Tucker Carlson Told On Himself—And I Believe Him

What the pickup truck interview with the New York Times revealed about his methodology, his motives, and why he's not the authority you think he is

I haven’t spoken much about Tucker Carlson, but that’s not to say I haven’t had plenty to say about him, especially in conversations with friends and colleagues behind the scenes. On Sunday afternoon, after I came back from church and was getting ready to make lunch, I saw a notification pop up for a New York Times article titled “Once He Was Just Asking Questions, Now Tucker Carlson Is The Question” by Robert Draper.

Picture Tucker Carlson sitting in a pickup truck with a New York Times reporter during a six-day bird hunting trip across Maine, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Southwest Florida, casually admitting he knew exactly what he was doing with the Nick Fuentes interview. He didn’t prepare. He gave Fuentes the topics beforehand. He knew the backlash would come. He did it anyway.

I was actually shocked. Genuinely shocked that Carlson would sit down with a reporter from the New York Times. Like, this is Tucker we’re talking about, the guy who built his brand on attacking legacy media. And yet here he is, spending hours in a truck with a NYT reporter, telling on himself.

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ICYMI

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This isn’t the story of someone who made a mistake. This is the story of someone who admitted his methodology, revealed his motives, and showed us exactly who he is. And here’s the thing: I believe him.

Because Tucker Carlson isn’t a journalist, he’s not even “just asking questions” anymore. He’s a narrative crafter with an agenda, and this New York Times interview, combined with his own podcast admissions, proves it. Here’s why I think twice before treating anything he says as authoritative.

So what exactly did Tucker admit? Let me walk you through it.

The Setup: What Tucker Admitted

Let’s start with the basics of what happened with Nick Fuentes. Tucker gave this guy, known for Holocaust skepticism, admiration for Adolf Hitler, racist statements about JD Vance’s wife (calling Vance a “race traitor” for marrying an Indian woman), and disparaging Black people, a two-hour platform on his show. And he didn’t challenge him on any of it.

Why? A big part of it seems to be that Tucker saw Fuentes as a useful weapon against Ben Shapiro, Tucker’s long-time rival. They spent a good chunk of that interview, probably 20-30 minutes, on Shapiro. Framing Fuentes as a victim of Shapiro’s attacks, painting Shapiro as the villain for trying to “destroy” Fuentes back in college.

But when Fuentes mentions he’s “a fan” of Joseph Stalin, the guy responsible for 20 million deaths, Tucker says they’ll “circle back” to it. They never did. Tucker just moved the conversation along. No follow-up. No pushback. Nothing.

So you can spend half an hour letting Fuentes paint Shapiro as a villain, but when your guest casually drops that he admires one of history’s greatest mass murderers, you just... let that slide? That tells me everything about what Tucker’s actually doing here.

Now, when I first watched that interview, or I guess it was more of a summit between the two of them, I initially gave Tucker the benefit of the doubt. I assumed maybe he just didn’t spend much time online. Maybe he only had a minimal understanding of who Fuentes really was. I was surprised he wouldn’t have his staff look up Fuentes’s past statements, because clearly, this man has been well-known for his views. But I thought, okay, maybe Tucker just doesn’t do that level of prep.

Then I read the NYT article. Tucker told Robert Draper, explicitly: “Honestly, I was guilty of the same thing I criticize others for, which is judging him by a few three-minute clips I saw.”

The two had dinner at Tucker’s house in Maine the night before the interview. Tucker could see that Fuentes, who came alone, “was rattled, like he thought it was a hit or something.”

In a text exchange with Draper, Fuentes confirmed he “was very uneasy” and “thought that the show would most likely be a full-on ambush or at least very negative.” But after Tucker went over what the discussion topics would be, Fuentes said, “I felt much more comfortable.”

So Tucker had no intention from the get-go of challenging Nick Fuentes on anything. He pre-cleared the topics. He made Fuentes comfortable. This wasn’t an oversight or poor preparation; it was deliberate.

And then Tucker told Draper: “I just want to be clear about this: I knew what would happen. And I felt that, at this point in my life, I can take it.”

He knew. He absolutely knew what he was doing.

The Method: Selective Interrogation as Strategy

Here’s what really set it for me. Tucker is completely capable of doing aggressive, well-researched interviews when he wants to. We know this because in his November 12th podcast episode, he spent nearly half of his almost two-hour show griping about Mark Levin, pulling multiple clips of Levin’s statements. His staff did extensive research. They prepared. He had the receipts.

