Get your thinking emoji ready. You’re going to need it.
This weekend, USA Today published an essay declaring that Steve Bannon had some worldviews that were disconcertingly similar to those of the Islamic State. The kicker was that both Bannon and ISIS “harbor apocalyptic visions of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.”
The essay compared quotes from Bannon and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and concluded that Bannon was a dangerous person to be shaping policy.
Feel free to agree or disagree with that. What we are here to do is laugh at Tucker Carlson, who had USA Today‘s deputy editorial director David Mastio on his show to debate the issue.
Tucker began by dismissively calling Mastio’s premise that both Bannon and al-Baghdadi see the conflict between ISIS and the West as a “clash of civilizations … or something.”
That’s funny because Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is not an “or something” but rather one of the most prominent and accurate theories of post-Cold War geopolitics ever postulated.
But a political pundit need not be informed on major political theories to school liberal journalism nerds. Check out this graph Carlson dropped on Mastio.
Actually, before we show you the graph, we must pause to remind you that USA Today‘s argument was that Bannon and al-Baghdadi share similar worldviews and not that Bannon and al-Baghdadi have done identical things.
Those things are certainly factually accurate. Bannon has done none of those things and al-Baghdadi has done all of them.
That wasn’t USA Today‘s point.
But it might be worth mentioning that Bannon’s boss, President Donald Trump, once openly pondered about whether he would kill reporters (he settled on no), has speculated about using weapons of mass destruction, appointed an education secretary who funds lobbyists who want to loosen child labor laws, killed 30 Muslim civilians in this past week in a controversial raid in Yemen, and at his inauguration speech, declared that “a new vision will govern our land.”
You can watch the whole segment here.