If Abdul El-Sayed wins his Michigan Senate race, it will mark one of the biggest breakthroughs for the progressive left since the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, which makes it quite strange that right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson is lavishing praise on El-Sayed and has declared his Trump-backed opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, “unfit to serve in public office.”
Carlson hasn’t lost his mind. His quasi-endorsement of El-Sayed is a product of his flipping on President Donald Trump over the war with Iran. And it portends a serious problem for the GOP’s coalition — and a real opportunity for antiwar Democrats.
In his newsletter last week, Carlson defended resurfaced remarks that El-Sayed made in 2021 on a defunct podcast, during which he said, “9/11 scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people,” and, “When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them.”
Rogers described El-Sayed’s remarks as “disgusting” and “disqualifying” to The New York Post, the right-wing newspaper that reported on the resurfaced remarks.
Carlson scoffed at the idea that El-Sayed’s point could be considered a scandal.
“There is nothing remotely crazy about those remarks,” Carlson wrote. “El-Sayed did not celebrate airplane hijackings or cheerlead Al-Qaeda; he simply said that the U.S. conducting terrorism of its own in response to 9/11 was not exactly an appropriate reaction. He is obviously right.”
Carlson is arguably the single-most influential conservative commentator in America, and he’s now working to sabotage the GOP’s goal of maintaining a Senate majority.
Carlson, instead, argued that Rogers’ response was what was concerning, because “America’s response to 9/11 blew the original attack out of the water.”
“If Rogers is deranged enough to think that Jihadis are evil for murdering enough Americans to fill a Division III hockey arena, but that the Pentagon deserves two thumbs up for killing enough to pack Ohio State’s football stadium multiple times [in the Iraq war], then he cannot possibly have the judgment necessary to adequately serve the needs of American voters,” Carlson said, adding that he hoped “the good people of Michigan keep this man far away from Washington” and that it was Rogers, not El-Sayed, who was “unfit to serve in public office.”
Carlson’s de facto backing of El-Sayed in Michigan is the latest stop on his journey away from MAGA after Trump launched his war on Iran. Carlson has since then slammed Trump, pledged he would not support the Republican Party in the midterms and called for a third party that would advocate for the isolationist foreign policy he favors. His intervention in this Michigan race is the most concrete example to date of how his defection from the MAGA movement over foreign policy is now rendering him not just a critic of it, but an opponent against it. And a formidable one at that: Carlson is arguably the single-most influential conservative commentator in America, and he’s now working to sabotage the GOP’s goal of maintaining a Senate majority during what’s likely to be a bruising midterm election cycle.
What’s particularly striking is how Carlson has at least temporarily adopted what sounds like progressive antiwar language in his case against Rogers and in favor of El-Sayed. You’d be hard-pressed to find an establishment Democratic leader who would dare defend El-Sayed’s suggestion that the victims of the United States’ war on terrorism should be considered equally alongside the victims of the 9/11 attacks, out of fear that they might be called terrorist sympathizers.
The reason I say it sounds like is that it’s hard to trust it as more than expedient rhetoric when Carlson is a longtime hard-liner who uses disinformation and dishonesty to advance far-right positions such as the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Moreover, Carlson has trafficked in unsubstantiated 9/11 conspiracy theories, insinuating, among other things, that Israel had foreknowledge of the attacks and let it happen because it benefited them. The reality is that Carlson remains a right-wing nationalist who relies on sowing mistrust and couches the bulk of his foreign policy arguments in those terms.
Regardless of Carlson’s rationales, his end goal of isolationism and withdrawing from forever wars is driving him to throw support behind progressives and weakening the right. This is something I predicted as a possibility earlier this year — Trump breaking his pledge to start “no new wars” has left open a lane for progressive antiwar politicians to hoover up isolationist right-wingers who are disillusioned with Trump over Iran. It’s a messy, and likely temporary, alignment, but it accrues to the benefit of the left — for now.
The post Why Tucker Carlson has effectively endorsed Abdul El-Sayed for Senate appeared first on MS NOW.
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