The Man Who Once Warned About China Now Tells America to Fold

For years, Tucker Carlson built his brand as the voice of forgotten America: the factory worker whose job went to Shenzhen, the family priced out of the middle class by a political class that sold the country to Beijing. He even ran a segment on the China threat. So it is worth pausing on how far his worldview has moved. Carlson insists that his newfound softness on Sharia law, on Russian aggression, and on China, where he now suggests we simply play nice and share power, is all in the name of America First.

Since October 7, Carlson has waged a campaign to convince the West that Judeo-Christian values are corrupt so long as the “Judeo” remains. He has echoed, or given a platform to, guests who openly claim Jews are an evil cabal controlling the world. The natural byproduct of this propaganda is that conservative Christian Americans now see not only their government as captured by the genocidal “Greater Israel” agenda, but their very way of life as under systematic attack. The implication goes one step further: America itself is fundamentally corrupt, a force for global terror and genocide. The American Dream is a lie, and the Jews are to blame.

From there, the leap is short. If America is the villain, then perhaps the great powers we were told to fear are, at least in part, the answer. Enter post-liberalism: the idea that America should adopt the very systems this movement once denounced as failures.

This manufactured fear, that there has never been a worse time to be a middle-class Christian American than 2026, is the lie that will move a once reliably pro-defense, pro-military constituency toward anti-war rhetoric. That shift in the Overton window becomes candidates, candidates become officeholders, and officeholders set policy, including the defense budget. Those electoral consequences will take years to fully arrive. What is changing now, and fast, is Gen Z’s sense of patriotism and its willingness to fight for the country if called upon. The lie they have bought is that every war advances Israel’s agenda, and that America has failed because they cannot afford a million-dollar home.

This grievance-based worldview mirrors the woke left’s. Dissatisfaction that often stems from one’s own mediocrity is recast as someone else’s fault, and blaming the Jews makes it easier to swallow. That is not to say economic policy is beyond critique. But here is the irony: the party’s drift toward isolationism is what restrained Trump from a full campaign in Iran that would have required boots on the ground. Because Carlson convinced Republicans that Iran would be Iraq 2.0, the response to the IRGC was limited before the U.S. ever acted. Meanwhile, Houthi pirates terrorizing the Red Sea, relentless aggression across the Middle East, Iranian-funded terrorism, and the war in Israel itself all feed the global volatility that drives up the cost of living at home.

Yet the redneck-intellectual reasoning holds that war is bad, so capitulate to the aggressors and hope they govern the world alongside the U.S. in some constructive, “enlightened” way. None of these illiberal powers has ever spoken or acted as a good-faith partner to the United States. It is as if Carlson has forgotten the Cold War, or decades of official Chinese rhetoric and policy aimed squarely at ending American hegemony. This isn’t America First. It’s America Last.

This spring, Carlson told The Economist that the U.S. has reached the limits of its power and is unable to defend the self-ruled island of Taiwan. His line to the magazine was blunt: “The US is not going to defend and cannot defend Taiwan.” He went further, saying he no longer sees Communist China as a major threat and calling for the U.S. to share power with Beijing in a new world order.

This is not a harmless contrarian take from a podcaster. Carlson speaks to an audience of 21 million followers on X and YouTube, and his message lands at the worst possible moment. American forces and resources are already stretched between confronting Iran and backing Ukraine. Analysts warn that U.S. commitments in Ukraine and the Middle East compete for the same weapons systems, logistics and political capital needed to deter China over Taiwan. Deterrence is not only ships and missiles; it is will. When a leading conservative voice tells Americans that the fight is unwinnable before it starts, he erodes the resolve that keeps adversaries guessing, in the Pacific and everywhere else. Beijing, Tehran and Moscow are all listening, and they read retreat in one theater as permission in the others.

And the stakes of Taiwan in particular could not be higher. The island is the beating heart of the artificial intelligence economy. TSMC accounts for 70% of global foundry revenue, powering customers such as AMD, Apple, Broadcom, Nvidia and Qualcomm, and Taiwan has produced more than 90% of the most advanced chips. Every serious American AI effort, the race that will decide which country writes the rules of the next century, runs through factories in Hsinchu and Tainan. There is no quick replacement: TSMC’s Arizona plant isn’t expected to reach 2nm volume production until 2030, and Samsung and Intel remain years behind. Hand Taiwan to Beijing, and you hand China the chokepoint on America’s technological future.

Then there is the bill. Bloomberg Economics estimates that a war over Taiwan would deliver a $10 trillion shock to the world economy, equal to about 10% of global GDP — a larger blow than the Ukraine war, the Covid pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis. The U.S. itself could see its GDP decline by 6.7% in a single year.

Here is where Carlson’s reversal collapses under its own logic. His entire political identity rests on the grievances of middle-class America: stagnant wages, vanished jobs, rising costs. Nothing would crush that America faster than a Taiwan crisis. Picture the chip shortage of 2021, when car lots emptied and prices soared, then multiply it many times over. Retirement accounts would crater. Manufacturing lines from Detroit to Ohio would stall for lack of components. The very workers Carlson claims to champion would pay first and pay most.

The surest way to invite that catastrophe is to signal weakness. Wars over Taiwan become likelier when Beijing believes Washington won’t respond. Every voice that tells China America has already given up makes the gamble look cheaper to Xi Jinping.

Carlson is right that Americans are tired of endless wars. But deterrence is how you avoid them. Strength in the Taiwan Strait is not an adventure abroad; it is insurance for the paycheck, the pension, and the price of everything at home. The old Tucker understood that China was the threat to middle America. The new one is advising middle America to surrender its future without a fight. The question is what happened to Tucker, and who happened to him. How does a man change so drastically while insisting his motive is still “America First”?

Image: photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, edited.