On the menu today: Two days after President Trump announced a cease-fire with Iran to open up the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian regime’s proxy Hezbollah is still firing at Israel, the Israelis are still firing at Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Strait of Hormuz still has “minimal traffic.” Even President Trump himself fumed on Truth Social Thursday evening that “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” If only someone had warned him that the Iranian regime breaks its promises all the time.
With the five-week war against Iran not generating the results he wanted to see, on Thursday evening, President Trump turned his ire against a quartet of other high-profile leaders, ones who many call extremists or dangerous threats to American society and stability, and some with apocalyptic visions and incendiary rhetoric.
I speak, of course, of Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones.
Trump Denounces His Own Gang of Four
The president of the United States would like you to know that he no longer thinks highly of Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones:
They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did! They’ve all been thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV because nobody cares about them, they’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some “free” and cheap publicity. Now they think they get some “clicks” because they have Third Rate Podcasts, but nobody’s talking about them, and their views are the opposite of MAGA. . . .
I’m just going to stop it there, because I think you get the gist; you can click through and read the rest if you like.
Alex Jones being a nut job is . . . not really a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention in the past . . . oh, couple decades or so? I suspect you have known this for so long, you can’t even remember if there was ever a time when you didn’t think Jones was crazy. (There apparently was a time when some people saw him as nutty but amusing and harmless; Jones makes a cameo appearance as a street preacher in the 2001 Richard Linklater animated film Waking Life; Linklater said years later that at the time, Jones was just a funny-crazy public-access TV host in Austin, Texas.)
And yet, unlike our president, I suspect you’ve never agreed to appear on his program. If Trump is irked that someone that he deems a “nut job” and “troublemaker” has the profile that he does . . . well, Mr. President, you helped elevate him. (We should also note that many mainstream media programs, convinced that they were rebutting and refuting Jones’s views also ended up unwittingly elevating him along the way.)
The rapid rise of Candace Owens reflected the fact that the conservative movement desperately wants to see more young people, minorities, and women join the movement, and thus many conservatives get extremely excited whenever a young minority woman comes along and appears to be saying the right things. Alas, the warning signs about Owens were there from the start. Way back in 2019, addressing an event in London, she offered an . . . unorthodox interpretation of World War II:
Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. . . . He was a national socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German.
That is . . . not really the core problem with Hitler. To paraphrase the late and dearly missed Norm Macdonald, I think the worst part was all the genocide, not the “dreams outside of Germany.” Yes, the annexation of other nations was quite bad and makes the list, but I suspect that when going through “the problems with Hitler,” you must work your way down a long list of horrible large-scale crimes against humanity until you get to Hitler’s yearning for linguistic conformity.
You know who concluded, “I’ve studied a lot of history, plus I had family that was there, I don’t think Hitler was a good guy”? Alex Jones.
In the years since, Owens did not get any saner, nor is there much evidence that she’s learned much since her denunciation of Hitler as a globalist. And yet, once again, President Trump agreed to an interview with her and helped elevate her profile.
As for Tucker Carlson, the question “What happened to Carlson?” has been echoing around the right-of-center world for years. Many speculate that what we have seen in recent years reflects the real, probably long-repressed Carlson, unconstrained by cable news television show producers, editors, network lawyers, corporate programming heads, and so on.
There’s no one around to tell Carlson, “Hey, a softball interview with Nick Fuentes isn’t such a good idea,” or “No, the U.S. should not have allied with Hitler during World War II,” or “No, Winston Churchill was not the chief villain during World War II,” nor is the standard of living of Russians better than that of Americans.
(Note that there’s no sign that those Carlson programs bothered the president; in January, Carlson visited the White House twice in two weeks.)
When you look back at the 2023 Dominion Voting Systems’ now-settled defamation lawsuit against Fox News over its promotion of 2020 “stolen election” allegations, you can argue that it was Lou Dobbs who did more than any other on-air figure to cost his bosses the $787 million settlement. But by the time of that settlement, the network had long since cut ties with Dobbs; Fox Business Network dumped his program in February 2021. Shortly after the settlement, Fox News dismissed Carlson; the network concluded the ratings he brought in weren’t worth the risk of another massive defamation suit, and apparently deemed him the host most likely to generate another colossally expensive legal liability. As I wrote at the time, “In 2017, Tucker Carlson had the highest ad rates of any cable news host, with an average price of $13,779 for a 30-second spot. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to sell enough advertising at 10 times that price to match the $787 million payout.”
