The Danger of Treating Far-Right Opportunists as New Allies

Extremists like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly are bashing Trump. But they haven’t changed—the calculation did.

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

Every few years, the right produces a moment so egregious that even its own architects briefly pretend to have a conscience — and every few years, some people watch that performance and mistake it for character.

This is one of those moments. Tucker Carlson is calling Trump a potential antichrist. Megyn Kelly says she is sick of this. Marjorie Taylor Greene is invoking the 25th Amendment. Alex Jones is asking how they can remove the president he spent a decade building. And somewhere, some people on the left are nodding along like they just found new allies. They have not.

Let me be precise about something before we go any further. The Iran war is wrong. Trump threatening to wipe out a civilization is wrong. The 25th Amendment conversation is legitimate. None of that is in dispute here. What is in dispute is the idea that any of these four people arriving at those conclusions means something has changed about who they are, what they want, or where they are going. A broken clock is right twice a day. That does not make it a watch. This article is not about arguing with the time. It is about reminding you what the clock is made of and who built it.

The four subjects of this piece — Carlson, Kelly, Greene, and Jones — have between them built the ideological infrastructure of the most destructive political movement in recent American history. They are white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and conspiracy merchants who have spent years spreading disinformation, enabling authoritarianism, harassing private citizens, and defending the indefensible with the cheerful enthusiasm of people who understood exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. Opposing one war has not changed any of that. Calling for the 25th Amendment while your white nationalist infrastructure remains fully intact is not a moral awakening. It is a schedule adjustment. And if you cannot tell the difference between a changed mind and a changed calculation, these people are counting on that.

To understand what Tucker Carlson actually is, it helps to go back to October 15, 2004, when Jon Stewart sat down on CNN’s Crossfire and told Carlson and co-host Paul Begala to stop hurting America. The clip has been so thoroughly lionized that most people remember Stewart’s lines and forget Carlson’s. They should not. Because Carlson made a point that day that was genuinely correct, and I want to give him credit for it — and I need you to understand how much it pains me to type that sentence, because Tucker Carlson is a pompous dork and I want that on the record before we proceed. But a pompous dork can be right, and on this particular point, he was. I am not giving him a character reference. I am giving him a receipt. The argument matters, and watching what he did with it afterward is the whole story.

Carlson pressed Stewart on his interview with John Kerry. Kerry would not come on Crossfire, Carlson noted, but he would come on The Daily Show. And when he did, Stewart asked him things like, “How are you holding up?” Carlson called it a suck-up and asked why Stewart did not use the opportunity to ask real questions. Stewart’s defense was famous and the crowd loved it: “You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?” I sat there and thought: that is a dodge. A funny dodge. A dodge that won the moment. Still a dodge.

Over the course of his career, Stewart sat across from people like Desmond Tutu, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton — major figures in American and world political life who came to his show precisely because the environment was comfortable. The fact that those conversations aired on Comedy Central between puppet crank calls did not change what was happening on screen. And here is the argument Carlson was actually right about: when you are interviewing people like that, with an audience of millions paying attention, the responsibility does not go away because of the channel it airs on. It does not matter whether we are talking about Bill Maher, Chris Rock, Brian Williams, or Wolf Blitzer — a comedian with that kind of access and that kind of reach carries the same journalistic obligation as anyone else in that chair. The platform does not determine the responsibility. The reach and the influence do. Stewart’s answer was funny. It was also wrong.

I am not the only one who has made that argument. Alex Haley made it with his entire career. Haley became Playboy’s first interviewer in 1962 — the first time an African-American journalist had been featured so prominently in the mainstream press — and proceeded to conduct what are now considered some of the most important long-form interviews in American journalism. Malcolm X in 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, in what became the longest interview King ever granted to any publication. Muhammad Ali. Miles Davis. Quincy Jones. George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, who kept a handgun on the table throughout the entire interview and agreed to speak with Haley only after receiving assurance that the writer was not Jewish. Haley remained professional. Nobody looks at that body of work and says it does not count because it ran next to a centerfold. The platform was irrelevant. The seriousness of the work was not.

It is worth noting, in the interest of intellectual honesty, that Haley’s record is not without blemish. In 2023, scholars unearthed the unedited transcripts of his 1965 Playboy interview with King and found that King’s famous criticism of Malcolm X — a quote that had shaped the historical narrative of a rift between the two men for decades — did not appear anywhere in the original recording. Scholars called it journalistic malpractice. And that is precisely the point. Haley’s failure mattered enough to investigate sixty years later because the standard he held himself to was real. Stewart’s answer was that he did not have to hold himself to any standard because puppets. That is a different kind of failure — and one that Megyn Kelly has been running on a loop for years, which we will get to shortly.