Tucker Carlson Wants A Good-Faith Conservative Party. Best Of Luck With That.

The American right needs the deodorant of bad faith politics. And Carlson knows that.

A year and a half after working out his festering daddy issues in portraying Donald Trump as God’s messenger and the savior of the western (white) world, Tucker Carlson seems to be done with history’s most powerful interior decorator.

Like a lot of disillusioned Trump backers with a microphone and an audience that craves ever more rightward politics, Carlson is making noise about a third party that would supposedly interrupt the two-party domination in the United States.

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Carlson said in a recent interview with the Columbia Journalism Review that Americans deserved a more honest conservative party that would refuse to give into the empire's foreign policy dogma. In the months leading up to the 2024 election, Carlson was somehow able to ignore that Trump – who talks about the U.S. military as his own personal toy – went along with this empire-expanding dogma during his first term in office. So it goes.

I do know what really matters is war and finance. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? And who gets killed? And on those questions, the parties are in lockstep solidarity with each other. That’s not a democracy. That’s a one-party state posing as a democracy, and it needs to be broken, and there’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about. And that’s the lesson of the last two and a half months, to me. If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war—if Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy, which he is—then we need options, or else let’s just give up and be ruled by the most unscrupulous people. And I’m just too young to accept that. We need a third party.

You might remember Elon Musk pretending to start a third, even more fascist American political party during his one-week fallout with the president in 2025. Maybe he did it for online engagement, maybe he did it out of sheer fury. It doesn't really matter now because he was never serious. Musk has since retreated into the GOP's bosom, showering far-right candidates with his endless cash thanks to John Roberts' evisceration of all campaign finance laws and limitations. There will be no Musk-backed third party in 2028, or ever. So it goes.

Carlson has seized on polling over the past year that shows most American right wingers want "the next Republican presidential nominee to take the party in a new direction.” That 60 percent of those respondents have a "very favorable" view of Carlson – who has played a key role in conditioning American conservatives for a post-democracy future – surely has something to do with his embrace of a new far-right American political party.

"I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country," Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review. "I mean, if you make sixty thousand dollars a year, you’re degraded. Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. No one seems to care. It’s not even a factor."

Tucker Carlson has been among the most prominent promoters of the neo-nazi Great Replacement Theory. In this video he points out that Baltimore used to have a lot of white people and now it does not.

After a quarter century as the face of country club Republican politics, Carlson over the past few years has rebranded himself as a fascist populist consumed by great care and concern for the American worker. That the average American worker is a woman of color does not in any way factor into Carlson's politics. Like almost everyone else in American politics, "the American worker" for Carlson is shorthand for "white men aggrieved by any modicum of progress for ladies of people with brown or black skin."

This is his audience for a third party. This is who he wants as his constituency.

My question, as one of the fourteen best bloggers at Bad Faith Times, was how, exactly, a good-faith conservative party would operate in the 21st century. Bad-faith politics and jurisprudence, as the good BFT subscribers know well, is the roaring engine of right-wing politics today. Conservative lawmakers and judges and everyone else in the right-wing ecosystem must pretend to want certain policy outcomes for dishonest reasons.

No one in these circles can say what they mean or they know they will give the whole game away and expose themselves before American voters and the media for what they are: Vicious and determined anti-democracy operators who will do anything and everything to advance the vile duo of white supremacy and capital. Bad faith helps to cover up their true intentions. It helps the poison go down more easily.

So what would a right-wing platform look like if it were steeped in good faith? A little something like this:

Voting

Bad Faith: We have no choice but to limit voting and disenfranchise Americans in our all-out fight against rampant voter fraud coordinated by shadowy left-wing groups domestically and internationally.

Good Faith: We believe some Americans are more equal than other Americans. We don't want women and people of color to participate in the electoral process because we do not want them to influence the direction of the country. Also, we believe they are intellectually and morally inferior to white Americans. While we're at it we will making voting much more difficult in libbed-up suburbs filled with self-hating white folks.

Abortion

Bad Faith: Zygotes and fetuses are fully formed human beings who deserve constitutional protections, making abortion equivalent to murder. By shutting down abortion clinics and threatening abortion providers, we are looking out for the health of pregnant women and defending the defenseless unborn babies, black and white, boy and girl.

Good Faith: We view women as baby factories who have no place in the workforce. Blame Eve if you'd like. We're actually fine with unfettered abortion access for women of color because we don't care about those babies so much. Our plan is to end all abortion access for white women in our pursuit of a white supremacist utopia in the United States.

Housing

Bad Faith: We must continue and even accelerate our mass deportation program to remove immigrants from their homes and make those homes available for hard-working Americans. We can't increase the supply of housing in the US unless and until we get the immigrants out of here.

Good Faith: We could push national policies aimed at creating more housing across the country, but instead we will use the country's housing crisis to advance our ethnic cleansing plan. Even one immigrant family living in an American home is too many, anyway.

Free Speech

Bad Faith: Conservative voices must be prioritized and defended against the far-left threats to any speech that opposes a left-liberal agenda. We will never back down from the radical left attempts to silence the voices of liberty and freedom. We are the upholders of free speech, we are the defenders of the First Amendment.

Good Faith: Through intimidation and the weaponization of government we are going to sideline or outright silence anyone who disagrees with our agenda. All of the tech guys who own social media platforms agree with our politics and we're going to use those connections to ensure the American public is propagandized by people and organizations that are in lockstep with us. We have no interest in defending dissenting voices. If they're like to dissent, they can do that from a labor camp.

Climate

Bad Faith: There's no sense in even having a climate policy because there is no such thing as climate change, which is a far-reaching left-wing conspiracy with no scientific underpinning. Just ask the scientists at Exxon.

Good Faith: We are not going to address climate collapse because we don't care about the earth of its inhabitants. We know climate change disproportionately affects poor people and people of color, neither of whom we like all that much. We also know a real climate plan would involve some self sacrifice, which we see as an affront to God and the constitution He wrote personally.

On and on this would go, with a good-faith conservative party refusing to cover its odious agenda with the deodorant of bad faith politics. People – most people, anyway – would see this horrid honesty and say goddamn, you are all monsters, no thanks, I'm voting for the other guy, whoever it is.

Please don't be mistaken. Carlson knows the ways of bad faith. He's used bad-faith arguments against the American left for his entire wretched career as a pundit and more recently as a straight-up fascist influencer who appears to be toying with the idea of a presidential run. He's not an idiot. He knows this approach would not work.

Positioning himself as the Truth-Telling Conservative is a smart and savvy move as the American right wing finds itself increasingly alienated by the Trump regime and, more generally, the dying MAGA movement. In saying he wants a good-faith third party, Carlson is saying he wants to be honest about why the US can and should move beyond the messiness of representative democracy and reshape the country into something far less free and fair, something more like Russia. For a disturbing chunk of the electorate, there is great appeal in that message.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.