Flirting with Disaster: The Budding Alliances between Far Left and Far Right Media Stars

Are Ana Kasparian and Tucker Carlson a political odd couple? Or are they really two sides of the same coin?

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

Illustration by Riley Levine

I don’t approach politics like a tribal cheerleader who needs my side to be flawless. I’ve been clear for years that I’ve had issues with TYT and that I’m pragmatic. I criticize Democrats regularly. I don’t worship progressive commentators. I don’t do the “vote blue no matter who” bumper-sticker routine. But pragmatism has limits. It ends where moral clarity begins. And when I see people bending over backwards to normalize figures who have built careers on dehumanizing rhetoric, I’m going to say something.

I thought the I’ve Had It interview conducted by Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan was disappointing. Ana Kasparian was the guest, and she’s responsible for her own words, but the overall conversation felt like it kept rewarding sloppy framing instead of interrogating it.

When Ana suggested Tucker Carlson isn’t antisemitic because he’s a Zionist, I genuinely had to pause — not out of respect, but because my brain needed a second to process the idea that “supports Israel sometimes” is being treated like a spiritual vaccine against bigotry. That logic isn’t nuanced. It’s laughable.

Let’s define terms clearly so we’re not playing word games.

Zionism is the political movement that supports the existence of a Jewish national homeland — historically and presently centered on the State of Israel as a Jewish state. That’s it. It’s a political ideology about nationhood and sovereignty.

It’s not a personality test, it’s not a moral certificate, and it’s definitely not an antisemitism vaccine — you don’t get to flash a “Zionist” badge like it’s TSA PreCheck for bigotry and stroll past accountability because you said the right geopolitical password once.

Supporting Israel does not magically immunize someone from spreading antisemitic tropes. A person can support Israel for geopolitical reasons, theological reasons, or even cynical branding reasons and still traffic in conspiratorial narratives that have historically targeted Jewish communities.

I grew up in white evangelical spaces, so I know exactly how this script works. Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism breaks down exactly how these power structures operate. One of the churches I attended as a kid had a Christian Zionist minister who absolutely loved a Jewish Zionist rabbi who’d come through as a guest speaker — and it wasn’t just a one-off cameo either; the minister would sometimes go to the rabbi’s synagogue. There was warmth, praise, and genuine admiration.

And there was also theology underneath it that treated Jewish people less like neighbors and more like chess pieces in an end-times storyline. Christian Zionism has long been intertwined with apocalyptic theology — the idea that Jewish sovereignty in Israel is a precursor to Armageddon. In many versions of that theology, Jews either convert or perish at the end of the prophetic timeline.

That’s not solidarity. That’s instrumentalization.

Now, let me be clear: I cannot say all Zionists think this way. I haven’t met every Zionist on Earth. But I can say, confidently, that this strain of thinking has been a prevailing current within the broader Zionist movement — particularly in its alliance with American evangelicalism.

So the idea that “he supports Zionism,” therefore “he can’t be antisemitic,” is intellectually unserious. It treats Zionism like a moral force field instead of what it actually is: a political posture that can be sincere, strategic, theological, or purely convenient depending on who’s using it and why. It collapses centuries of antisemitic conspiracy thinking into a simplistic loophole—like the only way antisemitism exists is if someone explicitly says “I hate Jews” and never says anything nice about Israel.

And it ignores everything that matters. It ignores history—how antisemitism has survived through coded language and insinuation. It ignores theology—especially the Christian Zionist tradition that can praise Israel while reducing Jewish people to props in an end-times storyline. It ignores rhetoric—the way “globalist” narratives and shadowy-elite stories map cleanly onto old tropes without saying the quiet part out loud. Most of all, it ignores Tucker Carlson’s record, which is not a blank slate that gets wiped clean because he once took a position on Israel that someone found agreeable.

Because the same Tucker Carlson Ana wants us to see as misunderstood is the Tucker Carlson who told his audience that the narratives surrounding George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were lies.

After George Floyd was murdered, Tucker didn’t respond like a human being who understood what the world just watched — he responded like a man auditioning for CSI: White Fragility. He looked straight at the camera and told his audience the story they were hearing was basically a scam, that the public reckoning was “hysteria,” and after Chauvin was convicted he framed support for Floyd as an “attack on civilization.” Civilization. As if the real emergency wasn’t a man dying on video, but Tucker’s viewers being forced to sit through the unbearable horror of accountability.

