Afrasianet - Conservative  media personality Tucker Carlson's remarks about "Islamic extremism" have sparked a storm of debate within the American right, revealing deep divisions within the "Make America Great Again" "MAGA" movement between one wing that rejects foreign interference and  scrutinizes Washington's support for Israel , and another that sees the rhetoric as a direct threat to national security and conservative identity.

Carlson is an isolationist right-wing who wants the United States of America and its white Christian majority to become great again, and therefore he believes that to achieve this, the country must not enter into wars in which it has no words or camels in the interest of the Israeli occupation state, and he does not want Israel to have such enormous influence over his country.

In a news report, Newsweek magazine quoted Carlson as saying during an appearance on the popular podcast show "The American Conservative" that he did not know anyone in the United States who had been killed by radical Islam in the past 24 years.

Carlson argued that the real danger facing the United States lies in suicide, addiction and the disintegration of society, not "Islamic extremism."

He even went so far as to accuse the Israeli government and its supporters in the United States of promoting the idea that "radical Islam" is America's number one threat.

"I know a lot of people who have committed suicide, and others have died from drug overdoses. And I know people who can't get jobs ... "These white boys are being destroyed by Adderall, video games and."

The comments sparked angry reactions on social media from prominent right-wing figures, led by far-right  activist Laura Loomer, who accused Carlson of lying and covering up what she described as "Islamic terrorism," and a number of conservative commentators who saw Carlson's words as a denial of known security and political facts. 

On the other hand, former Republican member of the House of Representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene, defended Carlson, affirming her friendship with him, and praising his faith and love for the United States, in a position that reflects her clear alignment with the "America First" movement, which rejects Washington's involvement in foreign conflicts, especially its support for Israel in its war with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).

According to Newsweek, this public confrontation reflects a deep rift within  the MAGA movement, between an isolationist nationalist wing that questions U.S. foreign alliances, and a traditional Republican wing that sees support for Israel as an essential part of U.S. interests and values.

The crisis also comes in the context of previous tensions within the camp itself, including controversial interviews with Carlson and public disagreements between Greene and President Donald Trump.

The magazine concluded its report by warning that the conservative divide on key issues ahead of next year's midterm elections could affect the future of the Republican Party.

Tucker Carlson. The dissident from the "devils" of the West

In a secluded area in the heart of the woods of Maine, in a wooden house in the small town of Woodstock, Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News anchor, slept quietly surrounded by dense pine trees, away from the hustle and bustle of Washington.

It was in this place – which Carlson once described as "his favorite place in the world" – that the great transformation took place.

In a novel that at first glance may seem like a delirium or a chapter from a horror novel, Carlson recounts in a video published almost a year ago an incident that happened to him in his bed in that hut, and he asserts that what he will tell is completely true: he says that he woke up one night with sharp pain and shortness of breath as if invisible forces were applied to his chest and suffocated him.

It was not a passing nightmare, as when he lit the light and inspected his body, he found bloody claw marks, 4 tangible wounds under his arms and shoulder, as if an animal had attacked him while he was sleeping.

Carlson adds that his wife, who sleeps next to him, and their four dogs who share the room, none of them woke up, the dogs didn't bark, the wife didn't feel anything, and he was alone bleeding in silence.

When asked if his assistant, a devout evangelical Christian, could explain what happened, she replied as cold as the weather outside: "Oh yes, it happens, people are attacked by demons while they sleep in their beds."

This story, told by Carlson in a promotional clip for a documentary titled "Christianity," was the cornerstone of the man's profound ideological and spiritual transformation: for him overnight the world was no longer an arena for political struggle between Republicans and Democrats, or between conservatives and liberals over taxes and immigration.

The curtain has been lifted to reveal an all-out spiritual battle or war between good and evil, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness that leave real scars on bodies and souls. 

How could a man who built his media glory on white nationalism, warning against immigrants and defending "Western civilization" suddenly become one of Israel's most fierce attackers, and even the most prominent voice of the Palestinian narrative on the American right?

And how did he go from being a spoiled conservative star to a "heretic" who accuses ambassadors and senators of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel?

Perhaps the answer lies in that bloody night in the woods in Maine: If the world is a battleground between absolute good and evil, traditional political alliances are meaningless.

