The problem with Tucker

Monday night, Tucker Carlson tweeted the following:

Along with virtually everything Tucker does, the tweet went instantly viral. He’s currently got the sixth-most popular “news” podcast in America, according to Apple. (Candace Owens rounds out the list at number 10.) And of course, he already occupied the top-rated cable news slot for several years. I appeared on that Fox News show semi-regularly (example, example) and continue to appreciate being given the opportunity; I also always liked Tucker on a personal level. As best I can access my own interior psyche, nothing I’m about to write here is driven by any personal animus or resentment, even though you can always expect people on the internet to smugly tell you that you’re really just “jealous” if you ever say anything not-nice about some media figure of greater prominence than yourself. But the thoroughly non-personal nature of my criticism should be underscored by what had previously been my sincerely-held preference to never have to make this criticism at all. Yeah, I realize nobody’s literally forcing me to do it; things have just gotten so out of hand at this point that I now feel compelled, for reasons of public interest.

Plenty of people saw the above-cited Tucker tweet and instantly assumed it to be “anti-Semitic.” Plenty of people also did the same when he spoke at Charlie Kirk’s mega-church football stadium quasi-state funeral last September, and sprinkled in some curious references to “people in power… sitting around eating hummus.” I am not imputing “anti-Semitism” to Tucker. That would be tedious and trite — for one thing, yes, there is definitely a bloated cottage industry out there whose sole purpose is to ascribe maximum “anti-Semitism” to everything and everyone, and demand censorship/punishment/alarmism on that basis. But more substantively, “anti-Semitism” doesn’t even capture what I see as really going on with Tucker. The fundamental problem with his tweet, as well as his wider trajectory of late, is more subtle — you might even say insidious — than could be captured with an eyeroll-prompting “anti-Semite” label. And I feel obliged to elucidate further what I mean, especially given the continued enormity of his media and political influence.

First off, opaquely calling your followers to prayer in the midst of a rapidly escalating war scenario is not a productive exhortation. It’d be one thing if you were just benignly advising that everyone pray for the safety of the troops, or to pray for positive outcomes in general. But it’s another if you’re advising prayer as a substitute for rational political action — particularly if your ostensible aim is to “save the world” from a catastrophic military conflict. Because functionally, what you’re encouraging is passivity and limp resignation. I’m sure Tucker’s call to prayer comes with an implied promo to check out his next podcast episode, but that kind of “action” is perfectly congruent with the well-established stupefying aimlessness of the slopaganda online media ecosystem — with Tucker himself, unfortunately, at the top of the algorithmic slop-heap.

The demotivating message is reminiscent of the mass-scale stultification also being engendered by telling millions of people that everything is ultimately run by an impenetrable cabal of sadistic child-raping elites — so why even bother trying to take any rational political action, or solve any problems? The pedo-masters call the shots, in view of which we all might as well just give up. This is basically the conclusion of Whitney Webb’s generationally awful corpus, One Nation Under Blackmail, when she eventually gets to the “Now what do we do?” question people always ask at public Q&A events. Her answer: “Do what you can to extricate yourself and your family from this power structure that is predatory. It’s evil. It kills kids. It rapes kids.”

I’m not saying I personally have any good answers whenever I’m occasionally asked some variation of this semi-desperate question. I guess I’d potentially agree that extricating oneself from corruption-inducing institutions could have some salutary benefit — cognitively, politically, and even interpersonally, depending on what institution(s) we’re talking about, and depending on a million other situationally-specific factors that wouldn’t be conducive to a concise little nugget of general life advice. But that’s still a lot different from urging, as Whitney Webb does, total nihilistic withdrawal from any mainline civic engagement, because online media slopagandists such as herself have decided we’re all being subjugated by some hazily-defined “power structure,” controlled by evil demonoids, who enforce their rule through the systematic rape, “trafficking,” and murder of children. That’s just unbridled lunacy. And of course, it’s also hysterically divorced from any evidence-based reality, even if it clearly plays well on the slop-infested podcast circuit. Telling people what they should do with their time and energy on the basis of assumptions about the world that are so outlandishly fact-devoid cannot possibly stir anyone to rational political, civil, social, or even interpersonal action. Instead, what you’re doing is just stirring up a bunch of counterproductive nuttiness. And naturally, the algorithm eats it right up.

