Tucker Carlson, changer
Anyone who’s followed Tucker Carlson over the years knows he’s been on a long and winding journey: from a childhood that was highly unusual, to say the least – raised in mega-wealth but with an eccentric mother who deserted the family when he was six years old and thereafter had nothing to do with her two sons – to a long career as journalist and TV personality with shifting positions. He reached the heights of popularity on the right with his Fox News show from 2016 t0 2023, as he became more and more aligned with what one might call the Buchanan-type isolationist wing of the party and finally was let go by Fox and started his own podcast. Riding on his previous popularity (and probably an assortment of bots and foreign fans in Muslim states) he’s been popular ever since and grown increasingly pro-Russia and pro-Arab as well as increasingly anti-Israel in a mendacious manner.
Along the way, his religious views have changed as well. He describes some of that in this short clip from a year ago:
So although he was a nominal Christian growing up, it really was a shallow thing. And he says that about three years ago he was mauled by a demon. In addition, it was about two or three years ago that he read the Bible for the first time:
Tucker on spiritual warfare: “Leaving aside elections, it’s clearly a pivot point in history. There are unseen forces acting on people. People, while they have freewill, are not really in charge of the arc of history at all. A lot of these issues are symbols of a larger battle.”
So according to Tucker, the larger overarching battle is spiritual. In the last couple of years he keeps mentioning his Christianity and yet also has taken more and more extreme positions on a host of issues including – of all things – sharia law. This latter position is a rather recent development. For example, see this short video excerpt from about eight years ago, back in his Fox News days:
Contrast to this short clip of Carlson recently, demonstrating what you might call his “evolution” in thinking:
In that clip Tucker still self-identifies as a Christian, but his praise for “tolerant” and “diverse” Arab Muslim societies is bizarre. Not only does it contrast with what he “knew” eight years ago, but it seems based on dinner party conversation with polite elites trying to curry favor with him.
And yes, he’s probably been getting money from Qatar. But he’s been mega-rich for his whole life, and I think the prospect of more money would be insufficient in and of itself to turn the tide for him like this. I think he’s become an Arab and Muslim admirer because of their enforcement of strict cultural norms that he says are lacking in Western countries. The issues of liberty – or harsh apostasy punishment, or his old concern for women’s rights, or his definition of “diversity” in Arab states (which is a laugh), all really have fallen off in service to his desire for what he sees as clean streets and moral strictness where a man’s a man and a woman’s a woman and all that.
Which brings us to the present. It appears that Tucker is edging closer to taking the next step – conversion to Islam. Here’s Tucker now:
All the drama about this traitor exhausts me.
We now learn he hates Jews and probably told Iran that Trump wasn’t going to attack. He supposedly passed this info onto the mullahs and they felt they were safe for their big meeting where we killed dozens of them.
Tucker Carlson should just go away. He’s like a Kardashian to me.
Cornhead:
Something tells me you may not have read to the end.
Cornhead. Good analogy.
Wealth from birth without responsibilities–old military family in old England–or running an estate with subordinates, or any other thing is a huge insulator. As has been said before about AWFL, the bill for their stupid votes and positions rarely shows up on their porch attached to a copy of their last vote.
He can say or do anything he wants and….he’ll be okay. If he converts to Islam, nobody will be counting his prayer intervals in his home in, say, Doha. The big shots get away with sexual perversions–not those allowed or required in Islamic tradition but what the west might consider them and if he’s so inclined….no problem.
As before, all his life, no problem.
I liked him when his gig was to invite a liberal on to the show and let the guest talk himself into knots. After that….
I tend to think his professed preference for the “conservative ideals” of Islam and/or Maduro are rooted in a calculated propaganda move to appeal to some portion of conservatives, and are not genuine.
James Lindsay has said that by 2022 the Woke Left ran out fo gas and the next step was to cleave the Right by starting a similar movement: The Woke Right.
https://newdiscourses.com/2025/07/a-beginners-guide-to-the-woke-right/
Carslon, Gaetz, Emerald Robinson, MTG, Owens, Bannon, Dreher and his American Conservative are trying their best, but OMG do they sound scatterbrained and loony.
Is that third clip Tucker, or the Tucker impersonator? April fool?
The battle is spiritual, and that’s no joke.
