Tucker plays the Joker to Piers Morgan

Tucker Carlson has a favorite stage persona: the last sane man in the world, now at the end of his tether. His typical format for interviews starts with a folksy, Mr Smith Goes to Washington line of questioning, which then collapses into bitter, hysterical laughter. Episodes end up feeling like the famous police station dialogue with Heath Ledger’s Joker, with guests reduced to a discomfited Commissioner Gordon trying to maintain their poise. In yesterday’s episode of the Tucker Carlson Show the Carlson technique was used on Piers Morgan – the British former tabloid journalist and host of another popular online show, Piers Morgan Uncensored.

The interview was an interesting clash of ideologies. Everyone knows about Carlson’s feud with the neoconservative and pro-Israel faction of the American conservative movement. But in this interview with the Fleet Street veteran Carlson decided to open up another front: against those sections of the English-speaking right for whom politics seems to be chiefly about cultural issues like transgenderism, transgender bathrooms, and the cancellations of celebrities like J.K. Rowling. Morgan set out this view of the world in a – slightly complacent – recent book, Woke is Dead. 

In an episode framed around the decline of Britain, Piers Morgan rolled out the old favorites – like when the comedian Graham Linehan was briefly arrested by the police at London’s Heathrow Airport earlier this year for a slightly bolshy X post about transgender men. Tucker wasn’t interested. These kinds of laws were obviously crazy, Tucker said, but do they really matter when London is now only 36% White British? 

Piers demurred, and that’s when the hysterical laughter started. There was an unedifying segment in which Tucker tried to get Piers to say “faggot” out loud, which was then followed by an extended discourse on whether homosexuality was something you were born with. For his part Piers was reduced to various Keir Starmer-isms about how London was more or less fine because “top pubs” were still serving up “over 20,000 Guinnesses” to paying customers. Tucker Carlson’s new ability to set the terms of debate in the American right is certainly a major achievement; yet managing to turn an incorrigible shock-jock and outrage merchant like Piers Morgan into a bemused moderate is surely another.