Tucker Carlson casually maligns David Frum, who responds by deconstructing his former friend's 'cowardly' act

Tucker Carlson
(Image credit: Screenshot/Twitter/Fox News)

Fox News star Tucker Carlson is having a moment — or, rather, another moment in a Zelig-like career full of them. Lately, he has been torching a select group of conservatives, and David Frum was added to that list Tuesday.

Carlson's ostensible target Tuesday night was the Central Intelligence Agency's curious new ad featuring an "intersectional" Latina millennial officer. Carlson eventually suggested the woman was actually a deep-cover operative trying to recruit agents to infiltrate the real threat to America — which, he assured his viewers, is definitely not white supremacists. No, "if you wanted to save America," he said, "these are the people you'd be worried about":

The decadent rich people from their class at Harvard. It's the gender studies program at Cornell. It's the cat cafes in Austin and Ashville. It's the Monday editorial meetings at The Atlantic magazine, where David Frum is treated as an important intellectual rather than some dopey middle-aged Canadian Twitter celebrity whose life goal is to force America into yet another unwinnable pointless war. [Tucker Carlson, Fox News]

How can Carlson — a self-described trust-fund kid who attended boarding school in Rhode Island and college in Connecticut before being rejected by the CIA — say all that with a straight face? Frum, the Twitter celebrity, tweeted an explanation.

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Carlson criticizes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq now, Frum writes, but "he was a FEROCIOUS advocate of both wars" at the time, "when it mattered." He went on to describe Carlson's "cowardly," amoral opportunism.

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.