Ivana Hughes and Tucker Carlson Bridge the Political Horseshoe

On a Columbia scientist’s unlikely conversation with one of America’s most polarizing media figures

@tuckercarlson on Instagram

Students at Columbia College know Dr. Ivana Hughes as the director of Frontiers of Science, the required introductory science course for freshmen. However, outside of that role, Hughes lectures in Chemistry and serves as the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an organization that advocates against nuclear weapons and which has consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. She has written for progressive outlets such as The Nation, Common Dreams, and Truthout. And on Friday, October 17, her interview with Tucker Carlson was released.

Nearly three weeks later, at a live event in White Plains, Carlson told Megyn Kelly that he’d been having his annual “Nazi week.”

Tucker Carlson: Humane Populist

It seems as if every day, Fox News host Mark Levin takes to X to accuse “Qatarlson”—a nod to a conspiracy theory on Carlson’s purported Qatari funding—of antisemitism and anti-Americanism. On November 3, shortly after Carlson released his bombshell interview with the edgy alt-righter Nick Fuentes, Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro posted, “No to the groypers. No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash. No to those who champion them.” In defending Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts faced intense backlash from within the conservative establishment and received a series of resignation letters from Heritage employees. Five days later, he walked back his defense of Carlson, admitting to having fallen “short.”

Fuentes—the white nationalist and self-proclaimed racist who expressed admiration for Stalin on Carlson’s show—joins an eclectic string of pundits, podcasters, and professors who have made the pilgrimage to the former Fox News host’s log cabin in Bryant Pond, Maine. A heterodox pool in the truest sense of the word, besides Hughes and Fuentes (who share little in common), guests have included leftists such as Columbia economist and peace advocate Jeffrey Sachs, independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, and Young Turks host Ana Kasparian. On the right, some names worth mentioning are revisionist historian Darryl Cooper, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and renegade podcaster Candace Owens. Meanwhile, Carlson has also managed to engage with credentialed conservatism: he has hosted Trump’s chief negotiator Steve Witkoff at his cabin, and has also interviewed sitting cabinet members such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Scott Bessent.

Carlson thus moves with seeming ease from amicably conversing with anti-establishment leftists, to hosting some of the most controversial voices on the right, to engaging directly with the Trump administration. What has emerged is the following overarching argument: The American people and their social and economic well-being must be placed over that of corporations, entrenched interests, and idealistic foreign policy—and for as long as anyone can remember, that has not been the case.

Each guest, whether on the right or the left, shares their expertise and opinions as Carlson crafts this compelling narrative. While it might be convenient for Columbia students to brush aside anything that comes out of Carlson’s mouth as mere MAGA propaganda, I’d caution against doing so. If you actually listen to him, you’ll quickly realize that, at least lately, he’s been spending more time attacking others on the right for their neglect of populist concerns than rallying against drag story hour or woke M&Ms. In the past year, Carlson has openly chastised the U.S. bombing of Iran and the Trump administration’s apparent cover-up of the Epstein Files, and is now criticizing musings of war with Venezuela, driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s core political constituency of South Florida neocons, as “Viagra to Lindsey Graham.”

Many, however, still find Carlson beyond the pale—as if he were Fuentes himself. As I was preparing to interview Hughes about her appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, a peer snided, “Why would she even do that?” As if Hughes were going to Joseph Goebbels’ cabin, no doubt how many see it. They, I’d argue, have a different “TDS”—Tucker Derangement Syndrome. Not that Carlson should be supported in all his opinions or even some of his borderline rhetoric, but that, as far as one can tell (and in his own words), he is fundamentally a subscriber to the Christian teaching on human universality.

It must be this reading of Carlson—a humane populist as opposed to some sort of bigoted zealot—that convinced Hughes to go on his show.

Hughes’ Nuclear Weapons Advocacy

Hughes’ interview with Carlson was released just when intra-conservative tensions had reached a boiling point but had not yet reached the bitter and hard-to-reconcile level they are at now—an escalation ultimately triggered by Carlson’s conversation with Fuentes. In the show, Hughes described the sheer impact of a nuclear exchange on life on Earth, advocated for nuclear disarmament, and voiced that holding a nuclear arsenal is actually not in the best interest of American national security.