If the forces that govern Washington are "anti-human" and "satanic" forces, as Carlson describes them, then everything they support—including wars in the Middle East and the unconditional alliance with Israel—becomes questionable at best or a theological rejection at worst.

Here, in this candlelit wooden hut and amid walls decorated with hunting rifles, Carlson has gone from "America First" to "Christ First," where he plans to burn bridges with his closest allies who have remained so for many years.

In April 2023, Fox News abruptly dismissed his services despite being the highest-rated anchor in the history of the channel and American television.

It was an attempt to silence the conservative media establishment that was beginning to feel that Carlson had crossed the red lines drawn for him.

But instead of disappearing, Carlson retreated to a studio he built in an old garage he bought for $30,000 in Woodstock, Maine, and added thousands of dollars in improvements of his own money.

From this rural studio, free from the constraints of traditional media and Republican pressure, Carlson launched his new platform on the X platform.

In this new space, Carlson no longer has to embellish his views or balance "Trumpism" with the interests of the Republican Party, he is free to say what is not said.

At the heart of this new discourse are foreign policy issues—specifically the relationship with Israel—as a central tool for dismantling what America's ruling elite calls hypocrisy.

Years ago, no one could have imagined that Tucker Carlson's views, programs, and interventions would become so popular in the Arab and Muslim world, as Carlson has always been on the exact opposite side of the world, but these profound transformations, which no one imagined would take such a sudden turn, changed everything.

Carlson's interventions and meetings have been translated into Arabic and are widely celebrated among its speakers, primarily due to his harsh criticism of  the Israeli occupation  state and his opening of unprecedented space for Palestinian rights defenders through his program, in addition to his media interviews in which he severely embarrassed senior officials in the US administration regarding the hostile US policy towards the Muslim world. 

Carlson's recent stances, which have enabled him to unexpectedly mobilize popularity among Muslims in the United States, the Muslim world, and sympathizers of the Palestinian cause in general, have prompted a far-right political commentator who describes herself as "proud of her Islamophobia" — Laura Lemaire — to launch a scathing attack on Carlson, who shares her on the conservative right, saying he has become controlled by Muslims.

She claimed that he receives money from Muslim countries to promote pro-Islamist and anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric, which a detailed report by The Independent shows is not true, as there is no evidence that Carlson received money from any Muslim country to work for them.

Carlson's anti-American anti-imperialist stances recently made him win clear admiration from the American left, which has been hostile to him over the past years, as his anti-US stance against the United States of America waging war on Iran and embarrassing the American elite enthusiastic about that war in his meetings with them by showing their lack of knowledge about the Middle East and Iran itself prompted the American-British journalist Mehdi Hassan, who is known for his defense of the Palestinian cause and his harsh criticism of the Israeli occupation state, to say at the time that he joked:  We have the right to admire a white supremacist like Tucker Carlson for 48 hours, because he's the only man at that moment who honestly practices journalism.

Up to that point, it can be explained simply that Carlson, as an isolationist right-winger, wants the United States of America and its white Christian majority to become great again, and one of the ways to do this greatness, in his view, is not to get the country into wars in which there is no camel or camel in the interest of the Israeli occupation state.

He also does not want the Israeli occupation state to have such enormous influence over his country, and therefore it is natural at this point that his positions converge with those of progressives, leftists, and sympathizers of the Palestinian cause only out of mutual interest.

In one interview with a guest on his YouTube channel, Tucker stated that he was a hater of Muslims and an attacker of Islam, but he remembers that he was once hosting an anti-Islam commentator, who told him to show him how bad Islam was in their view at the time.

Carlson remembers this situation and says that something in himself was telling him that this meaning is actually good, so why try to portray this good meaning as bad?

Carlson says this while recalling his Islamophobic past and laughing his famous laugh in the middle of his speech, then saying "I am not a Muslim now", meaning that his conversion is not so much a conversion to Islam as it is a transformation of understanding Islam away from prejudices and racism against Muslims.

Carlson's speech has also changed in another important respect: the guests he has recently received and criticize the Israeli occupation state not only base their speech on a pragmatic basis to make it clear that bias toward the occupying power is harmful to the United States , but they and Carlson, who comments on what they say, are building part of their rhetoric on a moral basis as well.

