Tucker Carlson put out a new video yesterday. I haven’t seen all of it but I did watch about an hour of it and that hour was completely devoted to lengthy attacks on Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro.
To be fair here, the attacks have been going both ways. Carlson’s video is in response to attacks on him by Levin and Shapiro which have been coming his way for a while but especially since he interviewed Nick Fuentes. Shapiro, for instance, put out a video earlier this month which spent a fair amount of time attacking Carlson as someone who was ideologically laundering the views of Nick Fuentes.
So this is the middle of a fight not the start of one, but I still found the arguments made by Carlson pretty odd and ultimately just dishonest. His argument is that Shapiro (falsely, he says) accused him of defending Nicolas Maduro, the communist dictator of Venezuela. But immediately after denying this, Tucker goes on to…defend Nicolas Maduro. Not completely, but he’s certainly defending him enough that he can use Maduro to attack Shapiro as being not a real conservative.
The whole video is below but here’s a bit of what Carlson argued.
Ben Shapiro spent, I don’t know, a decade posing as someone who actually cared about your concerns as an American. He did it imperfectly. There were flashes that he didn’t really care. But he’s like, “No, no, I’m a conservative. I’m a conservative. I’m not just interested in the fortunes of one tiny country in the Middle East with a population 9 million. No, I have a lot of interest. I really care about this country and I’m against the trans movement or whatever.”
He worked in the dual loyalties argument, and he’s pretty clearing suggesting Shapiro isn’t really a conservative. Why not? He explains in what sounds an awful lot like a defense of Maduro:
…whatever his many faults, I wouldn’t hire him as an economist, okay? But whatever his many faults has the most socially conservative country probably in the hemisphere. So Venezuela, it’s just a fact. I mean, I didn’t make this up. I’m not in charge of Venezuela. Just noticing that Venezuela has banned pornography, banned abortion, banned gay marriage, banned sex changes, and banned usery. You don’t have credit cards with 40% interest in Venezuela.
What does this have to do with Ben Shapiro? Well, Megyn Kelly suggested during her recent interview with him that Carlson was merely saying Maduro had a lot of socially conservative polices to which Shapiro replied: “Who gives a s**t! The guy’s a communist dictator. Everyone in his country is eating dog. He’s shipping fentanyl to the United States to kill Americans. Why would I give a whether he’s whether he’s anti-LGBTQ rights?”
In his own video, after showing the clip, Carlson replies, “Who gives a s**t? I do.” He goes on to suggest that, as a real pro-life conservative, this matters to him.
Why wouldn’t I care about that? I’ve got kids. I first of all, I’m against abortion. I sorry unpopular. I feel that way. I think it’s really sad. I would personally become poorer to end abortion. Voluntarily become poor to end abortion in the United States. That’s not a choice. Don’t want to become poor, but I would because I care about it. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re offended that I do, but I care about it. Lots of people care about it.
His argument literally seems to be that, yes, Maduro is a communist dictator, but Venezuela is anti-abortion so that should count in Maduro’s favor. And more than that, Ben Shapiro’s failure to care about Venezuela being anti-abortion proves Ben Shapiro isn’t really a conservative. If you boil it down, that’s his argument.
What Carlson doesn’t tell you, and he would if he were honest, is that Venezuela has been anti-abortion for nearly 100 years, long before Maduro and his socialist/communist predecessor Hugo Chavez came on the scene. Chavez took power in 1999. Venezuela’s abortion law dates to 1926.
Abortion in Venezuela is illegal in almost all circumstances. The 1926 law banning the procedure has been modified just once, with a 2000 reform allowing an abortion if the woman’s life is in danger.
In other words, pro-life laws in Venezuela have nothing to do with Maduro. They aren’t in place because he put them there. They were in place before Maduro was born.
Why wouldn’t Carlson mention that? Is it because he doesn’t know? Or is it because he’s not being honest with his audience?
In either case, the fact remains that communist dictatorships are about the worst thing that can happen to any country and using pro-life laws that preexisted the dictatorship as a defense of said dictatorship is either dishonest or stupid.
Also, Carlson is using this point to pivot to another claim, i.e. that Shapiro doesn’t care about the life issue or any other social issue here in the US.
Oh, okay. I don’t give a s**t. Well, you spent like a decade pretending you did give a s**t, that you were on the side of like normal Americans who have a mix of concerns. They definitely care about economics and they care about social issues too because they have children and they see where this is going. It’s not good. That your economic condition is not the only measure of health. Your spiritual condition matters too.
This strikes me as extremely dishonest. Shapiro didn’t renounce his conservative beliefs. He merely said that when a nation of people are living under a communist dictatorship, one that sends dissidents into a military prison, steals national elections and forces people to near-starvation (including reports of people eating zoo animals), those social issues aren’t the most important thing people have to worry about.
Shapiro never said he didn’t care about those issues in the US (or other countries) because we aren’t living under a communist dictatorship at the moment. We still have the freedom and the ability to make a difference on these issues, a freedom that has been completely denied in Venezuela.
What Carlson is arguing here is akin to saying that if Zohran Mamdani were somehow elected president of the Unites States and then announced he was rewriting the constitution and packing the Supreme Court with loyalists (Maduro did both in Venezuela), most conservative Americans would feel a lot of solace in the fact that Roe v. Wade had been overturned or that credit card interest rates were low. Really? I mean, sure, those are good things, but Mamdani is now a dictator over the entire country and my pets are starting to look like lunch, so maybe that takes precedence until he’s gone. Simply put (and I think this was Shapiro’s point) twenty years into a communist hellscape may not be the moment to look for the spiritual silver linings or to claim it’s really just a mixed bag when it’s one of the worst things happening in our hemisphere.
Anyway, I don’t disagree with everything Carlson says, but in just the first 3-4 minutes of this clip he says a lot of things that strike me as really dishonest in an attempt to unfairly villainize Ben Shapiro.
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