Woe betide the left-leaning hack who deviates from the narrative about Tucker Carlson. Tucker’s a fascist and any liberal who says otherwise should expect swift cancellation. Witness the troubles at the American Prospect. On Wednesday, the day after Carlson’s abrupt departure from Fox News, that young organ of pained liberalism made the grave error of publishing a piece suggesting Carlson might in fact be a complicated figure. Perhaps – whisper it – a rebellious one. Might this boisterous puncturer of the new elite’s ‘lazy pieties’, this primetime critic of war, free-market capitalism and Big Tech, hold some lessons for the left? Oh dear. Summon the mob. A liberal has made unapproved comments about Mr Carlson.

The irregular commentary was written by Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein. Yes, Carlson could be ‘obsessively nativist’, they said, not least by flirting with Great Replacement theories. But he also had a ‘willingness to challenge and mock ruling elites’ and he won a ‘wide audience’ by doing so. Which begs a question, said these reckless dissenters from Tuckerphobia: ‘Why other nightly news shows that attacked him didn’t raise the same critiques.’ It’s a good question. There was Tucker saying ‘You’d have to be a fool to worship [market capitalism]’ and roasting the DC elites for ‘spending tens of billions of dollars’ on war, while Trevor Noah was fluttering his lashes at war criminal Hillary Clinton and asking: ‘What does it feel like being the boogeyman to the right?’ Instead of mauling Carlson some more, why don’t ‘liberal media outlets like the Guardian’ do some of their own ‘skewering [of] comfortable pieties’, asked Harris and Goldstein?