In the hours following the release, I broke the news to various Columbians, and received an onslaught of messages from friends and peers who were shocked that the professor they knew from weekly FroSci email blasts had gone on Carlson’s show. Sachs is the only other Columbia faculty member to have appeared on Carlson (and many times, at that). But he’s also more of a public intellectual, and his work is more explicitly political. Therefore, I too found it somewhat curious that Hughes might join Sachs in going up north to Bryant Pond.

Two weeks later, I sat with Hughes in her Pupin office to understand why she had decided to speak with Carlson, what she hoped to achieve through her work, and how she viewed the role of her advocacy at Columbia.

Discussing with Hughes in her office (Sebastian Galbenus/Columbia Sundial)

Hughes identified staunchly as a leftist, and recalled in a tone of moderate bewilderment that in the moments after she had met Carlson, “he asked me where I was from, and asked if I was Croatian. And then I said I was Serbian. It was actually really charming, because he said, ‘Oh, you’re Serbian. You know, I’m going to a wedding in a place called Niš.’” Hughes told Carlson that Niš was her hometown, and recalled that Carlson, allegations of bigotry amok, was actually incredibly kind and “understood, obviously, that I was an immigrant.”

Hughes lamented that she did not get the opportunity to talk to Carlson about how nuclear exchange compares to climate change, an issue where he and Hughes are in stark disagreement (recall that climate change comprises a quarter of the FroSci curriculum).

But Hughes also acknowledged that climate change was not the issue she was on Carlson’s show to talk about. Climate change, according to Hughes, “is not going to destroy the Earth in a matter of minutes. That doesn’t make it less of a problem. Some people choose to work on a lot of different issues. For me, I find myself in this topic of nuclear disarmament, partly because it’s also not something that many people are talking about. And so I just feel like it’s the topic in the field that needs the most support.” Her example is worth heeding: it is possible to converse with others amicably on the issues we agree on, whilst holding good faith disagreements as well.

To my surprise, Hughes recounted that she was not initially that interested in nuclear disarmament at all. This topic came up through FroSci when her husband, Dr. Emlyn Hughes, “gave one lecture on nuclear weapons in Spring 2011 for the first time, and it was just mind-boggling for me. I mean, I was absolutely stunned at what I had learned.”

What had she learned that was so troubling? Hughes described to me the following: “Hiroshima, Nagasaki—are just fine. I’ve actually been to both. They are just fine. In 1945, one country had three nuclear weapons. Today, nine countries have 12.5 thousand of them, most of which are much more powerful than the bombs we used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, it’s just a completely different scale. And in the decades since, we’ve learned all these things about what nuclear war is, where you use hundreds or thousands of these warheads, and what it will do to the environment. And it’s not just radiation. It’s also nuclear winter. It’s also ozone layer destruction.” She gave a similar account on Carlson’s show. Contrary to most of his other guests, she largely avoided political parlance by providing a purely sober and scientific account.

Now, Hughes’ work with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is mostly off campus, and she told me that she hoped for more interest at Columbia. “I think when it comes to Jeffrey Sachs”—her friend, fellow peace advocate, and Carlson frequent—“we should be having more things with him.” Surprisingly, Hughes told me that I was the only student who reached out to her at all regarding her appearance on Carlson’s show.

“Look, I would understand if someone came to me and said, ‘Dr. Hughes, I can’t believe you went on Tucker Carlson.’” I had the sense she almost wished students would be interested enough to talk to her about it, even if in condemnatory terms. I can only stipulate that either no Columbia student was arrogant enough to confront Hughes, or more plausibly, that most students are so deeply immersed in an echo chamber that simply does not include Carlson’s less controversial, news-making interviews. The day that Hughes’ talk with Carlson was released, I looked through Sidechat and could not find a single reaction.

If a student were to express an issue, Hughes posited, “I would just tell them, ‘look, there are times for disagreements, and there are times to sit down with people with whom you might disagree on things; and in my mind, really, truly, the issue of nuclear disarmament should absolutely not be a partisan issue.’”

