There was a time when Tucker Carlson occupied a defensible place in polite society. He was combative, sometimes reckless, often theatrical, but still tethered to a recognizable, traditional American moral framework.
That framework is gone. What has replaced it is something far darker, far smaller, and far more corrosive to any legitimate non-lefty coalition.
Carlson’s recent record shows not principled dissent but ideological decay. It reveals a man increasingly animated not by American national interest or cultural preservation, but by grievance, resentment, and a perverse attraction to defending forces that have historically and openly opposed Western civilization.
The result is a public figure who no longer belongs anywhere near respectable institutions.
The rupture became impossible to ignore in June, when Carlson aggressively confronted Senator Ted Cruz over U.S. policy toward Iran and Israel, framing American support for Israel as a betrayal of “America First” priorities. This was not a measured debate over foreign entanglements. It was an attempt to recast one of America’s most consistent alliances as morally suspect, while treating a theocratic adversary as a misunderstood victim.
The left applauded this spectacle, characterizing Carlson’s position as part of an emerging isolationist “woke right” critique of Israel. That praise alone should have raised alarms. Carlson was no longer challenging excess. He was laundering hostility toward Israel through populist rhetoric.
Anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty should know full well where such narratives historically lead.
That trajectory hardened throughout 2025. In November, Carlson appeared with Piers Morgan and dismissed public concern over Islam’s growing influence in Britain as exaggerated, arguing that fears about Muslim population growth were overblown. The point was not prudence but was, instead, deflection. Legitimate civilizational questions were waved away in favor of moral scolding aimed almost exclusively at the right.
One month later, speaking at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, Carlson went further, rebuking conservatives for criticizing American Muslims as a group and declaring such criticism “disgusting,” a remark that stunned the audience into silence.
The problem was not the defense of individual civil rights. It was the refusal to acknowledge ideological realities that shape law, culture, and power wherever Islamism gains influence.
That refusal reached its most dishonest form days later. Dismissing concerns raised by a poll at AmericaFest ranking radical Islam as a top threat, Carlson claimed that he did not know anyone in the United States killed by radical Islam in the last 24 years.
Pay close attention to his words. Twenty-five years would have encompassed September 11, 2001, the deadliest Islamist attack in American history. Shrinking the timeline allowed Carlson to erase an event that reshaped American life to its core. This says nothing of the numerous Islamist terror attacks that have followed 9/11. Particularly those on American soil.
What Carlson spews is not analysis. It is a grotesque rhetorical manipulation.
The broader pattern reveals motive. After his 2023 departure from Fox News, Carlson abandoned a mass audience for a subscriber-based platform, the Tucker Carlson Network, increasingly tailored to fringe and extremist sensibilities. The break freed him from institutional restraint and rewarded provocation over persuasion.
The descent accelerated in September 2024, when Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper and praised him as “the best and most honest popular historian,” despite Cooper’s record of Holocaust denial. By mid-September, Republican officials and conservative outlets were openly condemning Carlson for amplifying venomous historical revisionism.
Even Donald Trump’s 2024 victory did not halt the spiral. In June 2025, Carlson accused Trump of enabling war with Iran over Israeli strikes and publicly berated Senator Cruz immediately thereafter. Trump dismissed Carlson as “kooky,” a rare but telling rebuke.
By September, Carlson’s eulogy at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk drew credible accusations of antisemitism. The climax arrived on October 28, when Carlson interviewed anti-Trump, and fringe-right, cult leader Nick Fuentes. Carlson derided Christian Zionists as victims of a “brain virus.” Representative Randy Fine responded by calling Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.”
None of this is random. As I have argued, Carlson’s behavior is driven less by ideology than by civilizational grievance. Raised in elite WASP circles as the son of a diplomat and an heiress, Carlson grew up inside a ruling class that collapsed within two generations. His career now functions as a prolonged act of revenge against a world that moved on without him.
That rage has metastasized into open contempt for the GOP itself.
In October, Carlson told a Turning Point audience that he “kind of hate[s] the Republican Party.” Months earlier, he questioned whether he could support a party that included Rep. Fine. During November, he declared there would be “no reason” for the GOP to exist if Lindsey Graham, whom Trump endorsed, won his midterm primary. Weeks later, Carlson said he might have to oppose the party outright because he hated its leadership class for purported betrayals.
This is not reform. It is nihilism.
Carlson’s pro-Islamic advocacy, his fixation on Israel as a uniquely illegitimate ally, and his indulgence of extremists all serve the same end. They allow him to burn institutions that failed to preserve his inherited status. That is a degenerate motivation, and it produces degenerate outcomes.
There is no moral, political, or strategic justification for allowing Carlson anywhere near even vaguely respectable non-lefty organizations. He should be excluded without apology from campaigns, donor networks, think tanks, youth organizations, media enterprises, and Republican infrastructure. Not because dissent is forbidden, but because this dissent is not productive.
Carlson did not merely lose his way. He chose it.
Any lingering affection for him rests on memory, not reality. It is nostalgia for a Fox News version of Carlson that no longer exists. The figure operating today is not the sharp critic of elite excess many once admired, but a reckless accelerant of American self-destruction. Clinging to old impressions only delays an unavoidable reckoning.
Carlson’s current project is not American renewal, despite his patriotic rhetoric. It is demolition without any aim for creative destruction. He tears at alliances, institutions, and moral boundaries not to strengthen the American right but to gratify grievance and command attention. That is why his rhetoric grows more extreme as his audience narrows. Provocation has replaced persuasion. Contempt has replaced responsibility.
This matters because influence carries consequence.
Carlson is not an obscure crank shouting into the void. He retains name recognition, pop-cultural reach, and credibility borrowed from his storied past. When he trivializes Islamist violence, softens the ideological realities of political Islam, or treats America’s enemies as misunderstood, he launders dangerous ideas through a familiar voice.
That is how movements lose their compass without noticing they have slipped.
For Republicans, this path is radioactive. It fractures coalitions, alienates allies, and hands rhetorical weapons to the left. For America, it corrodes moral clarity at a moment when clarity is a strategic necessity. For the West, it weakens civilizational confidence in the face of adversaries who do not share its freedoms and never will.
The hardest truth is also the simplest. Tucker Carlson is no longer a flawed ally of American greatness. He is an active opponent, masquerading as a truth-teller. Remembering who he was cannot excuse who he has chosen to become.
Tune this menace out once and for all.
Tucker Carlson: Pro-Islam, Anti-American, And Toxic For Republicans - American Thinker
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