My Own Tucker Carlson Theory : The Other McCain

Posted on | July 26, 2026 | No Comments

Does this look like a sane man to you?

Raise your hand if you have a beef with the Republican Party establishment. Everybody’s hand is up, am I correct? Now, keep your hand up if you feel that the Official Conservative Movement is often ineffective and sometimes not really conservative at all. Pretty much everyone still has their hand up, I believe. It is fair to say that, the more conservative you are, the more discontented you are with the institutions and “leaders” who are supposed to represent your point of view.

At the same time, however, what are you going to do? We try as much as we can to steer things in the right direction, and occasionally express our outrage at the ballot box — hat-tip to those Texans who finally dumped John Cornyn — but we know that it’s bad tactics to form circular firing squads. Keep your fire aimed downrange is always good advice in politics, and there are always plenty of liberals targets to aim at.

Notice how I’ve avoided getting into the intramural skirmishes over the Iran War, J.D. Vance, etc.? Y’all want to argue over that stuff, go ahead, but it seems to me there are more important battles to fight, so I’ve mostly stayed out of it. Likewise with the ongoing Tucker Carlson drama. Except for one post last November — “Has Tucker Carlson Lost His Mind? (And Is This Kind of Insanity Contagious?)” — I’ve permitted that saga to continue without adding any commentary of my own. Why publicize such an embarrassment? He was “our guy” for a long time, now he’s become a divisive figure, and I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by constantly spotlighting this unfortunate situation.

Some of my friends, however, haven’t chosen to emulate my example, and spend a lot of time “monitoring the situation,” with daily updates on the latest outrage. In the process, they tend to engage in speculation about Carlson’s motives. Is he “Tucker Qatarlson,” bribed by Arab money to promote anti-Israel messages? Or, as some have suggested, was he always secretly a Jew-hater who has in recent years finally decided to reveal The Real Tucker Carlson? My friends debate these theories often enough that I feel the need to state clearly my own beliefs.

Can we rule out the possibility that Tucker Carlson is exhibiting symptoms of organic brain damage or a degenerative neurological disorder? “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive brain disease linked to repeated head injuries, causing memory loss, behavior changes, and mood swings.” I don’t know if Tucker has suffered “repeated head injuries,” just like I have no idea whether he might have contracted syphilis many years ago and is now in the dreaded tertiary stage of that terrible disease. Has he been experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs? Psilocybin has become a trendy treatment for depression, but its crazy-making potential should not be ignored.

The Just Plain Crazy Theory has to be considered, but I will leave it to psychiatric experts to explore that possibility. It seems to me that the most obvious explanation for Tucker Carlson’s recent “issues” (as we may diplomatically phrase it) is this: Whatever his grudges against the Republican Party and the conservative movement may have been prior to April 2023, this was the decisive turning-point:

On the morning of Monday, April 24, 2023, Fox News dismissed Carlson and the executive producer of his evening show. . . .
Fox did not provide a reason for Carlson’s termination. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Chairman of Fox Corporation Rupert Murdoch was responsible for the firing, and that a pending lawsuit from former Fox producer Abby Grossberg and Carlson’s coverage of the January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection both influenced the decision. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Carlson was dismissed due to private messages in which he criticized Fox’s management, using vulgar and offensive language. In May, The New York Times reported that in one such message Carlson expressed racist views by criticizing three Trump supporters who were beating one antifa activist: “It’s not how white men fight.”

For six years after he replaced Bill O’Reilly in the 8 p.m. time slot at Fox News, Tucker was the draft-ox of the network’s primetime lineup — the most-watched man in cable news, the biggest media star of the MAGA era, and he lost his job because of (a) a disgruntled former producer’s lawsuit and (b) some rude text messages? If Carlson felt himself to be the victim of an injustice, certainly many would agree he had grounds for feeling that way. Fox News settled Grossberg’s lawsuit for $12 million. She claimed that the network set her up to “take the fall” in the Dominion voting systems defamation lawsuit against FNC.

At any rate, my basic theory is that Tucker Carlson’s trajectory for the past three years is basically his revenge against Fox News and, as collateral damage, also against the conservative movement.

Imagine how it feels to have been the King of Cable News, then suddenly to be hurled into the exile of podcasting, by a bunch of corporate assholes freaked out about a couple of lawsuits. Anyone might be discombobulated by such an experience, and I return to what I explained at the start — all of us have our own gripes with the Republican Party and “mainstream” conservatism. Getting fired from Fox News gave Tucker Carlson an excuse to “go nuclear” and air all the grievances he might previously have kept quiet about for the sake of his career ambitions.

Less than months after Carlson’s unceremonious ouster from Fox News, Hamas launched the deadly October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and instantly American university campuses were overrun by radical students accusing Israel of “genocide.” To be anti-Israel was now The Current Thing™ for cool kids, at a time when Tucker was eager to build his online audience. We may further surmise that it did not escape Carlson’s notice that his downfall at Fox News involved a person named Grossberg.

Ex-FNC producer Abby Grossberg appears on MSNBC in 2023.

You may say that this was just a coincidence, and I might agree, but what matters — the relevant factor — is what Tucker Carlson thinks. Many people have been shocked by the rapidity with which Carlson turned into a peddler of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but as the old feminist saying goes, “The personal is the political.” And it seems to me that such strictly personal grievances, related to his being fired from Fox News in 2023, make much more sense in explaining what happened to Carlson than any speculation about secret payments from Qatar.

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