And Breonna Taylor? Same routine. Same sneer. Same “are we sure this matters?” energy — the kind of rhetorical shrug that only makes sense if you’ve already decided which deaths count as tragic and which ones count as inconvenient. Tucker’s entire brand in that era was taking Black people killed by law enforcement and treating their humanity like a disputed charge on a credit card statement: I don’t recognize this transaction. I’d like to speak to a manager.

So forgive me if I don’t suddenly light a candle and declare Tucker Carlson morally reborn because he condemned the right for praising the shooting of Renee Good. Yes, he criticized conservatives who reacted ghoulishly. Yes, he framed it as a human tragedy. Wonderful. The bar is now officially buried six feet underground: “Podcasts host acknowledges that shooting someone is bad.” Break out the confetti.

But let’s not confuse baseline decency with a redemption arc. Saying “this is awful” when someone is shot is not a courageous act of moral clarity — it’s the bare minimum required to pass as a functioning adult in society. You don’t get a character reference for clearing a hurdle that low. That’s like applauding a man for not kicking a puppy on live television. Congratulations, you didn’t actively cheer violence for once. That’s not growth. That’s gravity.

But moral licensing is real. The psychological phenomenon where one “good” act becomes an excuse to ignore a broader pattern of harm. The halo effect is real. One decent moment casting a glow over a decade of demagoguery.

Selective empathy is real. It’s the convenient kind of compassion that shows up when it’s politically safe, when it lets you look reasonable, when it doesn’t require you to reexamine the worldview you’ve been selling to your audience for years. It’s empathy that comes with a return policy. It’s “I can acknowledge this tragedy” empathy — as long as it doesn’t force you to admit that your broader story about crime, protest, race, policing, or power has been a con. The second empathy demands consistency — the second it requires you to treat Black victims of state violence as fully human, or to acknowledge structural racism as real, or to stop treating civil rights as a scam — that empathy mysteriously evaporates.

And Tucker’s ideological architecture has long included demographic panic. He has spent years telling his audience that “real” Americans are being replaced, that the country is being stolen through immigration and cultural change, that shadowy elites are engineering a transformation they didn’t consent to. That’s not analysis; it’s grievance cosplay dressed up as sociology. It’s fear with a costume on. And once you build a worldview around the idea that demographic change is a threat, you don’t get to dabble in empathy the way someone dabbles in a new hobby. Because that panic requires villains. It requires scapegoats. It requires an “us” that must be protected and a “them” that must be suspected. Which is exactly why a single “good” moment from Tucker doesn’t rewrite the record — it just gives people who want to like him an excuse to pretend the rest was never the point.

Great Replacement rhetoric is one of those ideas that people try to sanitize by calling it “just concerns about immigration,” but the core message isn’t policy — it’s paranoia. It’s the claim that demographic change isn’t happening organically, through births, migration patterns, economics, wars, or globalization, but through a deliberate scheme. Not “we need to debate border policy,” but “they are doing this to us on purpose.” And notice how the story always needs a villain. It can’t just be history unfolding; it has to be sabotage. That’s why the rhetoric is so corrosive: it trains the audience to see neighbors as invaders and political opponents as existential threats, not fellow citizens with different preferences. It turns pluralism into a crime scene.

And then you get the “shadowy elites” cast of characters — the vague “globalists,” the faceless “international bankers,” the unnamed “powerful donors,” the people who “control the media” and “pull the strings.” It’s a conspiracy template that has been running on autopilot for generations, and the reason George Soros gets singled out so often is because he’s an easy plug-in for that template: wealthy, foreign-born, Jewish, and politically active. You can’t tell me the fixation is purely about “policy disagreement” when the storytelling always frames him like a comic-book supervillain with a remote control for society. That’s not critique; that’s mythology. And “globalist” is the all-purpose air freshener they spray on it when they want deniability — vague enough to say, “I didn’t mean Jews,” but specific enough that the audience who’s already leaning that way hears exactly what they’re supposed to hear.

The bigger point is this: once you accept that “replacement” framework, everything downstream gets uglier. Immigration becomes invasion. Diversity becomes decay. Elections become illegitimate if the wrong people vote. Political losses become evidence of sabotage. And violence becomes easier to justify because you’ve told your audience they’re not in a democracy — they’re in a siege. That’s why treating Tucker Carlson’s Great Replacement-adjacent messaging like it’s just edgy commentary is so irresponsible. It’s not a spicy take. It’s a worldview built to manufacture fear, and fear always goes looking for someone to blame.

---

---

You don’t have to say “the Jews” every time to activate centuries-old conspiratorial frameworks. Dog whistles work precisely because they don’t require full sentences.