Hughes On The Horseshoe

A notable part of Hughes’ appearance on Carlson was when she mentioned how, at an influential conference in the U.K., she told a high-profile and unnamed individual that it was not in America’s interest to have a nuclear arsenal. In response, she was simply belittled for sounding “like Trump” and neglecting our allies. This person reasoned that, were it not for America’s nukes, Putin would have already made his way well into Europe.

“And I said, that’s not an answer,” Hughes recalled to Carlson.

She expressed to me the absurdity of “the idea that Democrats, and not just the establishment, but your rank and file Democratic voters,” are so pro-war. “I mean, you just have to go to a New York Times article about Ukraine and look at the comments. It’s not that I don’t like the articles, but what kills me are the comments that are like, ‘war and war and war,’ and ‘we have to destroy Russia, and we have to destroy Putin. And there’s no other way.’ Where is this coming from? Where is this lack of recognition that on the order of a million people have died or been wounded in that war?”

Hughes continued, “These are mostly young Ukrainian and Russian men. I have two sons. One is 21, [one] is 14. I have a daughter as well. But to me, this is an absolute tragedy, and it does appear to have been a war that could have been stopped ahead of time, that could have been stopped even in April of 2022. Countless lives would have been saved.” Hughes articulated that she “was never for peace because I like Putin. I was for peace, because I just think that settling these disputes in the 21st century in this barbaric way, and at the same time risking nuclear war that could end humanity and possibly life on the planet, is just absolute insanity.”

Compared to the optimism Hughes initially felt at Obama’s run in 2008 as the anti-war candidate—the first time she voted as a U.S. citizen—and at Bernie Sanders’ promising run in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries, “it’s all just gone downhill. I mean, the levels of income inequality in this country are absolutely astounding. So I’ve also been listening to some Tucker Carlson interviews. Initially, I primarily just really wanted to know how he behaves in these interviews once I was invited. But you hear someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene,” on Carlson, “talking about her concern for her children, who are in their 20s, and cost of living, cost of rent and groceries and health care.”

“I’m just not hearing this from Democrats,” Hughes stated, referencing the possible exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk. “I mean, it’s so simple,” she continued, “government by the people, for the people. I even really dislike—as much as you could see me as a kind of overly educated, you know, New York and an Ivy League university type person—I dislike that the term ‘populist’ is somehow bad. A populist should be someone who’s for the people. I just don’t see how we’ve managed to turn that into a bad thing.” Per Hughes, being a populist “should be something that you’re proud of.”

The irony of the situation was not lost upon me. Here was a chemist and an immigrant articulating why Americans are irate at the affordability crisis and at all the foreign wars. Her common-sense logic was far better than the actual “experts” at SIPA, like Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, and Mike Pompeo.

“Mamdani was the most hopeful thing to have happened in American politics in a very, very long time,” Hughes told me.

Japan Has Bullet Trains, We Have Ballistic Missiles

“Is there not a profound relationship between the destruction of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Nagasaki, the only holy place in all Japan—was it not chosen as a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War?” These were the words of Japanese Catholic poet Takashi Nagai following America’s nuking of Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki and a sacred site for the nation’s Catholics.

Poetic justice, perhaps, that the country upon which America unleashed the evil of the atomic bomb now has “bullet trains,” said Hughes, while “we have intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

This is really the problem. In America, we have old Amtrak trains making their way up the more-than-century-old Northeast Corridor, hot coffee spilling onto passengers at every sudden turn, the entire train car engulfed in a terrible cacophony. In other parts of the country, matters are even worse, trains going so slow than when Amtrak relaunched its route along the Gulf Coast, The New York Times came up with this enticing description: “Driving may be faster, but the inaugural train trips between Mobile, Ala., and New Orleans this week drew travelers eager for a different kind of adventure.” Meanwhile, in Japan, they currently have Shinkansens traveling at 200 miles an hour, and as Hughes pointed out to me, they are testing trains going at a whopping 300 miles per hour.

We have been told that this doesn’t matter. Forget the nice things like thriving communities, 21st-century infrastructure, and giving young people a chance at the American Dream of home ownership, a family, and economic prosperity. America is great because we can nuke all life out of existence. We shouldn’t buy it. Not for a second.

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Mr. Mohammadi is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in American studies. He is a staff editor for Sundial.

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The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.