A wave of Republican attacks against two Muslim Democrats has ended with one of the most prominent right-wing commentators in the country endorsing Abdul El-Sayed for Senate.
Tucker Carlson wrote in his newsletter on Friday that El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, was unfit for office and defended him over his past criticism of the war on terror.
The Michigan Democrat emerged from this past week after a wave of attacks were hurled at him and Zohran Mamdani, the first elected Muslim mayor of New York, around the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both men were the subject of intense focus from media organizations on the right and even some mainstream outlets as the two faced differing but related accusations of anti-American sentiment impossible to separate from their Muslim faith.
enough of the right is hungry enough for an opinion that still validates their identity and positionality, I wouldn’t expect Tucker to go away any time soon. there is too much appetite for grift on the right. if Tucker went away, another would slip into that void to fill that gap. the real problem here is that Tucker is actually pretty good at what they do, and in-spite of several institutional attempts to cancel them, they’ve managed to survive.
They, unlike Trump in 2016, aren’t dependent on national media to bring them oxygen. A 2016 Trump could have been stopped if media would have just ignored them. Since that time, media has changed. This generation have their own media enterprise in a media landscape largely not beholden to any kind of outside interests. A self fullfilling windbag. Owens, Fuentes, Carlson, they don’t rely on outside financing and have a pretty fair degree of capture of their audiences.