In his aforementioned tweet, Tucker obviously didn’t advise anything as extreme as Whitney Webb did, but he’s increasingly gesturing toward that same kind of brain-deactivating sentiment. What are some things that could realistically be done in the midst of a brewing military conflagration? As opposed to just sitting around in prayerful hopes that some conspicuously unspecified “spell” might be lifted? Perhaps a good first step would be to rationally comprehend, as best one can, the causes and nature of the conflict. Seems like a decent start. Tucker is foundationally incapable of doing this, though — or at least he’s unwilling to do it, for one blindingly obvious reason: that being the giant orange-colored elephant in the room. Because to accurately explicate the causes and nature of the conflict would require finally getting real about the politician who hasn’t just set about obliterating Iran, but has invaded our collective psyches for the past 10+ years, whether you’re for or against him — and make no mistake, both flavors of fervor, “pro” as well as “con,” have bred a tsunami of cognitive and analytical distortions. Tucker remains squarely in the “for him” pack, despite the apocalyptic nightmare he warns has just been unleashed in the Middle East. He continues to profess his undying “love” for the Commander-in-Chief — the cloying refrain with which Tucker always prefaces his occasional acknowledgments of frustration and disappointment. Just as anyone in the current right-wing media/political landscape must do if they wish to preserve access, not only with the man at the top, but to the lucrative larger commercial world that this leader-allegiance unlocks. (Tucker’s son also works for the Administration — adding another layer of peril to his neverending tight-rope walk.)

During the 2024 presidential campaign, when Tucker decided to become a full-fledged PR surrogate for Donald Trump, I bit my tongue at first, even though I thought (and said privately at the time) it was a terrible idea. Here was Tucker, having just launched his ambitious new independent media platform, which (in theory) he could do a lot of good with, journalistically and otherwise. He’d been finally freed of whatever constraints, explicit or implicit, might have bedeviled him at Fox News, a corporate holding of Rupert Murdoch. He had a huge built-in audience willing to follow him wherever, and waiting to be edified by what could have been the very sort of genuinely “independent” media offering that I thought was supposed to be the whole point of “independent” media in the first place — though it turns out I was sorely mistaken about that.

Because in short order, Tucker chose to proactively hand over his newfound independence to a politician — and not just any politician, but a former and soon-to-be president, with a world-historic personality cult, who exerts unchallengeable domination over one of the two main American political parties, and who has saturated the public consciousness with such unremitting intensity for over a decade. This wasn’t like casually signing on with some backbench Congressman. Because it’s one thing to support a political candidate in one’s own personal capacity — sure, fine, whatever. Knock yourself out. It’s another thing to get onboard as a full-fledged communications apparatchik for the Republican presidential nominee, merging your fortunes with theirs — politically, psychically, and even materially — and imposing on yourself a dynamic whereby you are always necessarily going to be circumscribing whatever it is you say or do vis-a-vis that politician — made all the more unavoidable with such an outsized (and hyper media-sensitive) personage as Trump. There will always be a line lurking overhead that you know you cannot cross and remain in good standing.

It’s sad and ironic, because almost uniquely in the current media landscape, Tucker would’ve been perfectly positioned to honestly chronicle the second-term iteration of Trump. He easily could’ve continued to support or praise him as he found warranted, while also serving as honest non-liberal critic — or even, should circumstances demand it, become an outright opponent. Those criticisms would’ve been especially incisive coming from Tucker, given his bevy of first-hand experience with Trump, his proximity to the relevant insiders, and his overall integrality in the right-wing political and media tableau. But instead, Tucker boxed himself in by declaring overt allegiance to Trump, and consigning himself to perpetually walk on eggshells. On the off-chance he does ever “criticize” Trump, it’s always in this circular, evasive, elliptical fashion — always with a patina of plausible deniability baked in. Never anything candid or direct. “Obfuscation,” in other words.

On the matter of the Middle East war that Tucker is (justifiably!) exercised about right now, there’s a number of things that could conceivably be done to constrain Trump’s war-making powers. But they’re all things that if Tucker ever publicly advocated, Trump would freak out — just like he always does whenever anyone tries to constrain his power. Legislatively, Congress could pass a War Powers Resolution; they could restrict funding for the war; they could haul members of the Trump Administration before committees for some properly interrogative questioning. They could even initiate impeachment proceedings. Politically, individual Republican members of Congress could be lobbied/petitioned/demanded by their constituents to refuse support for the war, or most consequentially, withhold appropriations for it. Demonstrations could be held, social media pressure campaigns could be activated, etc.

