"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Tucker Carlson (1969- ) is an American far-right television host and podcaster.
He was a star presenter on cable news channel Fox News, hosting the top-rated Tucker Carlson Tonight show from 2017 until his dismissal in 2023. At its height Carlson's nightly show attracted more than 3 million viewers daily. Carlson is also the founder of the radical right website The Daily Caller, popular with white supremacists. Since leaving Fox he has built an independent media operation, the Tucker Carlson Network, whose podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show, now reaches tens of millions of people across platforms including YouTube and X.
A self-proclaimed libertarian who for years staunchly defended Donald Trump and backed him in the 2024 election, Carlson broke publicly with the president over the 2026 war on Iran.
On August 29, 2026, Carlson said Trump should be “removed from office immediately” if he is actively considering the first use of nuclear weapons against Iran, calling it a categorical “red line” despite saying he had “strongly opposed” Trump's two prior impeachments. The remark came during a podcast interview with Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent had resigned from the Trump administration five months earlier over the Iran war, publishing a resignation letter that trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories, blaming “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for engineering the war. The Democratic Majority for Israel called it a case of “falsely claiming that Jewish Americans and the Jewish state secretly control U.S. foreign policy,” noting Kent's own long record of election-fraud and “deep state” conspiracy theorizing. On Carlson's show the two went further still, with Kent nodding to a conspiracy theory that “pro-Israel forces” were behind the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The break had been building since Carlson called the February 2026 US-Israeli strikes on Iran “absolutely disgusting and evil”, and it deepened when Carlson publicly apologized in April 2026 for having “misled” Americans into voting for Trump. The rupture with Trump has consolidated Carlson’s role as a hub for the same antisemitic and pro-Kremlin conspiracy theories he has spread for years, even as it has won him praise from parts of the political left.
Since October 7, 2023, Carlson's trajectory has tended toward increasingly extreme narratives regarding Jews and Israel.
In September 2024, Carlson hosted podcaster Darryl Cooper for a two-hour interview, introducing him as “the most important popular historian in the United States.” Cooper called Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of the Second World War and suggested the mass murder of Jews in Nazi concentration camps was the unplanned result of German “mismanagement” rather than deliberate genocide — a bogus claim that flagrantly contradicts the documented historical record. The White House, then under Joe Biden, called the interview a “disgusting and sadistic insult”, and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney branded it “pro-Nazi propaganda.” A group of Jewish members of Congress issued a joint statement condemning Carlson for platforming a “Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier.”
In March 2026, Carlson released a video describing Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, who married at Joseph Goebbels' home with Hitler as a guest, as one of Britain's “great war heroes”. He presented the British Union of Fascists as the “opposition” and again besmirched Winston Churchill, saying that the world is “required to deify” a man who “presided over the imprisonment of his opposition party during the entire length of the war, and their families, and their wives.” Mosley’s “only crime was being the opposition”, Carlson said.
Historians and commentators across the spectrum have called out this grotesque form of revisionism, noting Mosley was never a legitimate opposition leader but the founder of a fascist party whose members terrorized Jewish communities in London's East End.
In October 2025, Carlson hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes for a two-hour interview viewed more than 20 million times. Fuentes used the platform to argue that Jewish loyalty to Israel and to other Jews stands in the way of a unified American society. Carlson, for his part, compared forms of Zionism to Nazism and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “enemy of Western civilization.” The interview divided the Republican Party, with the pro-Maga thinktank Heritage Foundation's president Kevin Roberts initially defending Carlson before a Heritage antisemitism task force cut ties with the think tank. As documented by the Anti-Defamation League, Carlson has also hosted anti-Israel conspiracist Michael Scheuer and has repeatedly promoted the idea that Israel or “Zionist” actors exert hidden, malevolent control over the US government. This storyline is historically associated with the white-supremacist “ZOG” (Zionist-Occupied Government) trope, now adopted across the far right, parts of the far left, and Islamist-aligned movements. Carlson has also fueled conspiracy mongering with the suggestion Israel had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks and withheld it, and that Israel has manufactured intelligence to draw the US into other conflicts.
In 2024, Carlson travelled to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, giving the Russian president a friendly platform to spread propaganda against Ukraine and the West. Most egregiously, Carlson did not push back when Putin blamed Poland for the outbreak of the Second World War, claiming the “uncooperative” Poles had “forced” Hitler to act. “Deep State” theories beloved by Carlson and Putin resurfaced during the interview. The pair spread the popular conspiracy theory that the CIA and other secretive agencies and “elite” forces control the US government and a succession of puppet-like presidents Putin has dealt with.
“So, it sounds like you’re describing a system that’s not run by the people who are elected in your telling?” Carlson said in one of his many suggestive “interrogations”. The editorializing came after Putin queried the independence of the American president and government, echoing decades of propaganda from the KGB, where Putin was once a senior figure.
“That’s right. That’s right,” was Putin’s response. “It is not about the personality of the leader. It is about the elite’s mindset.”
Carlson even allowed Putin to rave on for more than 30 minutes with a “history” lesson, earning the label "obedient puppy” from Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Carlson's foreign-policy conspiracism has increasingly extended to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Once a hawk who in 2012 called the Iranian regime “evil” and argued it “deserved to be annihilated,” Carlson strongly opposed the 2026 US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, normalizing the Iranian regime at the height of the crisis over its nuclear program. He has toured Riyadh, Qatar and the UAE promoting an “Iran First” line, undercutting US and Israeli diplomatic pressure on Tehran.
