Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, among others, are spiraling off into new dimensions of awful. Ace has the details of the Carlson story well-covered, in this post and in this one. The title of the former, just to give you a taste of what he’s talking about: “Taqiyya Qatarlson: The CIA Is Preparing a Criminal Referral Against Me Just Because I Was Acting as a Foreign Agent for Iran.” The title of the latter: “Axios ‘Journalist:’ The White House Says That Everything Tucker Carlson Is Saying Is B******t.”

As for Megyn, she’s in a feud with Mark Levin in which she said he has a micropenis. I am not making that up; that’s the level at whcih she’s operating these days. Well you might ask, how would you know, Megyn?

Micropenis Mark @marklevinshow thinks he has the monopoly on lewd. He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis. https://t.co/7cl3Efc3N7

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) March 15, 2026

But rather than get any deeper into the weedy details, I’ll just say that I think part of what’s happening is this (a quote from a response to Megyn on X):

Often happens to those who experience a very long and successful run. Something snaps and their ego’s invincibility trait goes haywire.

In other words, in the fight for clicks and without anyone setting external limits on them anymore, they get very full of themselves. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. For Carlson and Kelly, their previous employer Fox News used to act as the falconer and was a check on their wilder tendencies. Released from those constraints and wildly successful on their own terms, things fall apart, and those things are Carlson and Kelly. They’re not the only ones, either.

Over twenty(!) years ago I wrote about a similar phenomenon in connection with bloggers but also pundits in general:

But I think they (we) do need to be careful not to get carried away with the sheer brilliance of their (our) rapier wit and trenchant opinions.

Alone in front of the computer (or, increasingly less often, a pad of paper), the pundit/blogger sits. Inspiration strikes, and the need to be wittier, sharper (there’s that word again!), more opinionated–to be noticed–rises up in folks who tend to be pretty witty and sharp to begin with. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a cliche because it has some truth to it–and the sharper the words the mightier they sometimes sound, especially in the solitude of the act of composition. And once put down and published, they can’t be recalled.

Then there’s the group aspect. Bloggers and pundits write in isolation, but they’re not really in isolation at all, except physically. Mentally and emotionally they are part of one huge mass shouting out at each other and at everybody else, the sounds of the exchange echoing and ricocheting and reverberating all over the country–and in some cases the world. As such, we influence each other greatly. It’s not even a case of following the herd, it’s more a case of being influenced by the opinions of others, a process we are all susceptible to no matter how independent we may think we are. We influence each other directly by our words, and also indirectly by the sense of competition that’s inherent in this pundit/blogger game–the need, for some at least, to try to outdo each other.

So what’s the result? Sometimes it’s wonderful–in fact, since I’m a fan of blogs, I’d say it’s often wonderful–a liveliness of writing and thinking and interacting that you just can’t get in the staid old MSM. There’s an energy here, and part of it is the energy that comes with a bunch of sharp (in several senses of the word) and verbal people mixing it up and trying to say intelligent things in a way that’s interesting to read. Sometimes it segues into a group of people trying to say outrageous things, either to amuse or to stir up or out of anger or the desire to call attention to themselves, or some of the above or all of the above.

When is the line crossed and it becomes a feeding frenzy? I don’t have the answer; each person has to decide that for him/herself. But when there’s a lot of blood in the water and people find that their own entrails, and those of their allies, are hanging out–that could be a sign.

The only thing that’s changed is that the ascendance of social media has made it worse.

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