Two distinct but related conversations dominated Chicago’s Morning Answer Wednesday morning: a reckoning with the trajectory of Tucker Carlson’s commentary and its appeal to young conservative audiences, and a sober assessment of whether the Iran ceasefire is producing anything real or simply giving the regime time to regroup.
Noah Rothman, senior writer at National Review and author of the forthcoming Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, addressed both with considerable directness.
Proft opened by referencing a piece by Bridget Phetasy in The Free Press titled “I Don’t Care If Gen Z Likes Me,” which framed Carlson’s recent interview with Nick Fuentes as an example of an aging media figure chasing a younger, more radicalized audience rather than exercising the credibility he spent decades building to push back against it. Phetasy also compared the dynamic to John Stewart’s embrace of controversial figures, describing both as aging hosts performing for an algorithm and a demographic that will move on the moment someone edgier comes along. Proft said he found the framework persuasive as a description of what happens when a commentator starts reading the room instead of saying what is true, with each take getting a little edgier and each interview pushing a little further, all while the host tells himself he is being brave.
Rothman said he finds Carlson’s recent output on Israel and the Iran campaign more troubling than merely a personality or audience-chasing phenomenon, because the specific arguments being advanced are ones Carlson demonstrably knows to be false. The claim that American presidents have uniformly and obsequiously deferred to Israel is, in Rothman’s words, laughably false and impossibly dumb from someone who has spent decades covering American foreign policy. He walked through the documented record. George H.W. Bush pressured Israel to absorb Scud missile strikes from Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War without retaliating, including against potential unconventional weapons use. The George W. Bush administration ignored Israeli lobbying against the Iraq war, with Israel arguing the United States should focus on Iran instead, and then gave Israel approximately twenty days to conclude its 2006 Lebanon operations before Condoleezza Rice publicly withdrew American support. Barack Obama was, in Rothman’s characterization, inordinately hostile to Israel, doing everything from voting against it in the United Nations to withdrawing American protection from Security Council resolutions. Joe Biden actively frustrated Israel’s campaign against Hamas, including blocking Israeli operations in Rafah for weeks before Israel proceeded and eventually eliminated Hamas’s leader. The notion that Israel has always gotten whatever it wanted from Washington, Rothman said, is simply not the history, and Carlson knows it.
He connected the appeal of Carlson’s narrative to a broader dynamic he said he has been warning about for a decade: the rise of populist movements that traffic in persecution complexes, the idea that everything that is rightfully yours has been stolen by an ill-defined but omniscient and omnipresent cabal of elites. That kind of paranoid political grammar, Rothman argued, is not merely adjacent to anti-Semitism but is historically and practically favorable to it, because when you ask who has been running the elite cabal throughout history, the path to a familiar answer is short. He said the simultaneous rise of anti-Semitic attitudes on both the populist left and the populist right is not coincidental and is not separable from the conspiratorial frameworks those movements have normalized. Carlson’s particular contribution, he said, is introducing the notion of a grand malign plot designed to strip the United States of sovereignty and agency at the macro level and individual Americans of initiative and self-determination at the micro level. It is a toxic philosophy that is simply not true, and its primary function is to make its audience feel righteously aggrieved in ways that benefit the people promoting it.
On the Iran ceasefire itself, Rothman said his assessment is that it was initially worthwhile to pursue because Iran’s stated terms had changed and the administration was essentially committing to restrike targets that had already been hit, which is not a productive use of military resources. But he said the ceasefire has rapidly become one-sided. The strait, which was the central leverage point and the concession Iran put on the table that made the ceasefire worth attempting, remains functionally closed. Iran is now attempting to pull Lebanon and Hezbollah into the ceasefire framework, which was never part of the original agreement and represents exactly the kind of bad-faith maneuvering that has characterized every previous Iranian diplomatic engagement. He said the American negotiating team heading to Islamabad, including Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and JD Vance, should give the process a genuine shot but should be fully prepared to walk if the Iranians continue playing games.
On the question of dissident networks inside Iran and whether the administration should be doing more to support organized opposition, Rothman said his understanding of the intelligence picture is limited but offered several observations. Organized opposition groups inside Iran have been systematically destroyed by the regime over decades. What the country has instead is a pattern of mass street protests that have erupted with striking regularity since 2001 and will erupt again, confronting a regime that now has far less terror apparatus available to suppress them. The key variable he identified is the Iranian regular army, the Artesh, which is separate from the IRGC and has been deliberately left largely untouched by both American and Israeli operations. The design, he said, appears to be to preserve that armed element, which retains some vestigial connection to the pre-Islamic Revolution state, as a potential force that could break with the IRGC and facilitate the kind of elite-level fracture that would genuinely end the regime rather than simply killing its current occupants. Whether that plan works, he acknowledged, is genuinely uncertain. But he pushed back on the narrative that the administration went into the campaign without a plan, arguing that the conditions for action, a regime that had never been weaker, violent domestic suppression of protesters, and a standing American military presence in the region, created an opportunity that was taken with the forces available rather than the optimal forces one might prefer in theory.