Of all the things to fly out of Pandora’s Box, who knew one would be named Tucker.
The MAGA-GOP couldn’t help itself. Tucker Carlson was just too useful with his remarkable ability to spin up conspiracies and promote falsehoods in favor of their cause.
He was a promoter of the bogus story that voting machines had helped tip the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, a story his own texts proved he didn’t believe.
He embraced what’s known as the Great Replacement Theory, a vile idea that secretive powers facilitated immigration to replace whites.
He was all in on MAGA and President Trump, despite admitting privately in a 2021 text that “I hate him passionately.”
This is the sort of two-faced splitting that should disqualify someone from any public influence. For Carlson, it somehow had the opposite effect.
Before he was ousted from Fox News, after the voting machine company Dominion won a $787.5 million settlement, Carlson was treated as a leader of conservatism worthy to stand beside the president. This was long after he had demonstrated that he was the sort of person willing to endorse and promote the worst sort of ideas. Whether he believes the awful things he says is irrelevant. His audience not only believes these things, they take action on them.
Well, chickens come home to roost, and Carlson is coming home to roost for conservatives. Apart from Trump himself, the person getting the worst of it is Sen. Ted Cruz.
And to Cruz’s credit, he has been giving as good as he gets from Carlson for some time. Carlson is a media bully, which is Trump’s model and something Cruz has hardly been averse too.
But at least Cruz is capable of drawing a line somewhere. And what Carlson has become is a danger to the country. His bizarre rhetoric supports some of our worst enemies, from Russia to Iran. He may as well be in the employ of Vladimir Putin for all the damage he has done to the innocent people of Ukraine.
Carlson has also done all he can to tear down Cruz. In a recent New York Times interview (why he was granted the platform we cannot say), Carlson said Cruz is more “morally repulsive” than notorious white supremacist (and Texas GOP leadership visitor) Nick Fuentes.
Cruz has fought back, and he must keep fighting back. He has called Carlson the most dangerous demagogue in the country. That rings true.
But there is a lesson in this. It wasn’t a secret that Carlson was duplicitous and willing to give voice to really nasty business when GOP leaders used him for their own benefit.
Principles are no good if you ignore them when it helps you. And they are less credible if you engage them to defend yourself.