Tucker, Iran, and the Polishing of Power
Giving tyrants a microphone isn’t brave or balanced. It’s how we end up normalizing the very things we claim to condemn.
I have been thinking a lot about the interview that Tucker Carlson is going to conduct with Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian. He claims his interview with Iran’s president serves the democratic right of individuals to form their own judgments. But does it, really?
Can decades of nuclear extortion, proxy militias, and extraterritorial assassinations be adequately weighed against a polished exchange designed for foreign consumption? This is not a contest of rival electoral platforms. It is the methodical presentation of a regime that executes dissenters in public squares, exports violence through transnational networks, and perfects its rhetorical appeal for Western audiences precisely to blur these truths.
A 'heart surgeon.' That's how Carlson introduces Iran's president, already softening the image before a single question is asked. The interview's limitations are obvious and he states them clearly: conducted remotely, filtered through translation, stilted and mediated. So I am not really expecting fiery questions, nor do I expect Carlson to be as sharp and journalistic in his approach with the edge that he showed us when he interviewed Ted Cruz.
Carlson isn't simply platforming a regime that hangs protesters from cranes and arms proxy militias across the region. He's transforming it into consumable media, something to watch between dinner and sleep, to share with a quick comment, to forget by morning. The machinery of oppression gets edited down to talking points. Slowly but surely, horror becomes approachable, even relatable.
This is how authoritarianism adapts to the digital age: not through crude propaganda posters or military parades, but by presenting itself as just another reasonable voice in the endless scroll of content. Call a man a 'heart surgeon,' and suddenly the apparatus he commands looks less like a scaffold and more like a clinic. The executioner's credentials become more memorable than his executions.
I have seen this mechanism before. In Yemen, the Washington Post granted Mohammed al-Houthi, the head of the Houthi militia, who is responsible for the arrest and killings of millions, the dignity of authorship. The cost was the erasure of those subject to Houthi prisons and blockades. It allowed the perpetrator to narrate reality, uncontested.
These spectacles do not clarify history; they flatten it. They transform intricate structures of power, coercion, and fear into digestible fragments and do nothing but offer the illusion of parity, objectivity, and equality, where none exists. Meanwhile, those who pay the price for this reduction, through imprisonment, torture, disappearance, are never invited to speak.
Interviews like these do not simply fail to illuminate; they actively train audiences to accommodate horror, to see it as just another perspective, equally valid, equally marketable. And so the ideology does its most insidious work: not by what it asserts outright, but by what it normalizes through repetition, flattening, and feigned impartiality.
That is how complicity is not merely smuggled in; it becomes the air we breathe.
The illusion of neutrality
It is not inherently wrong to speak to power. In fact, there is value in interrogating it, exposing it, forcing it to reveal itself under questions it would rather not answer. But that is not what Carlson signaled he intended to do. By his own admission, he would avoid questions on nuclear capabilities or proxy militias because he “knew he wouldn’t get an honest answer.” In essence, he pre-announced that this would not be an exercise in challenge, but in passive facilitation.
This is precisely what authoritarian regimes count on. They know how to craft their message, how to project reasonableness, how to appear as simply another legitimate state actor defending ordinary interests. They understand that format itself, the calm exchange across a table, the polite translation, the absence of victims’ testimony, is already half the battle won.
Who narrates reality?
Meanwhile, those whose voices would shatter this carefully managed picture, Iranian women imprisoned for refusing compulsory hijab, families of protesters executed on fabricated charges, or communities across the Middle East who suffer under Iranian-aligned militias, are never offered such global platforms. They do not get to narrate. They rarely even get to watch, except perhaps in passing, as the men who direct their subjugation are afforded respectful interviews about sovereignty and misunderstood national dignity.
This is why these encounters matter. They do not simply inform; they shape what becomes acceptable to look past. They embed themselves in the public mind as “both sides of the story,” when in fact, they are a deliberate narrowing of the story to the voice of the most powerful.
In the end, this is less about free speech and more about the architecture that decides who speaks at all, and on what terms. And it is about who is systematically kept silent. When I look at this, I think of my Iranian, Yemeni, Syrian, Iraqi, Israeli, and Palestinian friends, all who have lived with the horror and fallout of the Islamic Republic regime, who carry the consequences in ways no staged interview will ever capture. They are the ones who know what this costs, and they are almost never the ones invited to explain it.