Tucker Carlson didn't technically endorse Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed this week.

But boy, he sure came close.

Carlson threw down on the increasingly nasty Michigan Senate race by unloading on Republican Mike Rogers while offering an eyebrow-raising defense of El-Sayed's incendiary remarks about 9/11.

“El-Sayed did not celebrate airplane hijackings or cheerlead Al-Qaeda; he simply said that the U.S. conducting terrorism of its own in response to 9/11 was not exactly an appropriate reaction,” Carlson wrote Friday. “He is obviously right.”

Yeah. That's going to be a problem.

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Carlson was responding to Rogers, who had called El-Sayed's attitude toward 9/11 “disgusting” and said it made the Democrat “completely unfit to serve in public office.”

Carlson instead turned the accusation around.

“Understanding that the Bush administration was wrong to kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, even though, again, Iraq did not do 9/11, is disgusting?” he asked.

“We are really not sure who Mike Rogers is, but if anyone in Michigan’s Senate race is ‘unfit to serve in public office,’ it is him.”

Look, we can all agree that the neoconservative foreign-policy establishment has a lot to answer for. You can believe the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake. You can despise the Bush-era foreign-policy establishment. You can think Rogers represents exactly the kind of Republican national-security thinking the party should have left behind years ago.

I certainly agree with all of those things. America needs to get its house in order and stop looking abroad for monsters to slay.

But you don't have to validate Abdul El-Sayed to make that argument. And you especially don't have to validate his 9/11 commentary.

El-Sayed said in a 2021 podcast that while 9/11 “scarred our country in profound ways,” Americans “often fail to center” the millions of people he said were scarred by what the United States did afterward.

Days after the 20th anniversary of the attacks, he wrote that after mourning the nearly 3,000 Americans killed, he would “mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

El-Sayed has unequivocally condemned the attacks themselves and said that “nothing can justify the murder of innocent civilians.” He has also faced criticism over his past association with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who infamously said “America deserved 9/11” before later retracting the remark.

And this isn't some obscure podcast debate. El-Sayed is the Democrat nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in one of the country's biggest midterm races. He's facing Rogers in November, with control of the Senate potentially hanging in the balance.

That's what makes Carlson's intervention so maddening. He didn't merely criticize Rogers. He told Michigan voters to “keep this man far away from Washington,” declared that Rogers may be the candidate “unfit to serve in public office,” and then pronounced El-Sayed “obviously right” in the middle of a raging controversy over 9/11.

Call it whatever you want. It isn't helpful.

As if to further prove that El-Sayed's core beliefs on 9/11 are still something he doesn't want to discuss in public, he appeared on Disgrace the Nation and again refused to give a straight answer on his relationship to 9/11-backing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

"This is the third time you’ve asked about a twitch streamer in California..." Piker deflected. Right. And it's the third time you refused to give a straight answer.

Most disturbingly, Tucker Carlson is part of a handful of "right-wing" influencers who are doing tremendous damage to the conservative cause of preserving freedom in this country.

The historian listed Tucker Carlson, MTG, and Thomas Massie as pernicious influences in the right-wing blogosphere. It's all beginning to smack of an "op."

And there was a lot of reaction online about Tucker Carlson's latest antics.

Carlson's gadfly routine has worn incredibly thin. There was a time when his willingness to challenge Republican orthodoxy was refreshing, particularly when it came to endless wars, intelligence agencies and a GOP establishment that treated every foreign-policy problem like another excuse to invade something.

But contrarianism eventually becomes its own form of orthodoxy.

You don't have to “both sides” everything. You don't have to find something admirable in every political opponent simply because you dislike the Republican standing across from him. And you certainly don't need to provide rhetorical cover to a candidate from the socialist left to prove that you're sufficiently independent-minded. Sometimes moral clarity really is enough.

Whatever Carlson intended here, a lot of conservatives heard something much simpler: Tucker Carlson telling them that Abdul El-Sayed was “obviously right” about one of the most emotionally charged issues in modern American history while simultaneously telling Michigan voters to reject his Republican opponent.

For people who have spent years defending Carlson's willingness to buck the establishment, that may have been one provocation too many. A lot of them seem done listening — at least for now.