converted. He is a double agent turned from the other side. He knows the ways of the neocons — their secrets, their tricks, their dodges — because he was once one of them.
In his previous bow-tie-wearing iteration, Carlson was part of the media circus that helped to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein was an imminent safety threat that required the full might of an American military invasion.
“We know today for certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction… There’s a lunatic with weapons that could kill the civilized world. What do we do about it?” he said in 2003 on his Crossfire show, echoing the calls being made today about Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
He quickly came to regret his support for the war just one year in, calling it “a total nightmare and disaster,” and became a staunch anti-interventionist in the years that followed.
Do not be fooled, Carlson is no liberal. His rise through the ranks of mainstream media and to the heights of Fox News was fueled by rage and racism. He described Iraqis as “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” called white supremacy “a hoax” and railed against diversity in America. At any dinner party, in any progressive household, he would likely be cancelled by the first course.
But on matters of foreign policy, he often finds common ground with liberals. And those years of regret over Iraq have made him extremely effective when attacking the people now pushing for a war with Iran.
That became clear when he sat down with Ted Cruz, a fellow Trump devotee, and interrogated the senator in a now-viral interview on his support for Israel’s war and a U.S. role in it.
“How many people live in Iran, by the way?” Carlson asked Cruz.
“I don’t know the population at all,” Cruz answered.
Carlson became incredulous: “You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?”
It went downhill from there.
Carlson grilled Cruz in a way he has never grilled a fellow Republican, on everything from Iran’s ethnic makeup to his interpretations of Biblical texts.
“You don't know anything about Iran,” the TV host said, pointedly and accurately.
Carlson even touched the third rail of Republican politics by quizzing Cruz on the donations he has received over the years from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
In an exchange that had echoes of Gore Vidal and Bill Buckley’s infamous wordy showdown at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Carlson accused Cruz of being a “sleazy feline” when the Texas senator suggested his line of questioning was anti-Semitic.
Carlson’s spat with Cruz was noteworthy not just because two MAGA figureheads were battling it out so viciously in public, but because Carlson appeared to be doing the job of dismantling the case for war far better than most Democrats or liberal commentators.
His interview even earned the reluctant praise of his longtime nemesis Jon Stewart, who once humiliated Carlson so badly on his own show that it went viral before that was even a concept.
“We’re in such a bizarro world, you’ve got me nodding my head to Tucker Carlson videos,” Stewart said Thursday. “You got Tucker Carlson going, ‘Why are we going why are we going to war with Iran again?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, you tell him, brother!’ Like, that’s how f---ing upside down we find ourselves in this moment.”
Stewart wasn’t alone in backing Carlson, with support from Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna, former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor, liberal commentator Mehdi Hasan and even leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who tweeted: “why is tucker carlson capable of conducting an adversarial interview about the dangers of american intervention in iran with ted cruz better than everyone else in legacy media? Shame.”
Carlson’s anti-war appearances could be powerful. He is a MAGA influencer with the president’s phone number. He was, not long ago, the host of the most-watched cable news show in the country. His influence may have waned since then, but if Trump is at all susceptible to pressure from his base, Carlson is appearing in all the right places to apply that pressure.
His history as purveyor of neocon propaganda from the belly of the beast, Fox News, allows him to dismantle the entire media-political apparatus that builds the case for war.
The interview with Cruz came days after Carlson appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room Podcast, where he railed against Fox News for “turning up the propaganda hose to full blast, and just trying to knock elderly viewers off their feet and make them submit to more wars.”
“The one theme that runs longitudinally through the history of Fox is the promotion of wars that don’t help the United States,” he said of his former employer.
But Carlson is aware of his limits.
Bannon, a fellow skeptic, asked Carlson if he thought the U.S. would eventually join the war, to which he answered, “Yes.”
“I’m really afraid that my country’s gonna be further weakened by this. I think we’re gonna see the end of the American empire,” he added.
The president dismissed those comments Monday, and described Carlson as “kooky.” But a couple of days later, he revealed that he and Carlson had spoken by phone.
“It’s interesting, because I did ask Tucker, I said, ‘Well, are you OK with nuclear weapons being in the hands of Iran?’ And he sort of didn’t like that. And I said, ‘If it’s OK with you, then you and I really do have a difference. But it’s really not OK with him. Therefore, you have to fight, and maybe it will end, and maybe it will end very quickly,” he said.
It’s unclear if they have spoken again, but both sides are continuing to make their case on the airwaves.
Trump, meanwhile, has been circumspect on his plans regarding an attack on Iran: "I may do it, I may not do it. Nobody knows what I'm gonna do," he said Wednesday.
