Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed pundits and politicians who accept “uncritically” the Trump administration’s assertion that Iran was planning an attack on the United States before a drone strike killed a top Iranian general.
President Trump ordered a drone strike last week that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, after Iranian-backed groups attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in late December.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top officials backed Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani and asserted that the general had been planning a strike on a U.S. target. After reports that the evidence for such an attack was “thin,” Pompeo said that, among top intelligence officials, there was “no skepticism.”
“It’s hard to remember now, but as recently as last week most people didn’t consider Iran an imminent threat. Iranian saboteurs were not committing acts of terror in our cities,” Carlson said on his show Monday night. “But our leaders tell us they were about to any second. That’s why we struck first.”
“What’s so striking is how many people appear to accept this uncritically,” Carlson continued. “Just the other day, if you remember, our intel agencies were considered politically tainted and suspect … Keep in mind, these are the people who invented excuses to spy on the Trump campaign, purely because they didn’t like Donald Trump’s foreign policy views, and they were the ones who pretended he was a Russian agent in order to keep him from governing. Remember that? Russiagate? Our friends in the intel community did that.”
The host drove his point home by saying, “It seems like about 20 minutes ago, we were denouncing these very people as the deep state and pledging never to trust them again without verification. But now, for some reason, we do seem to trust them, implicitly and completely. In fact, we believe whatever they tell us, no matter how outlandish.”
Carlson criticized the Soleimani strike in its immediate aftermath and was praised by CNN host Brian Stelter for bursting “the propaganda bubble on Fox with a really clear anti-war stance.”