Carlson. which was a symbol of the far right

By 2020, Carlson Tucker had reached the pinnacle of his success as the country's most prominent far-right commentator and media personality.

According to  Business Insider, Tucker Carlson's show on the right-wing Fox News channel at the time, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" was the most-watched news program in U.S. history, amassing 4.3 million viewers in the fourth quarter of that year. 

Until that moment, Carlson had been on the throne of success as the most prominent right-wing media personality, and he was famous for his harsh comments against immigrants, women, and blacks, which caused dozens of companies to stop running their ads on his show, in order to distance themselves from the great anger that his episodes have from large segments of the American people, who see the man as a model of racist right-wing extremism.

In addition to receiving record viewership, according to Business Insider, Carlson had reached a nascent consensus in the Republican Party that he would have a very strong chance of winning if he ran for president in 2024.

Carlson was so famous for his anti-minority rhetoric that in 2018 he stated that immigrants would "make the United States of America poorer and dirtier," a statement Carlson later apologized for despite the anger he caused.

In 2019, after someone carried out a mass shooting in Texas, and had left a statement before his incident talking about what he called the "Latino invasion of Texas," Carlson provoked a lot of listeners as the mainstream of the media at the time was talking about the problem of white racism and the rise of the racial theory about white supremacy among some extremists, while Carlson commented that this story of "white supremacy" is not a real problem, in the sense that white racism is an imaginary problem and not a real problem on the ground Reality.

Also in 2020, Carlson sparked outrage from the black community in the United States when he defended the young man who shot and killed two black people during a protest of the Black Lives Matter movement in Wisconsin, saying at the time, according to the British Guardian, why are we surprised that the looting and arson has led to a young man deciding to carry a gun to protect public order, when no one dares to do so, meaning that not stopping the actions of The looting of the Black Lives Matter protests, Carlson says, has led to this violence, which is at the root of the violence.

At the start of the decade, Tucker Carlson was still playing the same role brilliantly, a right-wing influencer who stirred up controversy with shocking views at a time when liberal language was still dominating the discourse of the Western world.

During that time with Fox News, Carlson was essentially promoting the Great Replacement Theory, which is that liberals and Democrats in Western countries cultivate policies in the West that eventually lead to the replacement of long-term white voters with immigrants of other ethnicities and non-Western ideologies.

According to Joey Reed in her interview with The Guardian – a 2022 MSNBC presenter – Carlson was the most prominent voice in the right-wing media who entrenched the racist conspiracy theory.

According to political historian Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt University in her interview with The Guardian, Carlson had by this time become the most prominent voice of the "Make America Great Again" group in the Republican Party, and he was able to weave a rhetorical right-wing tone in which the far right found its refuge, based on the idea of white oppression, that white men in Western societies are now suffering on many levels.

Until then, Tucker Carlson was nothing more than a right-wing voice known to some for his extreme anti-minority views, but perhaps the big shift was his departure from Fox News.

On  April 24, 2023, when Fox News announced Tucker Carlson's sudden departure, that was the turning point for him, despite the allegations that it came as a result of his involvement in broadcasting comments that he knew were untrue, according to CNBC, after Dominion Voting Systems filed a huge defamation lawsuit against the channel. He expresses skepticism about allegations of election fraud in which Joe Biden won over Donald Trump , even though Tucker's show has never shown such skepticism due to the lack of evidence of fraud. 

The turning point was not actually that Carlson had shifted to the center rather than the right, nor was it that he suddenly showed love and acceptance of minorities, but in his independence and attempt to conduct his journalism with greater professionalism.

After leaving Fox News, Carlson founded a media platform aimed directly at the audience, TCN, which stands for Tucker Carlson's network, and hosted a group of global figures, even those who don't usually appear in mainstream media, even on the right in the United States.

Carlson's February 2024 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin was perhaps  one of his most important press conferences after leaving Fox News, which has so far garnered 20 million views on Tucker Carlson's YouTube channel alone.

The meeting sparked outrage in the United States of America from some as an attempt to shine on Putin, in which the Russian president was able to give a lengthy lecture on Russian history and the reasons for his invasion of Ukraine without being asked embarrassing questions from Carlson, according to critics of the episode.