Journalistically, there are manifold things that could be done. This is perhaps where Tucker could make the most palpable impact, if he really thinks the Iran war is as awful and even apocalyptic as he’s been suggesting for the past two weeks. To start with: how about doing some truthful assessment of what has actually given rise to this war? But that’s where Tucker runs into a brick wall, because it would require being truthful about Trump, particularly his intensifying second-term ideations of global conquest — a manifestly decisive factor in this crazy Iran “excursion.” But Tucker can’t get into any of that. So he dissembles and equivocates, talking about Trump like a mildly jilted lover.

Ultimately, being honest about the war would require Tucker to adopt a public posture of truth-seeking, rather than access-preservation — something he hasn’t shown any interest in doing at all. So instead he babbles about “spells,” demonology, pedophiles, and especially his incessant Israel-blinkered myopia. Which isn’t even about rationally critiquing Israel — it’s about redirecting all responsibility and agency onto an overwrought cartoon of Israel, so he doesn’t have to directly impugn Trump, whom he otherwise still professes to “love” so much.

“You know, I’m a three-time supporter of Trump,” Tucker said last week. “I’m saying this out of love, you know, not out of hate.” Trump apparently heard one of Tucker’s recent comments questioning the sustainability of US munition stockpiles, and privately responded, according to Tucker, by proclaiming that the US has “enough weapons to fight a, quote, forever war — which, holy cow.” And not only that, at least based on this account someone purportedly relayed: Trump is also toying with the use of nuclear weapons in Iran. If there ever comes a time when you might want to reconsider your practice of qualifying every statement you make about the President with feeble expressions of heartfelt “love,” now might be it. You might even say that’s the “spell” Tucker has been intimating needs to be broken, although he probably had a different spell in mind.

Trump barreled into office last year with limitless political capital, at least within the Republican Party, and with the Executive Branch expressly organized to most fulsomely enact his wishes — in contrast, to some degree, with the first term, when he faced bureaucratic (sometimes known as “Deep State”) roadblocks. In short, everything was set up this time for Trump to pursue an agenda that is most resoundingly reflective of his true desires and ambitions. We see this manifested in all kinds of administration policy. But on the issue of Israel and Iran, according to the newly-foregrounded Tucker perspective, Trump is just so feckless and hamstrung that he can be haplessly “dragged” into war by a conniving Bibi Netanyahu. C’mon.

Look, nobody’s denying, or at least I’m not denying, that regime change in Iran has been an ardent objective of the Israeli political class, and of Netanyahu in particular, for a very long time. But what we have here is figures like Tucker displacing their own responsibility — for creating a fictional mirage of Trump, and selling it to a mass audience in the 2024 election. Israel is the most natural target for that self-absolving displacement. It wasn’t because of Bibi that millions of podcast-consuming young men became convinced that by voting Republican, they were voting for some blockbuster “anti-establishment” Avengers Squad featuring RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and friends, who were going to storm into power and crush the Deep State — and by natural extension of this, free speech would be restored, wars would somehow be ended, and the Epstein pedo traffickers would be exposed. This was always a puerile fairy tale, about as realistic as a bad Marvel movie, albeit highly effective from a propaganda standpoint. And indeed, Tucker himself was an active contributor to the propagandistic onslaught — he even appears in a Trump Campaign video, released on the eve of the election, in which he’s shown triumphantly striding around with the rest of the Dopey Deep State Avenger crew. In an alternate timeline, instead of participating in this duplicitous PR exercise, Tucker could have devoted his energies to explaining Trump’s actual record and position on Iran, which was never remotely hidden, nor was it some imperceptible mystery that during the 2024 campaign, Trump was openly going around threatening to blow the entire country to smithereens. Or that he’d expressly endorsed a joint US-Israeli operation to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. (So did JD Vance.)

