One of many problems with Tucker Carlson is his almost obsessive use of the straw man fallacy: rejecting an argument that differs from the one actually being made.
Here’s an example: Alice says, “Cars are dangerous,” and then Bob replies, “Alice is a moron! She thinks we should ban cars!”
Alice hasn’t said anything about banning cars, but if the audience isn’t paying attention, they will simply nod along and agree that Alice is, in fact, a moron.
It’s one of the most popular rhetorical tricks used in politics. Why? Because you can use it to reconstruct your opponent’s argument to be whatever you please so it’s easy to defeat.
Back to Tucker Carlson.
“I’ve got four draft-age children,” Carlson told Russell Brand during an interview this week. “If you’re playing recklessly, fast, and loose with their lives, then I have a right to despise you, and I do. So if you’re Nikki Haley, who’s running for president, or Ben Shapiro, or half the people I see on television casually mentioning the possibility of nuclear war or sending Americans to fight in the Middle East, or in any way involving us in a war that has nothing to with prosperity and peace at home, nothing, in other words, to do with us, Americans, then I have a right to call you out and be really offended. Because it’s my family. They live here. It’s not a joke to me. There’s nothing abstract about it.”
Setting aside the fact that Tucker Carlon casually mentioned the possibility of nuclear war in the Middle East on Oct. 9, 2023, his strange refusal to acknowledge that American citizens are still being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, and the use of not-so-subtle antisemitic tropes regarding Jewish dual loyalty to Israel, Jewish influence on foreign policy, or Jewish control of military action, what’s the fundamental problem here?
Neither Nikki Haley, Ben Shapiro, nor half the people Carlson supposedly sees on television are making the argument that a military draft should be enacted so that Carlson’s children are forced against their will to fight in the Middle East on behalf of Israel.
This straw man is particularly flimsy, given that this fragment of Carlson’s bizarre creation would require the United States to enforce a draft and declare war on Hamas.
Of course, listeners who may have made the colossal mistake of taking anything Carlson says seriously will immediately conclude that, yes, Haley and Shapiro are lobbying for your children to be forced to fight in a foreign war and, therefore, deserve your hatred.
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“I’m with Tucker,” they will declare.
Except all they’re doing is joining Carlson in a figment of his imagination. A fictional world in which his enemies, or at least his enemies of today until they become financially useful again, think, do, and say whatever is needed to justify his rage-inducing nonsense.
Ian Haworth is a columnist, speaker, and host of “Off Limits.” You can follow him on X at @ighaworth. You can also find him on Substack.