Tucker Carlson Gets His Big-Media Smooch from the New York Times

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 05, 2026

 

I’ve long since given up on trying to figure out what’s wrong with Tucker Carlson. I feel like I said what I needed to say years ago, and his depravity has now become so on-the-clock predictable that it frankly bores me. (What’s that I hear? Tucker had on yet another wacky antisemite to blame Israel and the neocons for Trump’s behavior? The deuce you say.)

 

I don’t even feel the need to denounce him anymore, because he usually makes headlines these days by denouncing himself so well in his own words on his show. But the most recent example of that is a touch different: Carlson’s long (nearly two hours over two sessions) interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times. However much contempt Carlson may have for the mainstream media, he clearly seems eager to explain himself to them at length, given that he welcomes the opportunity to reach more (and different) people than he would if he genuinely didn’t care.

 

Thus Carlson — forever a glib communicator — makes use of the Times platform to recast himself for this unexpected left-wing audience as a “true conservative” who simply cares about American interests as opposed to Israeli ones. It certainly beats leading with the sort of approach Carlson more typically has during his truly crazy post-Fox career, one that included reverently listening as avowed neo-Nazi Darryl Cooper — “the most important popular historian working in the United States today” — explained to his audience that Winston Churchill (backed by Jewish finance) really caused World War II, and that the Holocaust was merely an overblown logistical accident.

 

All of Carlson’s prominent rhetorical tics were on display in the Times interview. He constantly claimed superior, almost clairvoyant insight into what was really going inside the White House, referring at length to the many conversations he has had with Trump, Vance, Rubio, as well as unnamed others within the administration. And he just knows in his heart that Trump was backed into launching the Iran war against his will. By whom? Tucker barely tries to be coy about it: “Rupert Murdoch, Miriam Adelson, etc., and then a small constellation of, I guess they’d be called influencers, beginning with Mark Levin.” In other words, those people. (Amusingly, Carlson also throws his longtime Fox News internal enemy Sean Hannity under the bus.)

 

Elsewhere Carlson reverts to an age-old habit of making a much more hyperbolic claim than he can actually back up, and using “everyone knows” as his persuasive thread. Only when called on it — and of course he never is on his show — does he backpedal, cavil, and qualify. Carlson claimed that “there are people in the White House who want to hurt JD Vance” and that Vance “has been subject to — this is well-known, but I’ll just confirm it — nonstop treachery from people on the neoconservative side.” When pushed for specifics, he said it was “people around Marco Rubio.” When pushed to name actual administration names, however, he demurred with a shrug: “I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve never worked there.”

 

And when called flatly on one of the many crazy things he has been saying on his show recently, Carlson did what he knows how to do best: First he denied it, and then, when called on that, simply bluffed his way through the humiliation with the blank certitude of a practiced liar.

 

NYT: You’ve been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist.

 

CARLSON: I have not said that.

 

NYT: On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony as president, and you said, “Maybe he didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book.” And then on a recent show, you went further, saying: “Here’s a leader who’s mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods and exalting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist?”

 

CARLSON: I actually did not say, “Could this be the Antichrist?” I don’t know where that comes from, but I know that those words never left my lips because I’m not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is, if there’s just one. I actually tried to understand it. I may have said some are asking that. I am not weighing in on that because I don’t understand it, just to be totally clear.

 

Just to be totally clear, he actually did say every word of it, and then some. The Times had faithfully quoted him. But Carlson’s ravings about the Antichrist (or wrestling with spectral demons at midnight, for that matter) aren’t the look that Tucker wants to lead with in front of this audience, so he did what comes naturally in that situation: lied through his teeth.

 

There is a second-order question to be addressed: Why is the New York Times so eager to sit down with Carlson for two hours? His closest media friends were out on X over the weekend — in the face of scoffing over that clip of him being called out as a bald-faced liar — to demand that people “watch the whole interview,” as if I’m about devote 110 minutes of my life to this exercise in cynicism. (Reading the partial transcript was bad enough.) What these supporters don’t want to admit is that there is a reason Carlson was given the opportunity to speak at length at the New York Times: He is of use to them ideologically.

 

Most of the voices on the right that the Times has given elevated coverage to, from Carlson to Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, share a special characteristic: They are members of a “new right” antisemitic fringe, the faction most enraged by Trump’s preference for Israel over Hamas and Iran in the Middle East. A cynical man might suggest that the Times seeks to craft a political narrative for its readers wherein the Republican Party is safely cast as forever captive to culturally scary hard-right lunatics. An even more despairingly cynical man might suggest that the Times subconsciously realizes that the “anti-Zionism” of the modern right-wing fringe holds a surprisingly comfortable mirror up to the views of their own readers.

 

Victor Glover Is Utterly Superb

 

Last week, the four-person crew of Artemis II appeared on CBS Mornings to talk about their historic flight around the far side of the moon and back again. Later on, they took questions from an audience filled with schoolchildren. The four were their typically professional and relatable selves. But Victor Glover, pilot of the Orion spacecraft, made headlines in the best possible way: for explaining the meaning of true teamwork to a small child with an accurate simplicity that ought to shame most adults.

 

A small black girl asks Glover (who is also black): “How does it feel to be the first person of color to fly to or around the moon?” Some will groan at how the question was focused on yet another “racial first,” but really this sort of thing has been absolutely de rigueur in coverage of American achievements for decades — literally since before I was born — to the point where “first [X] to do [Y]” is a media cliché. (I can well remember in kindergarten when my teachers were abuzz with anticipation about the “first schoolteacher in space” . . . and then that happened.)

 

But the answer Glover gives to wave it off is practically a model one:

 

You know, Maya, thank you for the question, and I will tell you, one of the things about swinging for the fence and trying to hit a home run when the game is on the line is — if you think about that, that can add pressure and make you not, you know, go up there and play your best game. And so, I focused a lot on working with this team and trying to be a good teammate. . . . And I think one of the reasons we were as successful as we did is we spent a lot of time thinking about us and not me individually.

 

And so I would answer this by maybe just making a visual lesson here: that I spent a lot of time thinking about this patch [points to NASA patch on right breast], and this patch [points to American flag on left shoulder], and not this patch [points to his flight suit tag: “Victor Glover”].

 

For starters: Get this guy on Sesame Street, as soon as possible. He’s the sort of guy you want inspiring your kids. But for another thing, note how politely and delicately Captain Glover explained to that young girl the importance of people setting aside their egos to work toward a greater goal, and wonder at how many adults could stand to hear him patiently explain it to them as well.