Tucker Carlson’s post-Fox News trajectory is a timeline of escalating provocation and plummeting credibility.
Its culmination: His Oct. 28 interview with Nick Fuentes, a sworn enemy of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and an America worth living in.
After leaving Fox in 2023, Carlson pivoted toward an independent, subscriber-based platform that increasingly catered to extremist voices, abandoning the broad conservative appeal that had made him a household name.
His September 3, 2024, hosting of Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper drew sharp rebukes from influential Republicans, highlighting Carlson’s willingness to amplify venomous narratives.
By September 10, leading conservative outlets decried Carlson’s endorsement of Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian.” The episode was a campaign season snag as November approached.
While Donald Trump clearly won the election, Carlson lost trust in 2025.
On June 17, he accused the president of complicity in war during Israel’s strikes on Iran, exposing tensions among MAGA supporters over foreign policy. The next day, Carlson confronted Sen. Ted Cruz, aggressively framing U.S. support for Israel as a betrayal of “America First” priorities.
Trump dismissed Carlson as “kooky” and emphasized his focus on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, signaling a rift. Carlson seemed unfazed.
His eulogy at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Sept. 21 prompted credible accusations of antisemitism.
The apex of this troubling trajectory came on Oct. 28, when Carlson sat down with Fuentes.
In that interview, Carlson expressed explicit hatred for Christian Zionists, calling them victims of a “brain virus.” This direct attack targeted key Trump allies, including Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, signaling an alignment with Fuentes’ anti-Israel views. It was a bold escalation of Carlson’s falling out with the president.
GOP leaders swiftly denounced the interview as legitimizing dangerous rhetoric, with Rep. Randy Fine branding Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America” at a subsequent Republican Jewish Coalition conference. By this point, Carlson had completed the full departure from mainstream relevance, leaving onetime GOP allies scrambling to repair the damage.
To understand the gravity of Carlson’s choices, it is essential to examine Fuentes himself, a figure whose poison is prolific. As early as 2019, Fuentes mocked Southern conservatives, denigrating their cultural heritage as backward. In 2024, he publicly rejected Protestantism in favor of a narrowly Catholic vision of “America First,” alienating the Evangelical base crucial to Trump’s coalition.
His rhetoric escalates to genocidal antisemitism: in July 2023, he called for a “holy war” against Jews. That same year, Fuentes ranted on his livestream that “women age like milk,” expressing a desire to marry a 16-year-old because “right when the milk is good, I want to start drinking the milk.”
Around this time, he instructed his followers to “raise your right hand, repeat after me: I will kill, rape, and die, for Nicholas J. Fuentes,” demanding a cult-like oath of violence and submission.
In his interview with Carlson, Fuentes called himself a “fan” of Joseph Stalin. Previously, he declared, “I love Hitler,” bestowing gushing compliments on the Nazi leader while targeting “Talmudic Jews” for eradication.
In 2024, Fuentes urged his followers to “withhold their votes” from Trump, with the obvious goal of throwing the election to Kamala Harris. Why? He explained as much years prior: “Destroy the GOP,” he demanded, proclaiming that “Christian Republican voters get screwed over because the GOP is run by Jews, atheists, and homosexuals.”
Earlier this year, Fuentes vented his hatred for Charlie Kirk by calling him a “Zionist puppet” who “sold out to the Jews,” then boasted that “I took your baby Turning Point USA, and I f----d it...We own you, we own TPUSA and we own this movement.”
Carlson decided to amplify Fuentes by interviewing him in an accommodating fashion. This came just weeks after eulogizing Charlie Kirk.
That signals not random provocation, but a monstrous deficit of character.
Indeed, Carlson prioritized spectacle over the concept of decency itself.
So, what drives Tucker Carlson? Here is my solid theory: Politics alone cannot explain the intensity of his animus. At its core, Carlson’s rage is personal, generational, and civilizational. It’s a reaction to the decline of WASPs, his tribe that founded and shaped America.
Born to a diplomat father and an heiress mother, educated at old-money prep schools, and immersed in the bi-coastal establishment, Carlson witnessed the crumbling of his society. He faced the rise of neoconservatives, arriviste trendsetters, and hostile globalists. His anger is, in essence, a grievance encoded in socioeconomic consciousness: a fallen aristocrat humiliated by his world being replaced.
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