It's Time to Call Out Tucker Carlson

After doing my best to ignore the latest Tucker Carlson saga, I find I must say something.

"Go the hell away," for starters.

I'd said pretty much everything I thought I'd ever need to say about Carlson early last year, following his context-free interview with Palestinian Authority propagandist Reverend Munther Isaac. So when the current brouhaha broke out over his kid-glove treatment of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, I did my best to ignore it. Yes, even though Fuentes is the guy who rants that "Jews are running society" and that women and blacks should be silenced or imprisoned.

Then there was the additional blowup when Heritage Foundation chief Kevin Roberts made a totally unnecessary (and totally embarrassing) video defending Carlson. "Even sympathetic commentators understand that the damage is serious," Roger Kimball wrote on Sunday.

But I let the Roberts thing slide, too, because the revolt inside Heritage told me that the institution was probably in much better intellectual shape than Roberts was when he made that video. Rather than rehash all the sordid details, you can always reread Scott Pinsker's excellent take here.

So I posted a couple of brief items on Instapundit about Carlson and Fuentes, tried to not think about it, and called it good.

But it wasn't good. Something changed. It was these words from Ace of Spades that moved me:

I am pointing out that, contrary to the claims of Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and even Matt Walsh, who says we must stop fighting about Nick Fuentes and simply "unite" with him for the good of the party, Fuentes and his Gay Nazi fans are not part of the party, and they actively campaign and vote for Democrats, and fight to destroy MAGA and the GOP so that his version of a reconstituted Nazi Party can rise up in his ashes.

This is certainly more sorrow than in anger, because there's plenty to admire about Kelly and Walsh. But as Ace noted about Carlson's embrace of 9/11 trutherism, "I joined the Republican F***ing Party to traffic in the old 'Loose Change' Bush Blew Up Tower 7 conspiracy theories? I now have to co-sign Rosie O'Donnell's 'Fire Doesn't Melt Steel' metallurgical proofs?"

A shrug in the face of a collectivist evil trying to wear conservatism like the proverbial skin suit is not enough. Or as Scott Johnson put it at Powerline last week, embracing Nazism is "a recipe for intellectual degradation and destruction of the conservative movement."

Yet that's exactly what Carlson does.

You know his playbook by now. Carlson gives a softball interview to some non-conservative personality — a Hitler apologist historian, a PA-approved "reverend," a Stalin-loving Nazi (really!) — nodding along, and rarely (if ever) challenging their outrageous premises.

A few examples.

Historian Darryl Cooper called Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War,” and that the Holocaust was a simple accident because the Nazis were "in over their heads." Carlson introduced Cooper as the "best and most honest popular historian in the United States."

Rev. Isaac said he was "shocked by the strength of the Palestinian man who defied his siege," when discussing the Oct. 7 terror invasion that murdered 1,200 civilians, but decried Israeli "genocide." Carlson sided with Isaac at every point during the interview.

Nick Fuentes — who once described Vice President JD Vance as "a fat, gay, race traitor that married a j**t"— also told Carlson that "Adolf Hitler was very, very cool," and that he was “always an admirer” of Stalin. Carlson later posed smiling with his arm around the Nazi twink.

Then Carlson will have on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and grill him over Iranian demographics in an apparent attempt to discredit everything he has to say about the Israeli-Iran War earlier this year.

"I'm just asking questions," is Carlson's defense, but there's a world of difference between "just asking questions," and using your selection of guests — and your treatment of them — to establish a narrative.

Carlson's daily email blast — kudus to Managing Editor Chris Queen for sending it to me — today jumped on board the chemtrails panic train, and is "just asking questions" about who really won World War II. When Tucker defended narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro, or said he doesn't know "if [Hamas] is a terror organization… seems more like a political organization," he's no conservative. You have to wonder if he's a resident of Planet Earth.

The narrative Carlson established over the last couple of years in anything but conservative. "It should be clear to all that what Carlson is defending is closer to what our parents and grandparents fought against in World War II than anything that can be called American conservatism," the Civitas Institute's Thomas D. Howes concluded.

Some readers might caution me against infighting, and remind me that when conservatives are fighting one another, we aren't fighting the Democrats and the Left — and I couldn't agree more. I'm a Big Tent guy who believes the only way to win is convincing as many people as possible that conservatism is right, that it works, and that they belong inside the tent.

But Tucker Carlson left the tent a while ago. Back in the ’90s and early 2000s, Carlson was one of us — inside the tent, p***ing out, as they say. Now he’s on the outside with the Nazis, p***ing in.

Don't let him tell you it's raining.

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