The Atlantic

How Bigotry Made a Dove Out of Tucker Carlson

In newly unearthed recordings, the Fox News host portrays Iraqis and Afghans as too barbaric to subjugate.
Source: Chelsea Guglielmino / Getty

In the Trump era, some on the anti-interventionist left have developed a tolerance for, even a grudging appreciation of, Tucker Carlson. The reason: He’s a caustic critic of hawkish foreign policy. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, the historian Stephen F. Cohen, and the author Max Blumenthal—all of whom agree with Carlson that the Trump-Russia scandal is fueling a new cold war—regularly appear on his show. After Carlson last month savaged William Kristol and Max Boot as “professional war peddlers,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna—one of the most creative and influential doves in Congress—praised Carlson on Twitter for offering “a devastating critique [of] interventionism” that shows “there is an emerging, left right coalition of common sense for a foreign policy of restraint.”

To be sure, the progressives who appreciate Carlson’s anti-interventionism do not appreciate his racism—his endless of black and brown,” or his of about the oppression of white farmers in South Africa. Lefties such as Greenwald distinguish between Carlson’s foreign-policy views, which they consider a useful antidote to the hawkishness prevalent in both parties, and his racial views, which they abhor.

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