There’s been a lot of brouhaha about Tucker Carlson’s unctuous “confession” to his brother Buckley (a lot of “ucks” there), saying that he deeply and contritely regrets his previous support of and campaigning for Trump. If you can stomach his sanctimonious mien, and his self-serving claim of outsized influence, here’s the clip:

But in all I’ve read on this, I haven’t seen anyone emphasize what’s so especially disingenuous about Carlson’s apology. As Churchill might say, he’s re-ratting. Remember this? It wasn’t so very long ago that the story came out, either; just three years (2023, prior to the 2024 election in which Tucker campaigned for Trump):

The latest filings in the case suggest Mr Carlson expressed his dislike of the outgoing US president two days before Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to derail lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election win.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” he wrote in a text sent on 4 January 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately,” he added.

Mr Carlson, the top-rated host on the conservative network, also appeared to denigrate the Trump presidency in these private messages, despite lauding his achievements on air.

“That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

Fancy, fancy, FANCY that. And all that time, Tucker had been pretending to like Trump – and then later in 2024 he campaigned for him.

Have people forgotten this? I’m puzzled; why are so many taking his apology seriously? I can understand why the left would, because it suits their purposes. But the right? I remember the revelation of Tucker’s hatred for Trump while at Fox because it surprised me at the time, and I filed it away as “Tucker Carlson is not ever ever to be trusted.” We discovered then that all that time he’d been pretending to be for Trump he really wasn’t.

Then again, which was the actual pretense? Was he just pretending to like Trump while at Fox, or were the emails the pretense and he was just pretending to hate him when he wrote them? And then later, during the 2024 election, what was Tucker pretending? Was he just supporting Trump then in order to get supposed influence over Vance or Trump? Or had he changed his mind once more and liked Trump again?

And now what is Carlson pretending? One thing I don’t think he’s pretending now is his hatred of Jews and Israel. I think it’s very sincere. His brother Buckley is quite his equal in that, as well:

But here I am, writing about Carlson again. Why? First of all, I think that he’s a fascinating case. And secondly, although I also think he has less influence on the right than his traffic would indicate, and that he’s following trends as much as he’s creating them, I think it works in both directions and that he does indeed have some influence in spreading the hyper-Buchananesque word and that his message does find traction, especially with young men.

I’ve written several previous pieces on Tucker’s transformation (see this list). But I want to add one more event that might have fostered it: the death of his father in March of 2025. Dick Carlson was a strong and colorful figure with a life of achievement, but among other things he was a “Christian Zionist,” a group that Tucker said in November of 2025 that he “dislikes more than anybody” and which he called “a heresy” It may be that, with his father’s death, Tucker finally felt free to more fully reveal his sentiments about Christian Zionists and Israel and Jews.