Long before he was fired from FOX, I told my Wife that he was an Isolationist of the worst kind. And that he had no understanding of the World we live in.
Ambassador Huckabee had a nice April 1 send-up of Tucker on X today: https://x.com/i/status/2039333143728070743
Read any number of books on the history of Islam, its conquer or die. They only like to live beside until they take over, then your a slave or pay to keep your peace.
Early onset frontotemporal dementia?
I see what you did there. Good one!
Skip, you left out two other options Islam offers the conquered; conversion and death. Human nature being what it is; an unsurprisingly large percentage of the conquered will choose conversion. Rationalizing with that old saw; if you can’t beat them… join them.
crasey:
At last! 🙂
Neo: But he’s been mega-rich for his whole life, and I think the prospect of more money would be insufficient in and of itself to turn the tide for him like this.
A quick search for Tucker Carlson’s net worth returns about $30 to $50 million. That’s about a factor of 10 below the level where more money doesn’t improve your lifestyle. (Obviously, some people don’t stop seeking more money when they hit $300 million, but that’s not to improve their lifestyle.)
“~$750 million — effectively eliminates nearly all money-related limits on personal desires; remaining constraints are legal, physical, ethical, or constrained by reality/physics rather than affordability” according to GPT 5
AppleBetty:
More money is nice, even when mega-rich, and I assume Tucker welcomes more money. But at that level of already-rich, you don’t sell your soul and/or repudiate what you previously believed, for more money.
Please also read my 3-part series on Tucker.
Neo: you don’t sell your soul and/or repudiate what you previously believed, for more money.
You’re wonderful.
I stopped following Dreher when he left American Conservative and started charging to read his Substack. He’s woke right now and in with Tucker, Candace, Megyn et al?
Maybe someone can ask him “what would you do with another million dollars?”
If the answer is “I would do X” we can see he might be moved by money to some degree, but if he said “Gee, I don’t know”, then perhaps money is no longer a motivator of substance beyond have the label of being a Z level millionaire [or billionaire].
It might be interesting to ask that question of a large number of our public personalities in politics, business, or entertainment, and see what they say.
Dreher is pro-Israel and very anti-Tucker/Owens. Called him out early on. He is very critical of Trump, though he voted for him in the last 2 elections. He lives in Hungary and has the pulse of Europe, so feels concern about a lot of things.
@ Kate > “Is that third clip Tucker, or the Tucker impersonator? April fool?”
I have no clue. The presentation looks iffy to me, but AI is amazing these days.
However, the first two clips Neo gave us show why so many people followed Tucker in his earlier career: he was telling the truth (whether he believed it or not, and he sounds like he did at that time).
Bob Marro, the Sharia apologist in the second clip, is spinning like a top.
To say that all Muslim societies are open-minded is generalizing from small samples, and not fully accurate even so. Muslims may be too polite (or politic) to enforce full sharia compliance on visiting celebrities, but they are not so tolerant outside the tourist cordons.
My sister was “seconded” by the university where she taught English to go with an older teacher and serve as personal tutors to a Saudi princess, who wanted an American education like her brothers but whose father would not under any circumstances allow her to go to the US to study. So he pulled strings with some oil executive friends connected to the college to hire them. This was in the late 1980s.
The prince’s household was very welcoming, and generous (she’s still living on the interest from her salary and frequent gifts), and she & the princess had a great time together.
BUT the teachers had to stay in their assigned quarters near the royal compound, be chauffeured back and forth by a driver, and in all ways comply with the laws for women and dhimmis (no burkhas, though, as long as they stayed in the prince’s entourage). It was very stifling, and although she was glad she went, she said she would never have gone back.
Some friends of ours, a couple we knew much later in Colorado, also went to Saudi Arabia, around 2007 .
The husband was hired to teach in a university, and his family was really looking forward to living in Arabia, and traveling in Europe on their vacations (which is the part my sister also enjoyed immensely).
He quit before the end of the semester, for the same reasons she only went once.
They were servants, not equals doing a job.
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The fourth clip is definitely an impersonator.
I don’t know for sure that he reflects Tucker’s personal beliefs, but he does highlight the inconsistency of Western supporters of Islam.
