We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again

By Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, September 4, 2024 - I thought I was done with Tucker Carlson after he got fired from Fox News because of his role in encouraging the “stolen/flipped votes” hoax after the November 2020 election, a cynical gambit that helped pave the way to both January 6 and a $787 million settlement bill for the cable network in its defamation-suit payout to Dominion Voting Systems. (Having labelled the man both a “merchant of lies” and a “betrayer of trust,” further commentary felt superfluous.) I was wrong.

Then I thought I was done with Tucker Carlson after he journeyed to Moscow in February this year, to preach with alarming zeal in a series of propaganda videos about how Putin’s Russia was vastly more humane and civilized than They Want You To Realize, especially compared with the filthy sinkhole that is America in 2024. He then went to an international conference in Dubai to publicly talk down American democracy as being morally comparable to violent authoritarian dictatorships. (A day later Vladimir Putin, in a persuasive counterargument, murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison.) My contempt for Carlson’s anti-American turn was such that I wanted no more of him.

I ignored him when he strongly hinted on a podcast that he believes “gray aliens” are possibly hyper-dimensional demons with whom the U.S. government has struck a Faustian bargain for access to advanced technologies and human dominion. I ignored him when he sympathetically interviewed Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and ....  For I cannot ignore Tucker Carlson when he goes “partway-Nazi.”

... Carlson’s “I’m just asking courageous questions and hosting dangerously honest discussions” schtick is nothing new to the world, or even to Tucker; it is the same one he crafted at Fox and drove full-speed into a wall. 

... as it turns out, Darryl Cooper has a history of Nazi-sympathizing statements, and this was known well before this interview. I don’t mean that in the sense of “oh he has some politically incorrect views,” I mean that in the honest-to-goodness “Hitler is in heaven now” sense of a “Nazi sympathizer.” He’s not exactly subtle about it, either. This guy popped up on my radar months ago as a member of the Nazi-apologist alt-right subgenre. I saw these tweets long before this week. Am I to believe that Tucker Carlson did not? For a man he described as the “most important historian in the United States,” and not a casual guest? I’m just asking questions, Tucker. (read it all)

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