Having failed to illuminate any of this when it mattered, Tucker and others in his confabulatory 2024 cohort are now flailing around haphazardly for any rationalization they can conjure to explain how it is that their preferred electoral outcome has now resulted in the Mother Of All Regime Change Wars in the Middle East. Rather than do any self-criticism, much less atone for their complicity in the crass propaganda deluge, they instead choose to fixate myopically and monomaniacally on Israel. Because as usual, when something goes “wrong,” Trump is never the primary agent of responsibility. He’s perpetually being tricked, misled, cajoled, placed under a wicked “spell,” or perhaps even sexually blackmailed; always thwarted by some nefarious interloper from fulfilling his most pure-hearted instincts. According to Tucker, it’s not Trump or Pete Hegseth who bears any blame for the US strike on an Iranian girls school during the opening salvo of the war on February 28. Rather, the blame lies with — you guessed it — Israel, and their omnipotent scheming machinations. This is fundamentally “Israel’s war,” Tucker says over and over — definitely not “Trump’s war,” or even “America’s War.” At best, it’s a war waged with American firepower, under the sinister “spell” of Israelis.

Is this perspective “anti-Semitic”? Who cares? It’s sufficiently warped without having to play that tired semantic game. No one’s understanding of the war is being enhanced by the popularization of Tucker’s stunted perspective; it in fact actively impedes any rational apprehension of events. PLEASE NOTE: I am obviously not denying that Israel is a significant factor in precipitating this war, or in US foreign policy in general. TO REPEAT: It is obviously true that Trump is waging the war in concert with Netanyahu. It’s obviously true that toppling the government of Iran has been a decades-long goal of Netanyahu and other Israeli political/military officials. Nobody’s denying that, or at least I’m not. But promoting Israel as the mythical be-all-end-all explanation only serves to speciously immunize Trump, and therefore his erstwhile propaganda functionaries like Tucker, while also promoting a kind of lazy dumbed-down fatalism — as though the President and his supporters have been stripped of any agency by this all-powerful cosmological war-instigating force. Per this perspective, the genesis of the current Iran conflagration cannot flow in any appreciable way from Trump’s own ideology, worldview, policy priorities, instincts, grudges, personality traits, or other factors. Don’t even trouble yourself with any of that. Instead, just keep babbling about some mysterious “spell” that’s been cast, which somehow made it eschatologically inevitable that this crazy war would be triggered in the dead of night to decimate Iranian infrastructure and kill the Supreme Leader.

Nevermind that it would be strange to apply such Israel-fixated analysis to other examples of Trump’s second-term targets for global conquest, several of which are in the Western Hemisphere, making subservience to Israel all the more implausible as any kind of explanatory variable. If Israel and Netanyahu have such an unshakeable grip on US foreign policy, was it also to serve Israel that Trump abducted Nicolas Maduro and declared himself the new ruler of Venezuela? Or was that… a choice of Trump’s own agency, reinforced by the likeminded appointees he selected? How about his recurring gambit to seize Greenland? Panama? He’s now vowing Cuba is next on the list. What possible role for Israel could be claimed there? Sure, Trump declaring himself ruler of Gaza, and now trying to destroy the Iranian state, are more relevant to Israel’s regional interests — hence why Israel is an adjunct of the current US offensive in Iran. But the entire Iran “excursion” should still be understood in terms of the second-term global conquest agenda Trump clearly previewed in his January 2025 inaugural address, and has been doggedly pursuing ever since.

Meanwhile, the latest theory propounded by Tucker is that when Netanyahu gave Trump a commemorative plaque featuring a golden pager last year, this was a devious physical threat, with the idea being that if Trump doesn’t agree to wage wars on Israel’s behalf, Netanyahu or the Mossad will kill him. OK.

Reasonable people could potentially differ on how much responsibility to allocate Israel versus Trump for the initiation of the Iran war. If that were my only “difference” with Tucker, it probably wouldn’t be worth harping on. But his prognostications on Iran have to be seen within the context of his larger journey into full-blown epistemic dysregulation. One day before the war was launched February 28, Tucker welcomed a guest, Catherine Fitts, for a podcast discussion on who else — Jeffrey Epstein. “If people will allow you to poison and abuse and rape their children in exchange for keeping their 401ks up, you have no reason to respect them,” said the guest. “I completely agree,” says Tucker. Another (notoriously discredited) guest asserted on the March 9 edition that the Iran war was being perpetrated by the “Epstein class.” I didn’t even want to write the guest’s name here, because he’s so unrepentantly wrong about everything, but it was Colonel Douglas Macgregor — who, like Tucker, eagerly campaigned for Trump in 2024. Macgregor even declared at a September 29, 2024 rally that voting for Trump was of such urgent moral necessity because US soldiers were “preparing to fight a war against Iran,” and only Trump could avert this, to bring “peace.” Don’t worry: in the alt-media podcast sphere, everything can be swiftly memory-holed at one’s earliest convenience, not unlike in the “mainstream” media these podcasters purport to revile. (If anything, there’s even less of a reputational penalty to be paid in the alt-media world for catastrophic analytical and personal failure.)

