Tucker Carlson speaks with Bojan Pancevski of the WSJ:
‘No empire has ever ended in a more pointless, wasteful way.’
How did a patriotic American conservative who came of age in the Reagan era end up believing that Russia is a better place than the U. S.? He says that his evolution from a bow-tie wearing libertarian who supported U.S. interventions overseas to an antiestablishment agitator was catalyzed by two life-changing epiphanies.
The first one happened when he traveled to Iraq in 2004 during his time with CNN and witnessed the devastating effects of the U.S. invasion he wholeheartedly supported. This shattered his belief in America’s ability to administer global order.
The second revelation took place in 2021, at the table where we are having dinner, when he hosted a former senior U.S. official who, he says, revealed to him that the CIA had killed American citizens inside the U.S. He was left in a state of shock after his guest departed and then collapsed on his front porch. Two of his vertebrae had caved in, he says, and he was taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon, he says, told him that it could have been a stress-related injury.
Carlson has since doubled down on his opposition to U.S. policies and American global influence, which to his mind have made a “horrible mess” of the world since 9/11. Much like his left-wing opponents, he sees the U.S. as a destructive imperial power.
“Gay race communism isn’t an appealing export to anyone, and that’s what we are exporting,” he says, referring to what he sees as the social agenda of America’s cultural and media establishment and, to some extent, the U.S. government. “The purpose of empire cannot be to make other people’s children transgender.”
“The tragedy is no empire has ever ended in a more pointless, wasteful way,” he says. Nothing durable will remain from U.S. hegemony but “shipping containers.”
Carlson rejects any suggestion that he himself might be fanning the flames of radicalization. In a recent show, however, he wholeheartedly agreed with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, when he called for a “war to the knife” against the “illegitimate regime of neo-Marxists, from the Justice Department to the FBI” should Trump return to power.
He finds solace in his Protestant faith, reads the Bible and regularly goes to an Episcopalian church, even as he believes that Christianity is now divorced from the churches, which he says have become liberal and secularized. The “woke” political movement and its ideology, he says, have replaced Christian spiritual values and “effortlessly moved into the husk of Protestant Christianity in the U.S. It was a hollow tree, and they just occupied it, like a family of raccoons.”
As it nears midnight, Carlson climbs into his pickup truck to drive the short distance back to his house from the barn. He reaches into the glove compartment to show me his Glock pistol. “Everyone’s got one around here, that’s how we Americans are, and that’s the one thing Europeans will never understand,” he says, before driving off into the night.
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