Tucker Carlson is, if nothing else, a super-smart guy. Unlike many midwits in the media, he is sharp. So, for that matter, is Steve Bannon, who impresses me with his intelligence whenever I bother to listen to him.
I don’t bother that often, in either case, although I often learn something when I do. That’s because, in addition to their intelligence, I find that their view of how the world works is too idiosyncratic and too often wrong to make it worth too much of my time to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat.
Tucker put me off on his trip to Russia, not because he sat down with Putin–any serious journalist should have jumped at the chance to pick Putin’s brain. What was so off-putting was his love of the Soviet-era subway/bomb shelters and his marveling at the availability of food at the grocery store.
Tucker Carlson says that the experience of shopping at a Russian grocery store, recognizing their high standard of living and low costs, all supposedly in the “heart of evil” has radicalized him against Western leaders. pic.twitter.com/glBZQdpUIO
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) February 15, 2024
60% of Russians spend half or more of their income on food. Zohran Mamdani seems like a very smart guy–he’s just so wrapped up in a certain view of the world that he loses the forest for the trees. Ideology does that to a person.
Tucker’s hostility to the exercise of American power is driven by a not-at-all-wrong sense that our elite has gone off the rails, but you can’t get so wrapped up in that fact that you ignore that, despite all its flaws, America still is a great force for good in the world. Much of what America does wrong is driven by an arrogant belief that we can fix all problems, which we cannot, but much of what we do right is driven by the fact that we are still optimistic that things can be better.
It has now been a week since the initial strikes on The Islamic Republic….
Again, worth looking back at Tucker’s predictions for the first week of the war. pic.twitter.com/nDYjz7UA5N
— AG (@AGHamilton29) June 19, 2025
I have to admit that I can sometimes see things with too dark a view of the future. It’s all that doomscrolling, I guess, but Tucker has taken those intellectual gifts God gave him and constructed a view of the world that is so dark that Seal Team Six would love to plan an attack on that moonless night.
For some reason, Tucker expected the world to come to an end should Trump bomb Iran. No doubt, the worst-case scenario was indeed very bad, but the worst-case scenario was hardly the likeliest. Tucker’s opposition to the war–which I maintain is a perfectly reasonable, if wrong position to take–led him to make extremely dark predictions of a US war with the BRIC countries, $30/gallon gasoline, crashing markets, and general armageddon.
None of that was likely to happen, and none of it has. In fact, oil prices are currently down, and lower than they were in February, before any of this started. Oil is very volatile and may jump in the hours after I write this and before it gets published, but $30 gasoline seems off the table.
While Tucker predicted thousands of US military deaths if we get involved in the war, so far not a one has occurred. Iran’s “counterstrike” was carefully designed and calibrated to avoid causing American casualties–in a way that they might not have been if Biden or Harris had been in office–because they rightly find Donald Trump very scary.
The same action–bombing Iran–could lead to different results depending on who does it. Biden intimidated nobody; Trump intimidates everybody. That’s not a boast, but a fact. Iran knows Trump means business, just as they knew Biden left Afghanistan with his tail tucked between his legs.
Trump announces a ceasefire pic.twitter.com/gH3x8v5UmQ
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 23, 2025
I am not one to believe that Trump can do no wrong, and I certainly believe that he is sometimes too optimistic about his ability to persuade others. See: Ukraine-Russia war.
But Trump doesn’t bat a thousand, but he sure has a better hitting record than Tucker Carlson.
