Tucker Carlson's Iran Criticism Is Far More Sinister Than You Think
No, Tucker Carlson does not care about Iranians.
by Ben Cohen
Much has been made of Tucker Carlson’s recent denouncement of Trump’s assassination of Iran's top general Qasem Soleimani. In a lengthy segment on his show last Friday, the Fox News host issued a full throttled assault on the neo cons in Washington cheering a potential conflict with Iran.
"Is Iran really the greatest threat we face?” Carlson asked his audience. “And who's actually benefiting from this? And why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our own country in favor of jumping into another quagmire from which there is no obvious exit? By the way, if we're still in Afghanistan, 19 years, sad years, later, what makes us think there's a quick way out of Iran?"
"Nobody is thinking like that right now," Carlson went on. "Instead, chest-beaters like Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska are making the usual war-like noises, the noises they always make."
Sasse had stated that "General Soleimani is dead because he was an evil bastard who murdered Americans," an argument Carlson wasn’t buying.
“Soleimani was certainly a bad guy but does that make killing him "very simple"?” asked Carlson. “It does not. Nothing about life and certainly nothing about killing is ever very simple and any politician who tells you otherwise is dumb or is lying. Yes, Soleimani was linked to the deaths of Americans. Nobody mourns his passing. But Mexico and China are also linked to the deaths of Americans. Each has flooded our country with narcotics from which tens of thousands of Americans die every single year, not that anyone in power cares. So, does that mean we get to bomb Oaxaca? Can we start assassinating generals in the People's Liberation Army? Maybe. Maybe Ben Sasse will call for that, too. He's a former consultant and a very tough character.”
Carlson’s attack on those beating the drums for war has been heralded by many on the left, notably Glenn Greenwald who praised Carlson for his “vehement and unflinching denunciations of Trump’s assassination”. Greenwald also heralded Carlson for providing “the kind of #Resistance which Democrats largely failed to offer for Obama”.
There’s a slight problem with Greenwald’s fawning assessment of Carlson’s magnificent bravery — if you listen to the full segment, it becomes abundantly clear that Carlson isn’t actually blaming Trump.
“In 2016, Donald Trump ran on a promise of fewer foreign adventures considering the ones we'd embarked upon didn't work very well, Carlson stated. “He vowed instead to focus on our problems here at home, which are growing. Against the odds he won that election, probably because of that promise, but ever since Washington, including some around the president, have been committed to ignoring the results of that election and its implications. Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades. They've been working toward it. They may have finally gotten it.”
And there we have it: the real culprits are in fact the Democrats and neo con Republicans who have always wanted war with Iran. Trump, according to Carlson, is just another victim of the war machine in Washington. Despite Trump’s noble attempts to rid the country of dirty immigrants and make the country whiter, is incapable of keeping the interventionist globalists at bay.
Interestingly, Carlson presented no evidence for this brazen theory — almost certainly because all the available evidence suggests the exact opposite is true. We now know that Trump’s decision to assassinate Soleimani was entirely independent. According to the Washington Post, his decision to take the most extreme option after tit for tat exchanges in Iraq left aides “stunned” given the obvious ramifications.
Carlson, who has spent the past three years shilling for the president, knows his audience well. An outright attack on Trump would not be received well, so his criticism of Trump’s massive military escalation with Iran was packaged carefully as an attack on “Washington” — a code word for “The Deep State” (or Democrats who want to get rid of Trump).
Carlson has carved himself a niche as the intellectual vanguard of Trumpism — a position that requires mind bending assaults on reason and logic (Democrats, claims Carlson, don’t hate Trump because he lies, it’s because he tells the truth). In order to maintain a veneer of intellectual respectability, Carlson sometimes chides Trump for his faults (he does sometimes lie!) and picks topics to disagree with him on (when Trump momentarily embraced gun control for example, Carlson pretended to be outraged).
Carlson is acutely aware of the racial hatred Trump has whipped up in America though, and provides justification for it on his nightly show. That is his role in Trump’s America, and he knows he must not skate too close to the edge when it comes to criticizing the president.
Carlson’s motivation for criticizing the attack on Iran may come from a deeply held moral conviction that war is wrong and Iranians are human beings with lives of value. Given Carlson supported the war Iraq, and believes Arabs are “semiliterate primitive monkeys” who “don’t use toilet paper or forks,” one suspects a far more sinister rationale though.
Carlson understands that Trump’s political power comes from his appeal to nativists and isolationists — a new force in American politics that propelled the president to the White House in 2016. If Trump embroils the nation in another pointless military quagmire in the Middle East, he risks losing segments of his base that are crucial to his re-election in 2020. Carlson knows this and is using his influence to make Trump reconsider his apocalyptic approach to Iran.
Without Trump, Carlson’s raison d'être disappears after 2020. Carlson has staked it all on supporting this new, toxic form of modern fascism, and once the party ends, he will struggle to re-enter a society that has rejected it.
Carlson is trying to save Donald Trump’s political career, not the Iranian people. But above all, he is trying to save his own career. If Trump does go to war with Iran, no media pundit in America could continue to plausibly blame “Washington elites” when half of them are desperately trying to stop it. Carlson would either have to reverse his position and support Trump, or destroy his own show by alienating almost all of his audience. To support Trump but oppose his war is an impossible balancing act even a skilled wordsmith like Carlson isn’t up to.
Donald Trump does not have a political philosophy others like Carlson ascribe to him. He is a self promoting megalomaniac who thrives on chaos and survives from one day to the next. Trump attacked Iran because he is crazy, and Tucker Carlson knows it. This, more than anything, has Carlson deeply worried, and he’s pulling out all the stops to prevent Trump taking down the movement Carlson has profited so greatly from.
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“If Trump does go to war with Iran, no media pundit in America could continue to plausibly blame “Washington elites” when half of them are desperately trying to stop it.”
I’ve seen comments like this before. That there is no way someone can “plausibly” or “reasonably” do something. The problem is they ignore how utterly unreasonable the pundits and, perhaps more notably, the audiences of sociopaths they play to, are.
If Trump does go to war with Iran, plausibility won’t slow “conservative” media pundits from continuing to blame “Washington elites” despite the clear reality that half of them are desperately trying to stop it AT ALL.
”Democrats, claims Carlson, don’t hate Trump because he lies, it’s because he tells the truth).”
The Democrats, says Carlson, have always been at war with Eastasia.