So when Ana says, essentially, “He’s supported Zionism, so I don’t think he’s antisemitic,” what she’s doing is collapsing a complex historical pattern into a simplistic shield — like antisemitism is an app you delete the moment you download the Israel add-on. It’s the political version of thinking you can’t be misogynistic because you own a “Girl Dad” hoodie. Zionism becomes this little talisman she waves around like, See? He said the right thing about the right country. Case closed. Court adjourned. Except history doesn’t work like that, rhetoric doesn’t work like that, and bigotry definitely doesn’t work like that.

And that shield protects the wrong person. It doesn’t protect Jewish communities from conspiratorial rhetoric. It doesn’t protect anyone from the real-world consequences of demographic panic narratives. It protects Tucker Carlson — a man who has spent years packaging fear and resentment into something his audience can consume with dinner. It turns “supported Zionism” into a get-out-of-accountability card, and the only person cashing it is the guy who’s been playing this game the whole time.

When the subject changed to Mayor Karen Bass, I already knew where this was headed. I live just outside the city limits, so I don’t even get to vote for her, but I work in the city she governs and I stumped for her because I wanted her to win — I thought she was the better choice — and none of that turns her into a sacred cow. She can be criticized. She should be criticized. Support isn’t worship.

No Democrat is above criticism. Democrats are going to have to get our shit together, and I’m not handing out a “vote blue no matter who” bumper sticker and calling that analysis. There are valid critiques of Democratic leadership — on Israel policy, on institutional cowardice, on playing procedural games with Republicans who stopped respecting procedure a long time ago. At the same time, we should be honest about the reality we’re operating in: the Republican Party right now isn’t offering a normal alternative. It’s a MAGA vessel. So yes, critique Democrats hard — but don’t pretend the other side is some harmless plan B we can casually flirt with when we’re irritated.

When Ana started talking about Mayor Karen Bass and claimed she’d been doing “investigative reporting,” what she actually described wasn’t some deep-throat, trench-coat operation — it was a story that’s already been publicly reported and litigated in plain sight. The core facts are real: the Lincoln Safe Sleep Village site in South L.A. was contracted to provide space for up to 88 people and was associated with about $2.3 million in payments for that fiscal year; observers found it operating at roughly half capacity, and a court-appointed monitor/special master found only about 44 beds/platforms when the city had represented 88. A federal judge (David O. Carter) blasted the discrepancy and raised the possibility of fraud — but the scandal here is oversight failure and contract verification, not Ana Kasparian heroically cracking a code that was hidden from the public. And of course — of course — she’s got this smoke for the Black woman mayor, because why would Ana break tradition now after the way she carried herself toward the Black vice president Kamala Harris when she was running for president, or the way she’s swung at Black women like Jasmine Crockett like they’re personally responsible for every structural problem in American politics.

What’s misleading is the way she turns that into a neat morality play where Karen Bass becomes the symbol of “Democrats can’t govern,” as if one contract fiasco is a personality flaw in the mayor rather than a systemic accountability problem tied to LA’s homelessness contracting ecosystem — including LAHSA’s track record, which has already been hammered by audits and public criticism for poor contract oversight and shaky documentation. Ana also framed it like a “federal audit” revelation; the bed-count blowup is coming out of court oversight/monitoring and reporting, not Ana parachuting in with a magnifying glass and a press badge. And to be fair, Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan don’t live in Los Angeles, so I didn’t expect them to catch every missing piece in real time — but Ana’s framing is still misleading because it leaves out important details and turns a very specific contract-and-oversight failure into a broad, lazy indictment built to land on one target: the mayor.

On a sitting Democratic mayor governing a massive city with structural homelessness, state-level constraints, budget limits, and a federal government that routinely withholds support?

Breaking news: governance is complicated.

Stop the presses.

I’m not saying you can’t scrutinize Mayor Bass. You absolutely can. You should. That’s how democracy works.

But presenting municipal governance analysis like you uncovered Watergate is comedic. And I’m honestly disappointed that Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan didn’t treat that line like the punchline it was.

Because here’s the uncomfortable part: some of what Ana said about Bass struck me as racially tinged.

That’s my opinion.

When criticism of a Black woman mayor governing a sprawling urban system starts sounding less like policy evaluation and more like moral deficiency framing, I’m going to notice.

Outcome bias is real — judging leaders solely by visible results without grappling with systemic constraints. Scapegoating is real — channeling frustration into a single figure because it’s psychologically cleaner than confronting institutional complexity.