Tucker also joined legions of other internet-addled pundits who reasoned that the most sound research methodology for examining the newest batch of “Epstein Files” would be to input random foodstuffs in the DOJ website’s search bar, and when this yielded a certain quantity of results, infer the most depraved possible meaning from decades-old snippets of emails containing some mention of the foodstuffs. On his February 6 episode, Tucker leads with a monologue, relaying that he and his team had been hard at work analyzing the new Epstein materials, and what “caught our attention immediately,” he says, were “the emails and texts that we can be pretty sure were sent from or to Jeffrey Epstein that pertained to the question of food, specifically pizza.”

He goes on to surmise that theories previously associated with “Pizzagate,” once derided as outlandish, have now been proven terrifyingly and devastatingly true. Including that “pizza was actually a synonym for children or sex with children.” He intones: “Maybe the long debunked conspiracy theory about Pizzagate wasn’t actually debunked,” and in fact was only the beginning, given the newfound addition to the pedo-codeword vocabulary of such suspiciously carbonated beverages as “grape soda.”

His expert guest for the occasion was a numbskull named Ian Carroll — a person so mind-bendingly moronic, you almost have to hope he can’t possibly be real. Their joint episode has 2.6 million views on YouTube alone as of this writing. Entitled “Tucker Responds to the Epstein Files, Pizzagate & the Demonic Global Crime Network With Ian Carroll,” it’s a predictable flood of unvarnished brain poison. Tucker wraps up the show by lamenting how regretful it is that so many young people these days are saying to themselves, “Yeah of course, you know, like, of course we’re ruled by satanic pedophiles.” Gee, wonder if this has anything to do with their suboptimal media diet!

I spoke with Tucker last summer after I had the misfortune of watching his three-hour Emergency Epstein Podcast with a self-appointed leader in the “Epstein Space,” Darryl Cooper, because people kept hectoring me to listen to this garbage, as though it would conclusively demonstrate how humiliatingly wrong I was about all things Epstein. That podcast had been consumed by untold millions, and was likewise a cascade of hysterical bullshit. When I contacted him, Tucker seemed at least preliminarily open to being apprised of what had gone so disastrously wrong with the Darryl Cooper appearance, and how egregiously his audience had been misinformed by holding out Darryl as some sort of renowned Epstein Expert. But eventually, our exchange just kind of fizzled out. And wouldn’t you know it, soon enough Tucker was back doing “Pizzagate is real” soliloquies, and showcasing an even more preposterous charlatan, that “Ian Carroll” creature, who if you really want, you can watch me attempting to converse with last year. It was extremely unpleasant.

If Tucker’s increasing resistance to reason was limited only to the Epstein fiasco, that would be bad enough, but I might be willing to begrudgingly overlook it. We all only have finite time, energy, and willpower. But his miasma of diseased epistemology is now actively warping perceptions of an ongoing hot military conflict, launched by the guy he propagandized passionately for in 2024, and whom he still refuses to openly criticize. While the war is already a spiraling disaster, if Tucker is correct, and Trump is seriously considering nuclear weapons — for Christ’s sake! Social niceties are out the window at this point. I realize Tucker believes himself to have undergone some kind of manic religious epiphany, including his account of being attacked in bed by literal demons, who left him with bleeding scratch marks; he apparently found the “demon intrusion” theory a more plausible one than the fact that he routinely sleeps in bed with numerous hunting dogs. Regardless, this prophetic wisdom has inspired him to opine with oracular authority on pizza-eating pedos, Israel, and related matters. But as the Middle East explodes, and Donald Trump at the helm, if there’s any “spell” that most urgently needs to be broken, it’s whichever one he’s been waywardly casting.

---