Seriously, who cares that much about Mark Levin? There’s really nobody under the age of 60 listening to Mark Levin at this point. Yet Tucker invested all that time and resources into dismantling him.

So we know Tucker can prepare when he wants to. We know he has staff. We know he has resources. We know he’s capable of digging into someone, pulling clips, and educating himself before sitting down with them. He just chose not to do it with Nick Fuentes.

Look at how he treated Ted Cruz. The article mentions their interview from the month before the Fuentes sit-down, where Tucker and Cruz argued about Israel, Russia, and U.S. foreign policy. Cruz wondered aloud about Tucker’s “obsession with Israel,” and Tucker accused him of implying antisemitism “in a sleazy, feline way.”

And you know what? I think Cruz was suggesting exactly that. I think he was calling Tucker antisemitic. And, I don’t think Tucker is antisemitic.

In fact, I think accusations of antisemitism are becoming abusive and frivolous. But I do think that Tucker is being deeply irresponsible. He’s toying with revisionism, giving platforms to people who deny or minimize the Holocaust, letting statements go unchallenged that would make any serious journalist pause. That’s not antisemitism, that’s recklessness. It’s narrative crafting at the expense of truth and basic journalistic standards.

Later, Tucker told Draper directly, “I have contempt for Ted Cruz. Not just in his public positions, but in the way that he lives.” I was genuinely curious about that statement. Is he criticizing Cruz’s policy positions? Or is he accusing Cruz of being an out-of-touch elite? Because he said this while sitting in a pickup truck during a six-day, four-state bird-hunting trip to “escape the wreckage.” Look, I’m not anti-hunting or anti-vacation, but quail hunting across four states for six days is not exactly the working man’s way to blow off steam. Glass houses, Tucker.

And here’s another thing that drives this point home: Ben Shapiro has publicly offered, multiple times—on his show, on X, in interviews—to sit down with Tucker. Cameras rolling or off, his show or Tucker’s, hash it out face-to-face. Tucker has never taken him up on it. Not once. Instead, he’ll spend an hour on his podcast dismantling Shapiro with pre-edited clips while Shapiro has no chance to respond in real time.

Same pattern with Ted Cruz after their interview: Cruz reached out to clear the air, and Tucker went on air and said he has “contempt” for Cruz. When you only engage with people who can’t fight back in the moment, or when you pre-clear topics with guests you’re sympathetic to like Fuentes, that’s not courage. That’s not “just asking questions.” That’s a very deliberate pattern of selective engagement.

This is the permission structure he’s building. When someone with Tucker’s reach treats extremist views as simply “another perspective” without challenge, he’s not informing his audience, he’s mainstreaming those views. He’s signaling that these ideas are within acceptable discourse.

And you know what? It worked. His subscriber numbers went up after the Fuentes interview, from 1.46 million to 1.5 million. His audience knows what they’re getting, and apparently, many of them want it.

Haunted by Iraq

Now, I want to be fair here because I think there’s something driving Tucker’s behavior that’s actually understandable, even if the execution is reckless.

Tucker has publicly expressed deep regret about his support for the Iraq War. He’s called it “one of the worst things I’ve ever done.” And I think that guilt, that determination not to be fooled again, not to cheerlead another disastrous military intervention, is a huge part of what’s motivating his current foreign policy stance.

At its core, that’s admirable. Genuinely. Learning from your mistakes, especially mistakes that contributed to a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed a country, and cost trillions of dollars, that should change you. It should make you skeptical. It should make you cautious about who’s beating the drums for the next conflict.

But Tucker has swung so far in the other direction, with such emotional intensity, that he’s become reckless in a completely different way.

He’s so determined not to be the guy who promoted the Iraq War that he’ll platform Holocaust skeptics if they’re critical of Israel. He’s so focused on not being fooled by “neocons” again that he won’t challenge obvious extremism if it’s coming from someone who shares his foreign policy skepticism. He’s so consumed by this mission that he’s created permission structures for views that should never be mainstreamed.

The motivation is understandable. The execution is dangerous.

You can be deeply skeptical of military intervention, you can question U.S. foreign policy commitments, you can criticize the “neocon” approach to the Middle East, all of that is fair game. But you don’t get to do it by giving unchallenged platforms to people who deny the Holocaust or admire Hitler or call interracial marriage “race treason.”

Tucker’s Iraq War guilt doesn’t excuse his current irresponsibility. If anything, it makes it more frustrating because I can see where it’s coming from, and I still think he’s handling it terribly.

