There's a long, long interview in the NY Times with Tucker Carlson today. The interview confirms pretty much everything I already thought about Carlson's politics and his personality. Regular readers know I don't think much of the guy and haven't for a while now.
Tucker is someone who talks a lot about being transparent and honest but he's really neither of those things. In fact I think a lot of the fascination with him comes from the fact that most of what he says isn't straight-forward, it's a puzzle designed to draw people in. Is he saying what I think he's saying?
If this interview shows anything it's that it takes careful and persistent questioning to get him to say anything close to honest. He'd much rather tap-dance around issues and avoid owning up to anything and often outright deny having said things that he said. Honestly and transparency really isn't his game.
I think you could take the text of this long interview and find lots of examples of that, but I'm just going to take one: His interview with Nick Fuentes. This one is interesting because interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro refuses to let him run away. But it takes a really, really long time to get anything close to the truth.
Again, just to be clear, I'm not saying this is the most important issue of conversation. I'm saying it's representative of who Carlson really is and how he operates.
Obviously, Turning Point is just one organization trying to reach youth on the right, but you also have Nick Fuentes, the far-right white nationalist influencer who’s called Hitler “effing cool,” who also has a huge following among young right-leaning men. How do you see Fuentes in terms of the future of the right? It’s so hard to know. I’ll tell you my instinct on it. Most of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion, to some extent immigration, are less resonant long-term than debates about economics. I think the main frustration among young people is not just that the composition of the country is changing too fast, which it definitely is. But the main concerns are about the lack of economic opportunity for American young people, who are totally screwed at a more profound level than people acknowledge. Older people do not acknowledge that.
He's immediately looking to change the subject and it becomes almost ludicrous after the next question when he says five times in a row he doesn't know anything about the guy he interviewed for two hours.
So you see that as Fuentes’s power waning? For sure. I don’t know about Fuentes in particular. I wasn’t even aware of Fuentes. I’m just in a different world, right? I read The New York Times or whatever. I’m older, OK? So I’m not an expert on Fuentes’s reach or even what he’s saying day to day. I really don’t know. But he has been caricatured as a race guy, which he may be, by the way. He was mad about the Jews or Black people or whatever, but I’m just telling you I think the future, the energy, not just on the right, but I think right and left agree on this, under 30, is that young people have been shafted by older people, particularly by the baby boomers, people born between ’46 and ’64.
And as part of his not knowing anything about Fuentes, he says he "has been caricatured as a race guy, which he may be, by the way." Caricatured? That means his reputation as a "race guy" has been distorted or exaggerated. But then Carlson immediately backtracks and admits "he may be" exactly what people say he is. The whole point of this claim and immediate reversal is that Tucker Carlson doesn't know anything about Nick Fuentes. And then we're back to changing the subject.
Fuentes wants America to be a white Christian nation among other things. Well, he’s very good at offending The New York Times, but I think the real issues are not about Fuentes or even about race.
Everything about Tucker these days is about what is moral and right (himself) and what is evil and wrong (Trump). And here, after claiming to know nothing about Fuentes, Tucker is confronted with who Fuentes is. But instead of just admitting that Fuentes is a racist, Tucker jabs back that he's good at "offending The New York Times."
There are two things happening here. One, Carlson is making an argument that the people who think Fuentes is a racist are all effete pansies, i.e. the kind of people who work for left-leaning newspapers and like to clutch their pearls alot.
And secondly, in a more immediate sense, Tucker is lashing out at the interviewer for not allowing him to change the subject. What he's saying is: You've asked me this three times and I've made it clear I don't want to go there. Back off! Instead of backing off, the interviewer just pointed out exactly what Carlson was doing.
I can tell you don’t want to talk about Fuentes. Well, I don’t have a lot to say. I just think, like, OK, he said naughty things.
"Naughty things" is once again a way to minimize someone praising Hitler and Stalin (which Fuentes did on Tucker's show). Calling that "naughty" instead of insane or egregiously stupid or racist is once again Carlson's attempt to suggest this is something only the over-sensitive elites at the NY Times would care about. And Carlson's subtext once again is to move on. And this is where Carlson really starts to squirm because the interviewer refuses to move on.
Well, you caused a big uproar when you had him on your show. I didn’t cause anything. People got hysterical. How can you talk to this man? I’ve interviewed Ted Cruz, who’s calling for the murder of innocents. I don’t think Fuentes is doing that.
But that conversation [with Fuentes] was pretty friendly. People say that. I mean, whatever. I’m naughty for talking to Fuentes.
But you’ve been doing this for decades. I have watched you and your shows for a very long time, and you obviously have a very savvy understanding of how to approach your interviews and how they’re going to land. I don’t know about that. I don’t think I’m that savvy. Maybe I’m underselling myself.
Why did you want to handle it the way that you did? You started with talking about his background and where he grew up. It’s a different kind of interview than the one with Ambassador Huckabee. I’ve known Huckabee for over 30 years. He’s been a public figure for over 30 years.
