Pop quiz, hotshot: Who has the best, most inspiring anti-war message in the United States today? Is a faith leader? A labor organizer? A rock star? No? What if I told you it was a high-profile, unapologetic bigot? Or the other one? Or the other other one, if you really want to collect the full regressive set?

Weird as it sounds, that’s the subtext of some of the messages we’ve been getting from the liberal side of the aisle these days. If you’ve spent more than a minute on social media this past week, odds are good that you have noticed an uptick in presumably liberal-leaning media figures online encouraging you to engage with a growing list of MAGA notables who can’t wait to tell you how offended they are by Trump’s war in Iran. Just for fun, try logging onto your social media platform of choice, search some iteration of “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Carlson,” and watch your browser sizzle up and crash. Be careful you don’t find yourself buried under an avalanche of “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” JPEGs while you’re at it.

The “entire,” 43-minute-long anti–Iran War monologue of Carlson’s April 6 episode is “worth watching,” former Obama speechwriter-turned-podcaster Jon Favreau told his 1.3 million followers, sharing a more-than-two-hours-long episode of Carlson’s eponymous show.

Headquarters Newsroom, the liberal media outlet built from the ignominious remains of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, has been similarly enthusiastic whenever MAGA media Oprichniks voice rare, and often conspicuously tempered dissatisfaction with the regime’s Iranian adventurism; “Candace Owens cites our post while shredding Donald Trump in new video,” bragged a recent Bluesky message, preceded by three other Owens-centric posts. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna went even further, crediting Owens, Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene—and nobody else—by name, along with other anonymous “progressive activists & anti-war conservative voices” he claimed pushed Trump back from an atomic Iranian brink. To date, his message has around 2.3 million views.

So what’s going on? Should we welcome these previously verboten figures into our lives now? Should we make a space for them in the anti-war vanguard?

The answer to those questions is no.

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What’s happening here is obvious: Carlson and his ilk are savvy operators, well-practiced in the art of sneaking their rhetorical farts into the day’s prevailing political winds. Public opposition to American-Israeli military action is an opportunity for them to launder an ideology of racial and religious hierarchy through a sanitized lens of politically expedient isolationism.

None of these people are bothering to hide this. It’s just that liberals don’t seem too inclined to look. For instance, that Carlson episode Jon Favreau eagerly pushed at his legions of followers? It also featured segments like “Why Is Corruption So Prevalent in American Protestant Churches?” and “The Attempts to Usher in the Antichrist.” Less than a week later, Carlson readily admitted that his reason for opposing Israel’s assault on Beirut was that the city’s Christian residents “may not be the majority, but they’re in charge.” To Carlson, Beirut’s value then lies simply in being the right kind of theocracy.

But in order to gain more converts, Carlson, Owens, and those like them need partners to help with that laundering from across the ideological aisle. As it turns out, there are a number of left-leaning facilitators willing to meet Carlson & Co. halfway.

In a perfect, frictionless world, where perpetual motion is possible and nobody cares about rebooting Firefly, I suppose I could understand the underlying logic seemingly at play here: Who wouldn’t want to revel in the knowledge that their anti-war cause is so virtuous and pure it can convert demons from the pits of MAGA hell? Who doesn’t feel good knowing that they’ve picked a side so overwhelming in its justness that even someone like Carlson gets it?

The problem, of course, is that this is a fantasy for babies and the liberal consultancy-turned-influencer class (a frequent overlap). Tucker Carlson hasn’t suddenly grown a morally fortified spine, and Candace Owens isn’t “shredding” the president out of any sense of the common good. Their complaints, such as they are, are about Trump’s challenges in enacting a MAGA agenda they wholeheartedly endorse. That is to say, their criticism of Trump’s wartime conduct is fundamentally constructive, offered in the hopes of seeing the agenda that drew them to Trump in the first place fulfilled. They want the war to end not because it is fundamentally immoral, but because they see its execution as having become detrimental to their broader, ultranationalist cause.

These are professional colonizers of the attention economy successfully infiltrating spaces well past the ossified limits of their usual X.com output. They are not your allies. They are parasites of opportunity, leaping at a dovetailing series of interests wherein their racially motivated projects of ultranational ethno-religious homogeny can be sublimated under a more palatable anti-war umbrella.

There is a danger here, beyond that of seriously annoying people (me) every time Tucker’s smirking mug gets shoved into my timeline. These liberal media facilitators—people and groups with whom I am supposed to feel some sense of common cause—are only cutting themselves and their ostensible positions of authority off at the knees.

By repeatedly framing Carlson’s anti-war broadcasts as laudatory and worth watching, the implication is that people on the left should look rightward for inspiration. Compare the framing for Pod Save America’s recent interview with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, which Favreau shared on Bluesky by threading the episode after quoting Ezra Klein’s recent assertion that “conversation is not a reward to be bestowed upon those with whom we agree.”

Liberal audiences are, in essence, being told that conservative anti-war rhetoric riddled with bad-faith propaganda and fueled partially by inward-facing, right-wing score-settling is as legitimate and worthwhile as anything from the left—including, by extrapolation, the rest of the messaging coming from the same blue-tinged media figures sharing Carlson in the first place.

The fractures exposed by Carlson and company on the right are political pressure points to be exploited, yes, but that’s a far cry from uncritically lifting proponents of the Great Replacement theory and other flavors of white nationalism as voices worthy of consideration per se. Creating a false parity between sincere anti-war sentiment and right-wing opportunism serves to diminish sincere voices from the left. And for what? Increased follower counts? More engagement on Bluesky and Threads? There’s a trade-off happening here, but it’s a lopsided one.

Tucker Carlson is many things. He’s a bigot and a hypocrite and a vector for misery and harm across multiple communities. We know he’s willing to hold his nose and work to accomplish Trump’s agenda over personal qualms because that is exactly what he’s done in the past—professing how much he “passionately” hates the president in leaked texts, while working hand in glove to expand Trump’s political footprint. That he claims to agree in principle—but not specifics—about something as blatantly indefensible as a voluntary war of imperial adventurism is hardly worth whatever damage he will surely inflict with the newfound reach and authority he hopes to earn with this superficial pacifism. He and those like him want nothing more than to be seen and cited by liberals as a moral authority—all to make his immoral philosophy seem more palatable for an audience primed by popular podcasters to be receptive and open-minded to his polished propaganda.

Let me be clear: If you are opposed to the war in Iran, you do not agree with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or any of the other MAGA mainstays seeking reputational rehabilitation. If anything, they agree with you. With us. With those who haven’t spent years seeding the ground for Trump to do the exact thing they now vociferously claim to oppose. The territory is already being ceded. The inroads are already being made. But why should someone like Carlson get undue credit for belatedly arriving where many of us have been for ages? Why are we being asked to give that to him?

Tucker Carlson isn’t your anti-war buddy. He’s not your strange bedfellow during unprecedented times. He’s not your friend. And anyone who tells you that he and his ilk are the anti-war voices worth listening to above all others? They’re probably not your friend either.