The Four Minutes of Self-Awareness

In the November 12 episode, Tucker devoted roughly 90 minutes to attacking Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro. But buried in the middle of this rant is a four-minute confession that shows he knows exactly what he’s doing, and he can’t stop himself.

Tucker describes being on stage with Megyn Kelly the day Dick Cheney died. Instead of staying respectful about a man who had just passed, he went after Liz Cheney. He says, “I said something awful about Liz Cheney actually. I said that her father would be ashamed of her and if I had a daughter like that I’d probably kill myself.”

Then he pauses. He reflects.

“Which is an awful thing to say. It’s kind of hard to believe I said that.”

He explains exactly why he did it: Because he dislikes Liz Cheney personally, because he disagrees with her politically, he told himself “that you could say anything you want about Liz Cheney. She’s not really human.”

Then comes the apology: “So I just want to say I’m sorry to Liz Cheney and I mean that too... there is never an excuse to talk about people like that.”

And he warns his audience: “The fear is that we become Mark Levin by staring at Mark Levin too much, we become him... The real fight is against our own nature, our own natural inclination to in the face of Mark Levin become Mark Levin.”

He even predicts his own relapse: “Of course, I will do it probably by the end of the show I’ll do it again because I’m prone to that... but we need to say every single time, ‘I’m sorry.’”

My husband and I were listening to this part, and we both kind of looked at each other like, okay, this is actually pretty profound. He’s recognizing the trap. He’s apologizing. He’s warning people not to become what they hate.

And then he does it again. Immediately. For the next 40 minutes, Tucker:

• Calls Mark Levin “filled with hate... obviously”

• Says he’s “already there [evil]”

• Accuses him of wanting to “murder civilians, children”

• Claims his rhetoric is “a call to violence.”

• Says Ben Shapiro has “contempt for the people” and “will not be a factor in five years”

The self-awareness flickers for exactly four minutes and then it’s extinguished. The apology functions like a reset button, a way to clear his conscience so he can repeat the behavior with fresh justification.

This is what I mean when I say Tucker isn’t who he claims to be. He can identify the exact trap he falls into. He can apologize publicly for it. He can warn others not to do it. He can explain why it’s morally wrong. And then he does it again immediately.

The Faith Shield

Okay, this is the part that made my husband and me actually stop in our tracks while I was playing the NYT article audio out loud.

A lifelong Protestant, Mr. Carlson said that he had recently grown ‘much more devout’ and that he had spent a year and a half reading the Bible in its entirety. What drove him to do so, he said, was his belief that ‘the spiritual war is real’ in America. He now recites the Lord’s Prayer daily, he said, as a guard against ‘hating people on the basis of their race, or just hating them in general.’

Call me crazy, but I have never in my life recited the Lord’s Prayer so I could be less racist or to fend off racist feelings.

But here’s what really concerns me: Tucker says he recites the Lord’s Prayer daily to guard against hatred. But listen to his own words about the people he disagrees with.

He has “contempt” for Ted Cruz—not just his positions, but “the way he lives.” He calls Mark Levin “filled with hate... obviously” and “already there [evil].” He accuses Levin of wanting to “murder civilians, children” and says his rhetoric is “a call to violence.” He spends hours on his podcast dismantling Ben Shapiro, saying he has “contempt for the people” and “will not be a factor in five years.”

Tucker claims he doesn’t hate anyone. His behavior tells a completely different story.

And here’s where this becomes dangerous, and I mean really dangerous: When you’re consumed by contempt for certain people, when that contempt blinds you, you’ll give a platform to anyone who shares that contempt, even if they’re trafficking in extremism. You won’t challenge them because they’re saying what you want to hear about your enemies.

Think about it. Fuentes criticizes Shapiro? Tucker lets him talk for 30 minutes, unchallenged, framing Fuentes as a victim. Fuentes says he’s a fan of Stalin? Well, he said it while criticizing people Tucker hates, so Tucker just moves on. No follow-up. Because in that moment, Fuentes was useful. He was saying things Tucker wanted said about his rivals.

This isn’t journalism. This isn’t even strategic narrative crafting. This is being so blinded by your hatred for certain individuals that you’ll platform dangerous views just because they align against your enemies. You’re so focused on taking down Shapiro, Levin, Cruz, the “neocons,” that you don’t even notice—or don’t care—that you’re mainstreaming Holocaust skepticism and racial hatred in the process.

I mean, Tucker needs daily prayer to guard against hatred? Maybe the prayer isn’t working. Or maybe he’s so convinced his contempt is justified, that these people deserve it, that he doesn’t even recognize it as hatred anymore.