And I don’t see how criticizing a mayor for working within the system she actually has to operate in somehow makes her morally suspect — while simultaneously softening on a man who built a career mainstreaming demographic paranoia.

Working with what you’ve got does not make you a bad person.

And that brings me back to TYT’s posture more broadly.

TYT loves the anti-establishment brand. Fine. But you don’t get to lecture Democrats about working within institutions while your own network has taken institutional capital.

Buddy Roemer is not some random progressive benefactor TYT met at a vegan potluck. He was a Louisiana governor and U.S. congressman who switched from Democrat to Republican while in office and later ran for president seeking the Republican nomination (2012). In other words: a conservative political figure with a long history inside the Republican ecosystem — and, after politics, he moved into the investment world, including the private equity/investment firm that ended up writing TYT a check.

That’s why it matters when we say TYT accepted millions from his firm: in April 2014, reporting shows Roemer, Robinson, Melville & Co. provided $4 million in seed financing for TYT (with an option to increase up to $8 million). Later, in 2017, TYT raised $20 million in a funding round led by 3L Capital, with participation from Greycroft, e.ventures, and WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg’s venture firm).

That doesn’t automatically make them corrupt. Media costs money.

But don’t pretend you’re operating in some pure insurgent vacuum while criticizing elected officials for navigating power structures that actually exist.

Incentives matter.

When anti-establishment energy becomes a business model, you are rewarded for heat, not consistency. For viral disgust, not moral clarity. For contrarian takes that make you look independent, not for standards that remain steady across contexts.

And this is where I draw my line.

I am pragmatic about politics.

I’m not always thrilled with Gavin Newsom. If he runs in 2028, he might not be my first choice in a primary. But if he’s the nominee against a MAGA candidate, I’ll hold my nose and vote.

I didn’t love voting for Adam Schiff, but there was no universe in which I was going to vote for Steve Garvey. I love the ’81 Dodgers. I respect the mustache. I can appreciate a World Series ring. But nostalgia does not qualify you for the United States Senate. I’m not confusing batting average with policy positions. This isn’t fantasy baseball — it’s federal power.

That’s pragmatism.

What I do not do is negotiate my humanity or the humanity of others.

White supremacy goes beyond policy. It is not a tax-rate debate. It is not a zoning disagreement. It is a worldview that assigns human value hierarchically.

So just like I’m not a fan of so-called progressives who placate white supremacists, I’m also not the biggest fan of progressive hosts who placate the people doing that placating.

At some point the soft-glove treatment becomes normalization.

And people of color are tired.

We are tired of being told to appreciate the nuance of people who routinely undermine our dignity. We are tired of watching commentators bend over backwards to frame right-wing figures as complex, misunderstood, or secretly reasonable because they had one moment of decency.

Decency is the floor. Not the redemption arc.

Heading into 2026 and 2028, progressives are going to have to understand something: moral clarity is not extremism. It’s consistency.

You can criticize Democrats.

You can demand better governance.

You can call out establishment games.

But if your independence consistently results in rehabilitating people who built careers on dehumanizing rhetoric, then that independence starts to look less like courage and more like motivated reasoning.

I’m hopeful — genuinely hopeful — that we can do better than this. Not “better” in the corny, inspirational-poster sense. Better in the basic-standards sense. Better in the “stop rewarding narrative laundering” sense. Better in the “we can disagree inside the coalition without turning moral clarity into a luxury item” sense. Because if progressives can’t hold the line on dignity while we’re busy critiquing competence, then we’re just doing credibility cosplay and calling it growth.

We can critique our side without laundering theirs. We can demand better governance without pretending the alternative is harmless. We can be pragmatic about policy without being morally porous about humanity. And that last part matters because the people who benefit from our softness are not confused. They know exactly what they’re doing. They want the optics of seriousness and the legitimacy of proximity. They want to be treated like thoughtful contrarians instead of what they are: repeat offenders in the business of dehumanization.

And Jennifer and Pumps — I respect you. Truly. But you have to do better when you’re interviewing bad-faith figures like Ana who keep palling around with people who traffic in white supremacist rhetoric and who repeatedly take swings at the trans community like it’s a hobby. You don’t have to “win” the interview, but you do have to challenge the framing. Because right now, the soft-glove posture is doing work it shouldn’t be doing. It’s turning labels like “Zionist” into get-out-of-accountability-free cards, and they’re not. Pretending they are doesn’t protect anyone targeted by these narratives — it protects the people spreading them, and it insults the intelligence of everyone who has been paying attention all along.