But Carlson defended his interview by saying that most of the American people were deprived of knowing why Putin invaded Ukraine and what his goals were, because these questions had not been seriously and objectively addressed in the mainstream media before, and that was his goal in the interview, which was to let the American citizen know the other point of view.

After that interview, a Japanese news agency, SNA, noted that while most American progressives view Tucker Carlson as a representative of the far right, there is a clear fact that the man's foreign policy positions are beginning to conform to some of the principles of the anti-imperialist left, even if his conclusions stem from a different intellectual and moral path.

Al-Aqsa flood. The most prominent Palestinian voice on the American right

Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood and the subsequent war of extermination launched by the occupying power on  the Gaza Strip, the  vast majority of the American right has taken a traditional stance on the war, as a large segment of this right has been strongly influenced by theological visions that interpret the verses of the Old Testament as urging the State of Israel to always be supported.

Because this was the prevailing position within the American right, the right-wing media spared no effort in presenting media material that supported the occupation state and tried to create justifications for it, which it did not do.

If only one person could be pointed out as being responsible for amplifying the margin on the American right — a margin that the occupying power viewed with suspicion — that person would likely be Tucker Carlson.

In fact, Carlson took a stance denouncing the occupying state from the beginning, and this position grew as the war went on, as his platform became the window for the conservative American right-wing citizen to ask questions and opinions that he could not listen to in the mainstream right-wing media.

Carlson has been providing his media material since the beginning of the war critical of the occupying state, but it may have been his episode with  Senator Ted Cruz from Texas that gave Carlson recognition even from leftists in the United States of America for his great effort in exposing the occupying state, and that he is one of the few who truly practice journalism in the American right-wing media.

In that episode, Carlson deeply embarrassed his guest when he refuted his Christian Zionist thesis that supporting the occupying state is a religious duty of every Christian according to the Bible.

Carlson revealed through his questions that his guest did not even know where the verse he was referring to was located, and otherwise, he explained through his questions how his guest, who is pushing for the United States to strike Iran, does not know the most basic information about the country that wants to change its regime.

During the war, Carlson tried through his numerous press interviews to show the conservative American right-wing viewer three basic facts: first, he refuted the Christian Zionist propaganda that the Bible urges Christians to support the occupying state, and second,  he highlighted through his interviews with American Christian clergy who lived in the conflict zone, that Christians in Palestine are subject to excessive repression by the occupying state, just like Muslims.

One of the most important of these meetings was his meeting with Munther Ishaq, a Palestinian pastor who stressed that the occupying power is bombing Christians and limiting their ability to proselytize inside the occupying state, and his meeting with the American mother Agabia Stephanopoulos, who lived in the occupied territories for many years.

In her meeting with Carlson, Agabia went so far as to defend the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and emphasize that it is not a terrorist movement as the American right tries to describe it.

The third fact is that the United States is pragmatically losing out on its unconditional support for the Israeli occupation state, and that the United States should take an isolationist approach that distances it from such problems.

Prior to all these facts, Carlson was also expressing that what was happening in Gaza was ethnic cleansing and a war of genocide, that the unconditional support of the United States for such practices made it in fact antithetical to Christianity and morality, and that such unconditional support was considered national treason, according to him.

Dedicating American money and efforts to a foreign country is tantamount to treason, in addition to Carlson's devoted a lot of space in his media to talking about the Zionist lobbies in the United States and how they push the United States to take positions that are harmful to it in favor of the occupying state, and he also stressed that anyone who served in the army of a foreign country – meaning the occupying state – should immediately lose his American citizenship.

Today, Tucker Carlson stands in the no-man's land he created for himself, a warrior on multiple fronts, burning his ships with the traditional Republican establishment, the Israel lobby and the mainstream media.

His supporters see him as a prophet who has the courage to tell the truth in a time of lies, while his opponents see him as a flute who drags Americans like a cobra into anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred.

Whether motivated by a religious awakening of conscience after that night of the satanic attack or careful political calculations betting on a new popular mood that rejects Israeli arrogance after the genocide, it is certain that Carlson broke the biggest idol in American politics and made criticism of Israel, and even questioning the legitimacy of its religious and political existence, a rhetoric heard on the American right, which decades of Arab diplomacy that claimed that its peace agreements would be enough to convince the world of Palestine's right to exist have not succeeded.