When Carlson disagrees with a particular course of action, he tends to turn into a catastrophist. Back on June 4, 2025, Carlson warned that a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear program would lead to a wider war that would result in thousands of dead Americans, a collapsed economy, and $30 per gallon gasoline:
The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy, as surging oil prices trigger unmanageable inflation. Consider the effects of $30 gasoline.
But the second week of the war could be even worse. Iran isn’t Iraq or Libya, or even North Korea. While it’s often described as a rogue state, Iran has powerful allies. It’s now part of a global bloc called BRICS, which represents the majority of the world’s landmass, population, economy and military power. Iran has extensive military ties with Russia. It sells the overwhelming majority of its oil exports to China. Iran isn’t alone. An attack on Iran could very easily become a world war. We’d lose.
Now, as discussed during the past five weeks, the U.S. war against Iran has included its share of difficulties. We have suffered, as of this writing, 14 fatal casualties. The war has triggered serious problems in the world energy markets, and gas has indeed gone up, but to $4.15 per gallon average nationally, not $30. Russia provided targeting aid to Iran, but it has not led to outright world war. Much like his favorite analyst of the war in Ukraine, Douglas Macgregor, Carlson reports from the world he wants to see, not from the world as it is. You come away from watching Carlson’s program with a less informed and less accurate understanding of the world around you and how it works.
Anyway, Carlson has interviewed Trump many times, both on his Fox News program and at least three times on his post-Fox podcast. Once again, Trump is fuming about a media personality that he helped elevate. Trump even had Carlson speak at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Megyn Kelly . . . eh, I guess I can’t make fun of anyone who’s ever appeared on her program, as I myself appeared a bunch of times, in better, saner days. I don’t know why she’s going on about Mark Levin’s genitalia. I am sure that Levin is quite angry with Kelly, and vice versa. I do not think that Levin would like to have Kelly killed, as she recently asserted.
In the podcasting world, there is rarely a larger network with deeper pockets and more to lose, and a team of lawyers worried about what the shoot-from-the-hip host is going to say. Television shows are institutions; podcast shows are comparably free agents built around the host. Editors can protect you from your own worst impulses and habits.
As for these four podcasting horsemen of the Iran war apocalypse, it has been fascinating to watch them often furiously denounce anyone else on the right who criticizes Trump for the past eleven years or so. Since 2015 or so, if you didn’t like Trump’s crude language and boorish behavior, notorious womanizing, enthusiasm for government intervention in the economy, sneering disdain for longtime U.S. allies, obsequiousness to hostile dictators, habitual childish tantrums on social media, or just about anything else . . . well then, to this crowd, you were a RINO cuck squish sellout establishment Conservative Inc. weakling who didn’t know what time it was.
But if you opposed Donald Trump taking military action against a country that has killed Americans and chanted “death to America” for more than four decades . . . well, that was just a reasonable policy difference. Their disagreements with Trump were just a reflection of wise and discerning geopolitical prudence; your disagreements with Trump are a character flaw.
Finally, if President Trump is really that upset that he constantly feels betrayed by individuals who he thought were his allies and friends . . . maybe he needs to be more discerning in who he considers allies and friends.
ADDENDUM: Our Caroline Downey makes the sharp observation that to certain voices on the left — people like California Governor Gavin Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom — voices on the alt-right are not merely odious, but a serious threat that needs to be censored off the internet. Siebel Newsom recently declared, “Alt-right socialization online is very, very dangerous.”
But in the eyes of Newsom and her allies, Hasan “America deserved 9/11” and “Make American Planes Crash Again” Piker is just some guy on the internet who says stuff, unworthy of any concern or comment. Apparently, ideological radicalization can only occur in one particular ideological direction!