Now look, I’m not here to question Tucker’s personal faith or his walk with God. That is his to have, and it’s between him and the Lord. But I am here to say that I find it deeply concerning when someone uses their proclaimed faith as a shield, as a way to create trust and authority with their audience.

Tucker will often make statements about what is or isn’t Christian, what beliefs Christians should or shouldn’t have. He’s even categorized Christian Zionism as heresy. Those are bold theological statements to make publicly. And I personally feel, and you can come at me if you want to, that Tucker uses his alleged faith as a cover. To lower barriers between himself and his listeners, he creates an aura of trustworthiness. You know, Christian to Christian, he would never lead you astray.

Except that’s exactly what he does.

The fruit speaks for itself. A man who says he needs daily prayer to guard against racial hatred just gave an unchallenged platform to someone who traffics in exactly that kind of extremism. A man who invokes Christian principles to build authority regularly engages in the kind of personal attacks and character assassination that he himself admits are wrong. A man who warns others not to “become Mark Levin” by hating people spends the next 40 minutes doing exactly that.

I’m not questioning his personal relationship with God. But I am encouraging you to use discernment when listening to people who proclaim their faith loudly while producing, well, rotten fruit. When someone tells you they’re praying daily to fight hatred while demonstrating obvious contempt and giving platforms to extremists who feed that contempt? Believe the actions, not the words.

What This Means

Tucker has demonstrated:

• He chose not to prepare for Fuentes while preparing extensively for others

• He knew the backlash would come and did it strategically anyway

• He sees himself as more of a “narrative crafter” than a journalist

• He can identify his own moral failures, apologize for them, and immediately repeat them

• He’s stuck in a pattern he either can’t or won’t escape

Tucker Carlson is not here to inform you. He’s not here to guide you through the complexities of the world to help you come to your own conclusions. He’s a narrative crafter. His goal is to convince you of his worldview, not to empower you to decide your own.

I really don’t care who he has on his podcast. But he just sits there like a lump on a log, letting people espouse whatever they want, barely giving any pushback unless it’s something he specifically disagrees with. We saw him being completely capable of pushing back when it came to Ted Cruz. So we know he can do it when he wants to.

And I want to be clear about something else: Tucker Carlson is not a unifier. He is sowing division, and he knows he’s sowing division. Whether you want to admit it or not, he continues to attack and criticize fellow conservatives and people on the right. There’s this rise of democratic socialism among young people, significant issues being contributed to by the left, and yet Tucker’s primary focus seems to be criticizing and attacking people to the right.

Now, that’s not to say you can’t criticize your own side, of course, you can. But it’s the disproportion of it that concerns me.

When Someone Tells You Who They Are

Let me bring this back to where we started: Tucker Carlson, in a pickup truck during a multi-state hunting trip, telling a New York Times reporter exactly what he did and why.

No ambiguity. No “just asking questions.”

And here’s what I keep coming back to: he told us. He actually told us. He said he knew the backlash would come. He admitted he didn’t prepare. He explained he did it strategically. We don’t have to speculate about his methodology or his motives because he laid it all out.

The question isn’t whether Tucker should have a platform. Free speech matters. Controversial conversations matter. I believe that deeply.

The question is whether you’re going to treat him as an authoritative source, as someone genuinely seeking truth and trying to inform you, or as someone with an admitted agenda who selectively applies his principles based on who he likes and who he doesn’t.

I’d argue strongly for the latter.

And that’s what concerns me most. Not just Tucker himself, but the permission structure he’s building for his audience. Because when you mainstream extremism by treating it as just another viewpoint, when you let Holocaust revisionism slide because the person saying it also criticizes your enemies, when you create an environment where those views feel acceptable, that doesn’t just go away. It calcifies. It becomes normal. And the people absorbing it? They’re not all going to have the critical distance to recognize what’s happening.

I think I understand some of where this comes from. The Iraq War guilt is real and understandable. But understanding the motivation doesn’t excuse the execution. And Tucker’s own four-minute confession proved he knows better. He can see the trap. He just can’t, or won’t, stop falling into it.

So when someone tells you who they are, when they admit their methodology in a New York Times interview, when they confess they knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway—believe them.

I do.

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Drop a comment below to share with the class.

If you’re a regular Tucker watcher, tell me honestly—after reading this, has anything about the way he handles certain guests started to bother you? Or do you think this is all overblown? Where are you landing right now?

Tucker fans: what’s one thing in this piece you think I got wrong or overstated? I’m open—lay it on me.