Tucker Carlson’s Revisionist Guide To Making Friends And Influencing Liberals

As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, Tucker Carlson’s star will continue to rise on the Left and fall on the Right.

Among Carlson’s most telling critics, and newfound targets, is Victor Davis Hanson, the renowned classicist, conservative commentator, and, once upon a time, a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

“People who seemed totally sane just the other day, like Victor Davis Hanson, are all of the sudden talking about the glories of Hiroshima. Hiroshima was a moral crime!” submitted Carlson, his pitch resembling that of a starstruck teenage girl, on his program last month. “There’s no defending that.” The outburst appeared to be his response to a lengthy column in which Hanson objected to Carlson’s assertion that nuclear weapons had not been “created by people,” and defended the painful decision to drop the bomb.

“Few now remember that, of all the belligerents in World War II, it was the Japanese military that achieved the highest kill-to-loss ratio. Japan suffered total fatalities of somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million combatants and civilians, but it caused the deaths of between 15 and 20 million Allied soldiers, Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders. By summer 1945, the Japanese military abroad was executing, killing, or starving 15,000 people a day,” noted Hanson. “There was therefore an understandable desire to end the war as quickly as possible, by any means necessary, to save thousands of lives. Each day of war was literally a matter of life and death for thousands.”

“It is likely that the two bombs saved tens of thousands of Allied and millions of Japanese lives by averting a two-pronged, two-year invasion of the Japanese homeland,” he concluded. His was a widely-held historical argument about a difficult decision made by the leaders of a nation that had spent the four years prior at war, not a celebration of the death and destruction that resulted from it. Serious men and women of principle acknowledge the existence of trade-offs and try to navigate them as best they can; nihilistic grifters aware only of their own inadequacies condemn them for doing so because they are incapable of choosing any path but the most expedient.

To put it more succinctly: Carlson lied about Hanson because he’s the lesser man, it’s a habit that’s cost him the respect of most of his right-wing peers. Yet his serial dishonesty hasn’t cost him the trust of the mainstream press that once loathed him. In fact, in some corners, it’s earned him that trust.

Take Emma Green’s flattering treatment of Carlson in one recent edition of The New Yorker, where she contemplated the future of American conservatism through the lens of The Heritage Foundation and its initial defense of the lovefest between Carlson and Nick Fuentes last fall.

The naivete might have been endearing were it not so sinister. Green credulously repeated Carlson’s plea that the bear hug he had wrapped Fuentes in had been “strategic,” and recounted that “Carlson told me that he didn’t press Fuentes on his admiration of Hitler and Stalin because he thinks Fuentes is not credible when he talks about history. But, he said, if Fuentes’s young male fans think that ‘women are all bitches, or sluts, or whatever, that’s way more real than, like, your opinions on Hamas.’”

The more plausible explanation for his failure to interrogate his interlocutor – given his own well-documented misogyny – is the compatibility of their worldview. A lopsided recent conversation between the cable news washout and former member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, saw Carlson swear by the Führer’s peaceful intentions and castigate Britain for having ever entered into World War II.

That was hardly the first lie he had championed about the topic. In 2024, Carlson fawned over YouTube-famous Dilbert doppelgänger Darryl Cooper on his show, branding him the “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper went on to identify Sir Winston Churchill, perhaps the single most consequential hero of the 20th Century, as the war’s “chief villain,” and to describe the Holocaust as only an unhappy accident of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Per Cooper: “When they [the Germans] went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”

Carlson didn’t object; how could he with this modern Thucydides across from him?

As his recent dust-up with Hanson shows, the lies are legion. Unearthed text messages from his time at Fox News exposed the vast gulf between his public adoration and private contempt for Donald Trump. He’s regularly mischaracterized both the policy positions and motivations of a wide range of conservatives, from Ted Cruz to Ben Shapiro to Mike Huckabee. And, in a testament to the pitifully dishonorable life he’s led, he sat and listened as Jimmy Dore launched an unthinkable attack on Erika Kirk this summer.

“I remember when my dad died my mom immediately bought a gold-sequined pants outfit, started carrying sparklers around, and selling t-shirts, and my friends are like, ‘Jimmy, what’s with your mom?’ I’m like, ‘She’s grieving!’… Anyway, I get upset,” mused Dore.

“You have every reason to,” intoned Carlson, who, to his eternal credit, resisted the urge to stroke Dore’s hair comfortingly as he continued to spin a fantastical tall tale in which Charlie Kirk’s widow and best friends had planned his assassination.

Surely all this, a mere sampling of the deceit his career is based upon, ought to be discrediting enough for the progressive establishment that’s long despised him?

Think again, because in the “Battle for the Post-Trump Right,” the Left stands unabashedly on the side of Carlson, whose strident anti-Americanism, downplaying of Islamism, monomaniacal obsession with Jews, and collectivist economic beliefs all coincide with their own views. Hence why the likes of Tommy Vietor, Cenk Uygur, and Ro Khanna have gained so much strange, new respect for him. And hence why Green, with only euphemisms about his “offensive guests” and “willingness to violate the pieties of mainstream media” to qualify, parroted Carlson’s suggestion that “it’s OK to be wrong. But any kind of lying or deceit or cloaked motives or falseness is just not acceptable.”

What the collaboration between Left and Carlson proves, however, is that among friends, it is.

***

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.

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