Last week I was looking for something new to watch on Netflix. I’m a casual consumer of the true crime genre and decided that the new eight-part dramatic series Monster: The Ed Gein Story looked interesting.
Not knowing anything about Ed Gein, other than what I had seen from the trailer, I clicked on the first episode, sat back with a bowl full of popcorn, and prepared to enjoy the “based on a true story” feature before me.
I was soon horrified by the gratuitous gore and twisted evil of what I was witnessing on my screen. However, I finished the episode.
No sooner than the “Next Episode” countdown began on my television that my wife, who saw my jaw literally drop at several points, asked me, “Are you going to watch the next one?”
I emphatically said “no” and turned off the TV. I had no interest in watching the rest of that unfold and subjecting myself to whatever evils Ed Gein had visited upon his small town in Wisconsin.
I had the same reaction to Tucker Carlson’s “interview” with white supremacist and Hitler-lover Nick Fuentes.
I’ve admired Tucker for some time. His turn during Covid and his continuing fearlessness to question not just the policies, but the “science” behind them was inspiring.
He continued to awe audiences as he fought for those who were imprisoned following J6. He never stopped questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 elections.
He asked the questions that everyday Americans were asking. Common sense questions. He demanded answers from those who should know better.
That’s why when he was fired from Fox News in 2023, many conservatives vowed never to watch the network again, and simultaneously wondered what Carlson’s next move was going to be. They wanted to follow him. And they did.
Tucker inevitably dove into the podcasting world, hosting a semi-regular show with compelling guests who told compelling stories. The man who claimed to have performed fellatio on Barack Obama while he smoked crack-cocaine was a standout moment.
Carlson parlayed the success of his newest conquest into the Tucker Carlson Network, featuring a more regular release schedule of podcast episodes, incorporated with subscriber-only material and project collaborations.
I was a regular consumer of Tucker’s content and shared his interest in the UAP phenomena, which he has discussed with a multitude of officials and eyewitnesses.
What I most enjoyed about Tucker’s program, be it on Fox or on his own platform, was his earnest intellectual curiosity. He genuinely wanted to know why things are the way they are, why people think the way they think, and what can be done to change outcomes for the better.
With all of that in mind, I began to watch Tucker’s interview with Fuentes soon after its release. I had seen the beginnings of the social media uproar, and rather than take those posts for face value, I exercised some intellectual curiosity of my own and ventured to come to my own conclusions.
I made it through perhaps one-third of the two-hour-plus interview.
I was repulsed by what I was hearing.
I wasn’t repulsed so much by Fuentes. While I wasn’t very familiar with his show and his specific worldview, I had seen selected clips online that people shared to exemplify his admiration for the likes of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. I knew what to expect from Fuentes.
I was repulsed by Tucker’s journalistic instincts that seemed to have fallen to the wayside during his time with an avowed white supremacist. Tucker laughed with Fuentes, asked him about his upbringing, and gave virtually no pushback on his ideals.
Watching someone who once questioned everything question almost nothing was shocking. I came to the same conclusion that many others did: Tucker’s silence was complicity.
In the week or so since the interview was made public, Tucker’s fall from Republican grace has only intensified.
After Zohran Mamdani’s win in NYC on Tuesday night, Tucker’s newsletter on Thursday proclaimed that Mamdani was most definitely not an anti-Semite, despite all of the evidence indicating that the Muslim mayor-elect had no love lost for Jews.
I don’t know what’s happened to Tucker or who he’s been listening to. But I do know that platforming aspiring Nazis like Fuentes and history revisionists like Darryl Cooper is to give them something they may never have had otherwise: credibility.
Tucker Carlson taught me to question everything. It’s unfortunate that I now have to question him.