Not So Strange Bedfellows: Tucker Carlson and Ana Kasparian Really Don’t Give a F*ck
Former Fox News neo-con Tucker Carlson and leftist podcast host and producer Ana Kasparian come together to see if ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ is enough to build a coalition.
Welcome back to Unfortunately Not a Sound Bath (UNASB)! For those who are new to us, we’re a group of people across the country who regularly come together to listen to conservative-leaning podcasts, analyze their messaging and themes, and brainstorm actionable ideas for how the Democratic coalition can strengthen its own approach. This newsletter serves as a recap of our meetings.
This week, the entire group dove into an episode of The Tucker Carlson Show featuring Ana Kasparian, an executive producer and host of The Young Turks, the long-running digital news platform. For anyone needing a refresh: The Tucker Carlson show, airing across audio platforms and on Youtube, launched in 2024 following the hosts’ firing from Fox News. Since its founding, he’s hosted both holocaust deniers and Ted Cruz – among other guests – and has built it into one of the most popular conservative podcasts available with 4.4M subscribers on YouTube, to date. This episode with Kasparian gained 1.6M views in three weeks, as of this writing.
Inside the Episode: The Tucker Carlson Show with Guest Ana Kasparian
The pair covered a wide range of topics in the over 90 minute episode: Epstein, the genocide in Gaza, the dwindling of American sovereignty, cancel culture, and the Armenian genocide – just to name a few. And they were more friendly, and seemed to have more in common, than their respective audiences would think. Let’s get into it!
A United Front
Everyone seemed clear on their roles in this episode: Tucker was the mild-mannered moderator and agreeable host and questioner. Ana served as the passionate firebrand who refused to be pigeonholed or told what to do. They kept things civil and avoided any topics that would cause too much discord or disruption by not diving too much into specifics, even when discussing the Epstein files and Gaza which were two topics they seemingly agreed on. Our club debated if this approach was a rung on a ladder that Tucker’s audience could climb toward the left, or was Ana’s rubber stamp what they needed to hear to feel validated in their existing beliefs.
Know the Audience
Ana explicitly stated that she came on the show to have the opportunity to address the ‘everyday people’ she believes are in abundance within Tucker’s audience; as someone who lives in a city, she’s been ‘blinded’ to a lot of the realities of ‘real’ America. She never bulldozed Tucker’s POV and would conveniently ignore or circumvent some of his more right-wing talking points. She pivoted very effectively throughout the conversation and made a point of tying most of what she was saying back to an economic populism or American sovereignty message – two themes that are reddest of meat to this audience. Similarly, when discussing foreign policy, she highlighted incidents in the Middle East pertaining to the marginalization and oppression of Christians in the region to tap into the audience’s personal outrage and background.
Build Trust by Taking Things Back
Even further, by taking back her previous views on defunding the police, (she’s since realized that taking money from law enforcement ‘only costs the taxpayers more’), Kasparian built trust by ‘owning where she was wrong’ and showcasing an evolved POV that reflects a shared humanity and evolution to which anyone can relate. I mean, haven’t we all said something we didn’t mean? Moments like this allow people to see themselves in the same behavior, and conveniently reflect the sentiment of Tucker’s general audience who, like the host, have been vehemently against any budget cuts to law enforcement.
There is No Aisle
The Establishment serves both sides and Democrats and Republicans are more closely aligned in how they think and operate than regular Americans would like to believe. Both sides are aligned against everyday people and we need to lose the labels of ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ in order to move forward. The system is fake, and there is no greater societal ill than partisan hackery. Gavin Newsom is a ‘snake oil salesman’ and a ‘sociopath,’ Ted Cruz an idiot, and Joe Scarborough is apparently evil; there are shared enemies across all sides of the political spectrum. And they are all propped up by ‘traditional’ or ‘legacy’ media who share a vested interest in maintaining the oppressive status quo.
Cancel Culture isn’t Real, because Real People Change their Minds
Ana was ‘radicalized by the left’ before she started seeing the light on many of her opinions and Tucker is a self-proclaimed ‘former neo-con’ who has since realized the ‘evil’ nature of some of his former viewpoints. They both acknowledge, and seem to relish, that their ability to engage with people who have vastly different ideas from themselves will potentially upset people. Ana was most passionate when expressing that she refused to fall into any niches and won’t be told what to do or whom to talk to, by anyone. Cancel her if you wish!
Overall, a quote long attributed to Walt Whitman, and more recently popularized by benevolent mustachio Ted Lasso, ‘be curious, not judgmental’ seemed to be both the key theme of the episode and an overall direction for how to engage this audience and rebuild coalitions.
Rooting your POV in what’s best for America and its values is what makes ideas resonate
Don’t tell me what to do, who to associate with, or where I can be because that’s unamerican and rattles the bedrock of our sovereign society.
Everyone is ignoring the shared enemies of a growing technocracy, the stripping of rights, the consolidation of power, and the open proliferation of facism – focus on those real foes and start building bridges from there.
Because independence is freedom and what’s more important, and American, than that?
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