The Plague of the Easily Manipulated

We live in a post-modern era where objective truth is considered a lie. Everyone has their own truth. Not only does everyone have their own truth, but people gravitate toward voices to reassure them their truth is right and tell them what is happening in the world.

In an era where emotion trumps reason, the average person seeking information begins to connect to prominent voices they begin to trust. People then turn to those voices for affirmations of truth, answers, news, and information.

I am regularly mindful that I have an obligation to get as close to objective truth as possible because I do not want to abuse people’s trust in me. I do not always get it right, and I try to correct myself when I get it wrong and acknowledge my mistakes.

In a world full of pied pipers, I don’t want to lead people astray or abuse their trust. I am mindful that people who might trust me also trust others, even some I might disagree with. I try to be respectful of those relationships, too. I may not care for someone, but each of you can choose who to trust, believe, and rely on.

Unfortunately, many people will put trust in others who, over time, evolve in ways that risk leading those they trust away from the truth and into bad places. Look how Candace Owens, a black progressive, shifted to the right and developed a right-wing following. She is now able to use a large platform she built through right-wing trust to spread antisemitic lies. Owens is now on an “Islamophobia apology tour” apologizing to Muslims for how people have treated them in this country post 9/11.

Sometimes, the people you trust change their worldviews, and you have to decide if you’re going to stick with what you know is true or change with them. The world is full of liberals who get mugged by reality and become conservatives; atheists who become Christians; Christians who become atheists; and conservatives who morph into unrecognizable phantoms of themselves, crossing over into leftwing agitprop. How many young kids have been trotted out at CPAC, celebrated as conservative wunderkind, only to become progressive cheerleaders?

You must be sure what you believe instead of believing what someone else tells you.

That leads me to Tucker Carlson.

When Tucker Carlson, formerly of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the Weekly Standard, began shifting towards greater skepticism of the United States’s antics abroad, I might have disagreed on occasion, but I understood.

Carlson had defended the Iraq War, its justifications, and its rational basis, but many justifications and bases were untrue. I think a lot of people reacted the way Carlson reacted. It was not that the government was not forthright. It was that the government lied.

As an aside, taking out Saddam Hussien was right, and George W. Bush was right. But that’s my opinion. Factually, the actual WMD justifications, etc., were exaggerated, overblown, or lies. I totally can see how Carlson shifted his views. I have tried to view his shifts in worldview through that understanding.

But his views have now shifted somewhere disturbing, and I think those on the right and right-wing organizations that still want to stand in his shadow, ride his coattails, or use his name need to do a real gut check. Of course, I know they won’t. There is fundraising at stake.

When Carlson engaged in his Russian propaganda tour, multiple right-wing defenders claimed Carlson only did that to get the Putin interview and, after all, Putin might have harmed Carlson while in Russia. But then Carlson left Russia and justified Russian abuses and assassinations as “everybody does it.” Then Carlson, well out of Moscow, still defended Moscow as better than any American city.

If you have never been to Moscow, it is a third-world hell hole not too many steps beyond the Kremlin. Its crime, criminal underbelly, and violence make New Orleans look like Disney World.

But damn the facts, Carlson wants you to check out their grocery stores and grocery carts and Soviet-era subway stops built with forced labor that were then, and now with Carlson, used as propaganda tools to show the West how much better Soviet communism was.

Even if you wanted to give Carlson a pass on that, he’s now “just asking questions” about how Israel treats Christians. To answer those questions, Carlson is relying on a pastor in Palestinian-controlled territory to claim Israeli hostility to Christians. This pastor, you should know, said after Hamas's attack on Israel that he was “shocked by the strength of the Palestinian man who defied his siege.” He said that after Hamas beheaded babies, raped women, and killed over 1,200 Israelis and took American citizens hostage.

Munther Isaac does not believe Israel should exist. He is opposed to President Trump’s Abraham Accords. He claims Israel shot two civilians in a church — something the IDF disputes. The IDF has a history of admitting its mistakes and still denies this happened. Isaac is anti-Israel and pro-Hamas, and interviewing him was a choice. The people who made excuses for Carlson in Russia are doing so now, but how many excuses can be made when the pattern is consistent? If it is, as some say, ignorance of who the interviewee is, the ignorance itself is a pattern.

Carlson could have interviewed Christians in Israel. There are plenty of them. They are easily accessible. They freely criticize Israel when they want to. But instead, Carlson chose a Bethlehem pastor in Palestinian-controlled territory who supports Hamas. Likewise, Carlson never mentions that if the Christian pastors in Palestinian-controlled territory do not take the Palestinian line, they are very likely to eat a bullet, unlike in Israel, where people freely criticize the government. It’s rather similar to Putin's critics falling out of windows.

After relying on a pro-Hamas priest to tell everyone how bad it is for Christians in Israel, Carlson says, “If you wake up in the morning and decide your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you've lost the thread.”

Now, again, Hamas uses churches, hospitals, and schools as weapons depots in Gaza. You have to remember that. It is a fact, but one Carlson ignores.

What’s so troubling here is that Carlson first pushed Russian propaganda to undermine support for Ukraine. Now, he is using a Hamas supporter in Palestinian territory to undermine support for Israel.

I can understand a change of heart when it comes to supporting or questioning the United States’s motives.

But Carlson has staked out a pro-Russia position in Ukraine, a pro-Putin position in Russia, and a pro-Hamas position in Israel.

The first can be an understandable shift. The second can be a misunderstanding. But the drip, drip, drip in the direction he is headed is not ignorance, is not conservative, and is not something the conservative movement should be associated with. It is a dramatic shift in a worldview incompatible with the American conservative movement.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas went into Israel, chopped off the heads of babies, threw at least one baby in an oven to kill it, brutally raped women before murdering them, murdered over 1,200 Israelis, and took hundreds of hostages, including several American citizens who are still being held against their will.

If you wake up in the morning and decide the victims of that atrocity should just shut up and take it and not eliminate the terrorists who did it — the terrorists who happen to run the government of Gaza — you’ve not just lost the thread, you’ve lost your moral compass.

Hamas must be destroyed, and those on the right who keep excusing those who’d propagandize for Putin and now for Hamas probably need to ask themselves how they’ve become the mirror image of the Blame America First Democrats that Americans have repeatedly rejected.

Putin is not a good guy. You can have a serious, principled disagreement with American money being used to help Ukraine. But defending Russia is the wrong position. You can have qualms with Israel in Gaza, but embracing Hamas propaganda puts you on the side of the antisemites on college campuses, and the terrorist-supporting progressives of the American left.

I have kept hoping Tucker Carlson would do a show revealing it was all an act to expose the easily manipulated, the grifters, and the frauds. Instead, I’ve concluded we should take Carlson at his word. He likes Putin’s Russia and would prefer Hamas to Israel. In the meantime, he’s willing to use his platform and formerly earned trust and reputation to persuade the easily manipulated to believe the lies he used to rail against.

Oh, and look, right on schedule, Turning Point USA, which still affiliates with a bunch of vocal antisemites, is out with a tweet praising Tucker after this interview with the Hamas supporter.

And here’s a Palestinian leader recirculating Tucker’s interview with the Hamas supporter.