As with most of the positions of the Left: if they didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
OTOH, the UAE does seem to be serious about promoting tolerance for non-Muslims (at least those who are not imported manual laborers), but I don’t know enough details to comment.
The three faiths complex in Abu Dhabi gives some cause for hope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_Family_House
From my POV, this is even more encouraging of real coexistence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates
This kind of thing might make those bumper stickers accurate eventually.
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@ Kate > “The battle is spiritual, and that’s no joke.”
Agreed.
The small excerpt near the beginning of Neo’s post is, in fact, quite true.
“A lot of these issues are symbols of a larger battle.”
It seems like everything has to be black or white with people like Tucker. Is a nuanced viewpoint, which calls for Christian-based virtue and moderation in the West while at the same time condemning the outright tyranny against gays, women and others in Islam, even possible any longer?
I agree that hedonism and radical feminism (to name just a few) have hurt Western societies. But we’re also seeing Islam’s track record in Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and indeed in London, Paris, and Minnesota. Even in its present state I’ll take the West any day. After all, it’s not Somalia which sent astronauts to the moon last night or is building ChatGPT’s data centers.
A quick search for Tucker Carlson’s net worth returns about $30 to $50 million. That’s about a factor of 10 below the level where more money doesn’t improve your lifestyle.
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Depends on what your utility function is. Compare how Warren Buffett lives with how Dianne Feinstein and her husband lived. Diminishing returns (and negative returns) from owning things, accommodations, and travel sets in at different times for different people.
Neo,
Tucker can try to hide his identity as a jester but once you see it you can’t unsee it.
His current views and social media reach are certainly dangerous to our way of life but hopefully thanks to those like you and @amikozak_official more will see him as the fool that he is.
I used to like Tucker.
— neo
There certainly are some people who would do just that. As others have noted on thread, you’re not really in the highest socioeconomic class until you hit the mid eight figures. Plus there are some people whose hunger for wealth is literally just insatiable, the billionaire who can’t be satisfied until he owns everything.
But I agree with you that that isn’t what’s driving Tucker, or not primarily.
I agree that a lot of this is the same thing that’s driven much of the Left’s instinct to side with whoever is against America for the last 60 years. They hate their own country, or at least the people running it, so much that siding with the opposition becomes simply reflexive.
The Left hates traditional America so much that they sided with the USSR, with Communists generally, with the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and now Iran. They hate Israel for the same reason they hate America.
The iso-right so hates the now-dominant Left in America (and the other Western countries) that they reflexively side with anybody who seems to oppose that group. Which is why we started seeing right-wingers suddenly treat Putin as a savoir figure back about 15 years ago. They detest the globalist ‘social left/business right’ alliance that has dominated the West since the end of the Cold War, (and they are right to do so!) but some of them have allowed that in turn to drive them into mirror images of what they detest.
@HC68:we started seeing right-wingers suddenly treat Putin as a savoir figure back about 15 years ago.
In my experience these people know very little about Putin or Russia. They’ve created an ideal image that they substitute for Putin and Russia. They don’t try to go live there or even visit. They are surprised about Russia’s aging population, below-replacement birthrate, and accelerating Islamization, and usually denounce my evidence of these things as media lies to make Russia or Putin look bad. They don’t know anything about the oligarchs or other cronyism and corruption that dominates the economy. They’re also pretty sure that Russia’s involvement with the Ukraine tarbaby is making Russia stronger and richer in some mysterious manner, and that he’s playing 5D chess and has the West and Ukraine right where he wants them.
They are right that Putin is not down with the trans nonsense, as far as I know. For some that right there is enough.
I think we know about the oligarchs, which arose out of Summers* and Sachs bad advice, to russian policy makers like Gaidar and Sobchak, Putin worked under Sobchak, before he was promoted to the top ranks of the security service, a similar pattern accrued across Central Asia, Azerbaijan Kazakhstan, and places West
the rise of the Siloviki was a parallel development, the power vaccuum that came from the insecurity that characterized mid 90s Russia and associated states,
*see his episode with the Chinese princeling and Epstein,
I don’t trust Russians, wonder why, but I don’t make them 10 feet tall, which is what officials like Christopher Steele and Fiona Hill have done for a long time, as did their proteges like Danchenko,
the apologies for China, are more concerning as well as that for the clique that currently runs Iran,