In 2018 Carlson questioned the veracity of a chemical attack on civilians in Syria attributed to the armed forces of Bashar al-Assad's regime, claiming that it could be a manipulation to get the US to intervene militarily in the conflict. He has also suggested that the murders of white farmers in South Africa are part of a campaign orchestrated by the government in Pretoria to reclaim land belonging to the white minority.
During the Covid-19 pandemic Carlson regularly adopted positions similar to Covid-skeptic conspiracists. In April 2021 he said on Fox News of the Covid vaccine: “maybe it doesn't work and they're just not saying so”. His comments were labeled by immunologist Anthony Fauci, coordinator of the US pandemic response, as “a crazy conspiracy theory”. A few months later, in July 2021, Carlson accused Dr Fauci of being “the man who helped create Covid”. In January 2022, he was among those who relayed a truncated extract from an interview with Rochelle Walensky, a senior US health official, that twisted her comments about vaccinations and deaths from Covid-19 among those with multiple pre-existing health conditions.
Carlson is a supporter of the antisemitic and racist “Great Replacement” theory, adapted to the American context. Under this theory, the Democrats have conspired to bolster their electoral advantage by welcoming millions of undocumented migrants whom they presume will support them at the polls due to their minority status. In September 2021, Carlson broadcast an edited and manipulated video of Joe Biden, dated from 2015, in which the then-vice president allegedly said he would like to bring large numbers of immigrants to the country to put white citizens in the minority.
In the autumn of 2021, Carlson showed Fox News viewers a documentary called Patriot Purge about the assault on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. He declared, contrary to all video evidence and witnesses, that the attack was in fact the work of far-left and antifascist groups, with the complicity of the FBI, in an attempt to discredit Donald Trump's supporters.
In January 2022, Carlson appeared in a new documentary, “Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization”, in which the American philanthropist George Soros, the bogeyman of the conspiracy movement and hard right, was portrayed as conspiring against Viktor Orban's Hungary.
In February 2022, two days before the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, Carlson delivered an on-air editorial declaring “Americans have been trained to hate Putin”, and that US support for Kiev was about “the writing off of Joe Biden's personal debts to Ukrainian oligarchs.” With the official outbreak of war, he again took a pro-Putin stance, describing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as a puppet in the hands of the West. “The war in Ukraine is certainly not to help Ukrainian people, those poor people”, he said in May 2022. Carlson also asserted Democrats were dragging America into a war with Russia as a form of payback, because they believed Moscow had stolen the 2016 presidential election from Hillary Clinton. He also took up the conspiracy theory spread by the Kremlin about the existence of alleged secret “biolabs” in Ukraine that could have justified Russian intervention.
In April 2022, Carlson praised Alex Jones, one of the leading figures in the US conspiracy movement, telling viewers he was “a lot more talented” than himself. According to Jones' own statement in January 2023, the two men had been friends “for ten years”, and text messages showed Carlson repeatedly agreeing with Jones' conspiracy theories.
Carlson is also the author of a documentary film entitled “The End of Men”, which argues that masculinity in the West is under threat from the combined attacks of progressivism and feminism; as a possible remedy, the film advocates testicular tanning to boost testosterone. In December 2022, Carlson claimed to have interviewed an anonymous source who told him she “believed” the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
At the end of April 2023, when Carlson was sacked by Fox News, the channel's management did not publicly disclose the reasons for his dismissal. However, shortly after Fox agreed to pay more than $787 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, after Fox hosts — Carlson among them — kept airing false claims that Dominion's machines had rigged the 2020 election against Trump even as they privately dismissed those claims as “crazy” and “insane”.
On December 14, 2023, during an interview with Blaze personality Alex Stein, Carlson was asked about flat earth theory and an “ice wall” conspiracy; he responded that he is “open to anything”, adding, “there's been so much deception that you can't trust your preconceptions.”
Carlson's break with Trump over Iran and Israel has not quelled his conspiratorial rantings; his fellow Trump defectors, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, and Joe Kent, regularly appear on his show or echo him. None have resiled an inch from the xenophobia, Christian nationalism and conspiracy-peddling they helped mainstream. At an October 2024 Turning Point USA rally, before the rift, Carlson had cast a Trump return to power as an angry father — “Dad comes home” — coming to administer a “vigorous spanking” to a country that had been “a bad little girl”, rhetoric so widely mocked as infantilizing that the crowd itself took up the chant “Daddy's home” when Trump took the stage. Carlson repeated the routine days later at Trump's Madison Square Garden election rally.
At the same time, Carlson's break with Trump has won him a host of admirers on the political left. British-American media entrepreneur and recycler of left-Islamist narratives Mehdi Hasan, who runs the outlet Zeteo has praised Carlson's foreign-policy interventions and his willingness to “break with Trump.” Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, Canadian writer Jeet Heer of The Nation, and ex-Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald have all offered similar praise; Greenwald has said he “hopes” Carlson will run as an anti-Israel Republican candidate for president in 2028. Left-wing commentator Wajahat Ali, who has converged with Carlson on Israel, called it “embarrassing” that Carlson, rather than Democratic leaders, was the one voicing such criticism. Moscow-based antisemitic Putin idoliser Jackson Hinkle has likewise amplified Carlson's framing of US Middle East policy as captured by a “tiny country.”
This convergence of far right and far left around a post-Trump Carlson does not erase the record Conspiracy Watch has tracked for years: a mouthpiece for the Kremlin and for Qatar, a platform for Holocaust revisionists and white nationalists, an apologist for British fascism, a promoter of conspiracy theories about hidden “Zionist” control of the US government. That record predates his split with Trump and will outlast it too.
(Last updated on 08/31/2026)
