Everybody Knows You Never Go Full Duranty

Tucker Carlson becomes a full-fledged Kremlin toady while getting humiliated by Vladimir Putin in the process

I have a confession to make. I secretly semi-enjoy Tucker Carlson. At least I once did, before he went off the deep end and got fired by Fox News, despite being their top-rated talker, for donning a tinfoil-hat and imagining lethal Intelligence Community conspiracies everywhere. Including against himself.

Before that, while Tucker was frequently annoying, with his bowtied young fogey routine, he also offered sharp-elbowed insights which few in the media business, even its right-of-center quarters, dared utter openly (even though many of them agreed with Carlson privately, I can attest). Tucker is a man very much of The Swamp, born and bred, yet was willing to point out that our media elite is cliquish, callow, and corrupt, just like the political class it claims to critique, but it mostly just wants to hang around with at posh Georgetown parties.

It was bracing, therefore, when Tucker said the unsayable in early 2016 with a bombshell of a column in POLITICO which posited that the sudden and unexpected rise of Donald Trump in U.S. politics was attributable to the failure of our political elite, especially the Republican Party, which Tucker was enjoying watching Trump tear apart. Tucker predicted Trump would win, still a ridiculous idea at the beginning of 2016, and of course he was right. Ever since then, Carlson has been the most prominent face pushing the intellectual side, such as it is, of MAGA Nation.

Regrettably for Tucker and his oeuvre, that embrace of Trump came at a high cost. As MAGA descended into conspiracy theorizing about the Deep State to explain American politics, Carlson jumped on for the ride, insisting that “the Feds” were behind the 1/6 riot at the Capitol, as well as blaming the CIA for the JFK assassination. Evidence for such claims was weak, to be charitable, and Fox News leadership grew increasingly disenchanted with their nighttime star’s penchant for unsourced on-air dietrologia. This culminated in his abrupt defenestration from FNC last April, which gave Tucker no opportunity to bid farewell to his audience.

In truth, the wheels had come off the Carlson enterprise long before he was dumped by Fox News without warning. In the summer of 2021, an outraged Tucker told his viewers that the National Security Agency was spying on him and trying to get his show taken off the air. This charge was so absurd that NSA took the unprecedented step of publicly calling Carlson a liar, on the record. Nevertheless, Tucker kept at it, insisting that NSA was out to get him. As this newsletter pointed out at the time, the story Carlson told was nonsensical to anyone who understands how our spy agencies actually work, but that didn’t deter Tucker’s obsession with the Deep State. He kept insisting that our intelligence agencies are illegally manipulating Congress, for instance, without explaining how.