A Few Quick Thoughts on Tucker Carlson and Foreign Influence Operations…
The other night I hosted a space with Eric Garland discussing the erstwhile Tucker Carlson for whom I once worked at the Daily Caller.
It was a rather difficult conversation but a necessary one. For while I have long liked Tucker I found it increasingly difficult to defend some of his decisions without recourse to a foreign influence frame and indeed there’s a lot of evidence that Tucker has been way close to Chinese, Likud, and Russian intelligence operations. I’ve warned Tucker about this closeness over the years. He can’t say he wasn’t warned.
I first met Tucker right after I graduated college and worked as a freelancer for the Daily Caller. Tucker even blurbed my book on Calvin Coolidge.
I more than repaid the favor and even recommended him to Roger Ailes when Ailes asked me if Tucker should have his own show. I said it was time for a WASP to be on national television. Ailes laughed—and then was fired from Fox when its proprietor was vacationing with Jerry Hall, his fourth wife. What happened afterwards were the inmates running the network.
At the Daily Caller I had a falling out with Tucker over how he was extremely close to neocon Jamie Weinstein who consistently and repeatedly pushed Likud narratives. Looking back at it now, the main money behind the Daily Caller, Foster Friess, who was an index fund billionaire, was an extremely sketchy guy, especially given his support of Likud and the Kurds. It was through my brief time at the Daily Caller that I learned before everyone else that Ginni Thomas is a nut.
There’s a lot of places we could go with the Tucker story. We could go there with Tucker’s ties to Iran contra. (Tucker’s father, who is now a lobbyist for the Orban government, was a kind of functionary for the Voice of America and a Savings and Loan bank. He was quickly drummed out of the State Department world after a brief stint as Ambassador to the Seychelles.)
Online there’s a discussion where Tucker wanted to be recruited by CIA but was rejected and I think, this too, could be explored.
In truth I read Tucker’s career as wanting to belong and I sense there’s a lot of resentment and indeed you see a lot of Gen X resentment in his show.
But I think we should look to his motherly issues and his deep seated dislike of women. He reportedly repeatedly called Trump lawyer Sidney Powell a cunt.
Those sentiments are also expressed at length in the lawsuit filed by Abby Grossman but truthfully they are sentiments I’ve heard Tucker express over the years in person and on the phone. He has a kind of casual misogyny which I always found to be something of a character defect. There was a kind of gleeful cruelty that I think he really delighted in. I saw how cruel he could be and how he enjoyed building a boy’s club of people around him who were one step away from Lord of the Flies.
Hurt people hurt people. This I know to be true.
We could even bring up Tucker’s mother mental health issues and how a lot of those issues can be heritable. It must have been rough growing up without a mom. Tucker repaid that by refusing to attend his mother’s funeral or to see her on her death bed. Imagine the kind of pain that must have caused and think for a moment about how that might have led to some hostility around women generally.
Tucker has also struggled over the years with substance abuse issues and was, I’m told, a part of Alcoholics Anonymous. For what it’s worth I think the addiction jumped. I think he became addict to the fame and despair porn he featured on his TV show. He made it seem like America was collapsing all the time because I suspect his private world was collapsing all the time. I know he was under constant stress that he was being monitored by multiple foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. Imagine the stress of that life and how awful it must be.
Tucker once told me that he thought they’d get him in the end and that he was prepared for it. Well, they got him. And he deserved it. He really deserved it.
For what it’s worth I don’t think Tucker’ll be the last person to lose their career over the way that Fox has behaved.
Now we see lawsuits moving against the Murdoch empire in Australia, the United Kingdom (by Harry and Meghan no less!), and America. Why it’s almost like there’s a concerted roll back of the Chinese-Liked compromised nonagenarian.
I also think it’s telling that he hired Bryan Freedman — the same attorney as the Emirati-compromised Michael Jackson and as the Israeli-compromised players in the Sony Hack.
Are we going to ignore this too? “Top Hollywood lawyer Bryan Freedman paid a $40,000 settlement after being accused of gang-raping a 17-year-old while in college.”
We shouldn’t.
