Tucker Carlson Outdid the Mainstream Media — But Still Missed This Crucial Point
The Tucker Carlson Live Tour, featuring Donald Trump, in Glendale, Ariz., on Oct. 31, 2024. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
'Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.'
Has there ever been a more perfect moment for this old meme?
On Tuesday, talk show host and worst person Tucker Carlson challenged fellow worst person Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over the latter's dangerous support for further U.S. military action against Iran.
In a now-viral video clip, Carlson asked Cruz the simple question of how many people live in Iran. Cruz could not answer.
'You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?' Carlson asked. 'How could you not know that?'
Cruz responded, 'I don't sit around memorizing population tables.'
After a couple more questions, whereupon Cruz began visibly squirming, Carlson delivered his coup de grâce.
'You don't know anything about Iran!' Carlson said, both men raising their voices. 'You're a senator who is calling for the overthrow of the government and you don't know anything about the country!'
It was a thing to behold, but also evokes another classic meme: You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Tucker Carlson, the host of arguably the most racist show in cable news history.
He was simply doing what so many establishment reporters have failed to do: He asked whether a top U.S. politician pushing for an unprovoked Manichean forever war knew basically anything about the people he was seeking to subject to American hellfire.
This is not a credit to Carlson. It's a failure of the mainstream media.
You would think news organizations would have learned their lessons long ago — but that doesn't mean this is a precise replay of past media failures in matters of imperial war waging.
Comparisons to the Iraq War are everywhere, but hawkish mainstream media coverage didn't play out the same way in 2003. Then, mainstream U.S. news outlets settled on a near-total consensus affirming the likely existence of nonexistent 'weapons of mass destruction' to justify an illegal war.
Mainstream coverage today has at the very least reiterated the statements of the United States' own intelligence agencies and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, among others, that, despite their concerns about Iran's amassing of enriched uranium, there is no compelling evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
Any responsible news story would stress that, under international law, Israel's strikes were almost certainly illegal. Claims of self-defense to warrant a so-called 'preemptive strike' are extremely narrow. There must be proof of 'imminence,' of which there is not.
It was 'The Daily Show,' of all places, that bothered to pull together a supercut showing that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning of Iran's 'imminent' militarization of their nuclear supplies for 30 years.
'Iran: Weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 1995,' the comedy news show posted on X.
'Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, Israel does,' said Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan in a recent social media video, lambasting the media's continued insistence on treating Israel's acts of aggression as a victim's attempts at defense. 'It's a nuclear double standard.' The only country in the Middle East with a militarized nuclear arsenal is Israel, which has an estimated 90 to 400 warheads that it refuses to publicly acknowledge. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Meanwhile, some of the very same media hawks who most vociferously pushed lies to license the Iraq War are bolstering another illegal war of aggression against Iran, and using the same racist clash-of-civilizations logic.
Popular historian Niall Ferguson, an apologist for colonialism who declared himself 'a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang' after the launch of Iraq War in 2003, wrote with two co-authors in the Free Press this week that Israel's attacks on Iran were a 'blow for the good guys in Cold War II.' One of the the New York Times' prominent resident hawks, Bret Stephens, wrote a column last week praising Israel's 'courage' for doing 'what needed to be done,' given, of course, 'the millenarian mind-set of some of Iran's theocratic leaders.'
Looking at the media ecosystem as a whole, though, one might get the impression that the debate is pretty evenly split over whether Trump should escalate to U.S.-led strikes on Iran. But this, too, is a distortion: The majority of Americans don't want the U.S. to conduct its own military strikes. An Economist/YouGov survey from last week found that 60 percent of all respondents oppose U.S. involvement in the war, while just 16 percent supported military action. Broken down by party affiliation, the margins largely hold even among Republicans — 53 percent of whom said they opposed military action, while 23 percent want further U.S. involvement.
Of course, even the poll questions are misleading. They ask whether the U.S. should join Israel in military action, as if the two countries' military–industrial complexes are not wholly entwined already. The question should instead be about whether respondents think there should be any further involvement or U.S.-led strikes.
As Cruz put it to Carlson, 'we are carrying out military strikes today.' Carlson, rightly, jumped in by reminding him of the official U.S. line that Israel is conducting strikes on its own, pushing Cruz to clarify if he was breaking the news that 'the United States government is at war with Iran right now.' While Cruz attempted to correct by saying that the U.S. is merely 'supporting' Israel, the slip revealed the undeniable U.S. complicity in all Israel's warmongering, regardless of whether Trump formally declares a U.S. military intervention.
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