But one was prosecutorial, you were building a case. The other one was friendly. If I agreed with everything Fuentes said, I would just say so. The effort to divine my motives, when I state my motives clearly. I think I’m telling the truth.
Hysterical. Naughty. The murder of innocents. The language games are pretty obvious. I'll skip forward to the bit where Carlson finally spells out his moral calculus for his own behavior.
But the point is, who do you think is more morally repulsive: Ted Cruz or Nick Fuentes?
Who do you think is more morally repulsive? Ted Cruz! Ted Cruz is a sitting U.S. senator who has called for the killing of people who did nothing wrong, whole populations, who advocated for this war. Nick Fuentes is a kid. He’s like 26 or 27. He has no power except his words. Here you have a public official who we pay, who has actual power, who’s voting for things, who’s making policy decisions. And those decisions would include, in fact they are focused on, the murder of people who did nothing wrong. And yet no one thinks it’s a big deal. If there’s tape of Nick Fuentes saying we should kill people because we hate their parents or it’s OK to kill children, I would love to see the tape because that’s disgusting. And that’s basically what the entire U.S. Senate does every single day and no one notices. Nick Fuentes said something naughty that I disagreed with. He made fun of things that I don’t think I would ever make fun of.
He’s a white nationalist who has denied the Holocaust. OK, but is that worse than killing kids?
There are so many obvious problems here starting with the false claim that Ted Cruz is killing kids, which is the sort of reasoning you'd get from a Columbia undergrad camping out under a "gays for Gaza" sign. And sure enough, asked later which kids Ted Cruz had killed, Carlson's camp sent back a one word answer: "Gaza."
Cruz definitely supported Israel's response to the war launched against Israel by Hamas from Gaza, but he never called for the killing of people at random, much less kids, who "did nothing." On the contrary, he supported Israel's effort to eradicate Hamas, the actual terrorists who murdered 1,200 Israelis on 10/7 (and took hundreds more hostage). To say Tucker is overstating his case about Ted Cruz is putting it mildly.
Carlson is also playing games about what Fuentes supports. What does Carlson think the Holocaust was? It was the systematic killing of millions of people including kids. Nick Fuentes praises the people who carried out that mass murder as "cool" and snickers about the deaths of those children. I'm not sure how a moral person, which Carlson repeatedly claims to be, can minimize that as "naughty" and something that "offends the NY Times."
Ironically, NY Times reporter Walter Duranty famously downplayed the Holodomor, the mass famine engineered by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. When Nick Fuentes told Tucker he was an admirer of Stalin, Tucker promised to come back to that and never did. Even now, weeks later, he has nothing negative to say about it. In that way, he's not so different from Duranty. He's content to overlook it.
Carlson's overall argument is that we should care very much about the behavior of Israel killing people in Gaza. We should all be righteously angry not only at Benjamin Netanyahu but at anyone who supports him. But also, who cares if someone is making light of the Holocaust and celebrating Hitler and Stalin as heroes.
There's no way to square this circle, morally speaking. So when the topic comes up again, Tucker is clearly exasperated and just wants to avoid talking about it.
Since you mentioned Nick Fuentes, I have one last question. [Laughs]
You opened the door. I don’t care about Nick Fuentes!
He is not a JD Vance fan. He’s called him a race traitor because of his marriage to Usha, who is Indian American. I don’t care!
Wait, let me finish the question. Given how influential Fuentes is right now —— Is he?
Is he not? I don’t know, he doesn’t seem to be. He didn’t get us into war with Iran. Like, who cares, actually? That’s kind of what I’m saying. All of this is like a sideshow.
There's a long rant about why it's a sideshow which is yet another attempt to change the subject. But ultimately, Carlson gives up.
OK. I wish I hadn’t done the Fuentes interview.
Really? Yeah, it was totally not worth it. It was kind of interesting, I guess. But I added to the distraction.
He still won't say that Fuentes is a bad guy or that Holocaust denial is more than "naughty." Or that fanboying Stalin is monstrous and stupid. The only criticism Tucker can manage of Fuentes is that he was a distraction.
Why is it so hard for Tucker to say Nick Fuentes is a racist? It's not like Fuentes is trying to hide it. Even if Tucker really believes Ted Cruz is a worse person, why can't he say what Fuentes is? Why do his moral judgments, which he's eager to make of others, come to a stop at Fuentes?
I won't speculate, but Carlson clearly can't bring himself to say what is true about Fuentes. He would rather squirm and try to change the subject for 20 minutes than simply say Nick Fuentes is a racist creep. Whatever the reason for his reluctance, I don't think it's because Tucker is such an honest, moral person. There's clearly more to it than that.
Update: I wanted to stay focused on his Fuentes denial but here's another case from the same interview regarding Trump. Mr. Honest Transparency just denies he said what he said even though it's on video.
NYT: "You've been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist"
— Ryan Saavedra (@RyanSaavedra) May 2, 2026
Tucker Carlson: "I have not said that"
NYT: You said, "Here's a leader mocking the Gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of Gods, and exalting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist?"
TC:… pic.twitter.com/7YZyngfw7U
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