Tucker Carlson's Fear

"I'm not afraid 'cause I'm a man." But he is, like all of us, and he has good reason.

This is astonishing. Tucker Carlson again interviews a prominent “influencer” on what he himself identifies as the critical topic of the family, and once again the interviewee, Matt Walsh, reveals prodigious levels of ignorance. First, we hear platitudes and accounts of wholesome personal experiences that, I suppose, are intended to inspire and set a good example for the rest of us. But it is quickly apparent that this man has not the foggiest notion of what kind of family lives confront millions of Americans today.

If anyone doubts this, you need only listen from about 1:17. Here Carlson reveals a side of himself that many of us hoped he had put behind him: a willingness to mouth current talking points from the same establishment Right that he prides himself on rising above. In this case, he joins the chorus of right-wing scolds railing against men, not for any nefarious action on their part but simply for how they choose to lead their private lives.

The discussion begins promisingly enough. At 1:06, Walsh declares that “Feminism, by far and away, is the most destructrive ideology in human history. It’s not even close.” To which Carlson responds, “I agree with that.” But no details follow. If either man has ever dedicated a single broadcast or any journalistic energy to investigating this most destructive of ideologies (It is fairly certain they have not), they have failed to perceive its most destructive features. (The sole example Walsh cites, predictably, is abortion.) In fact, they seem eager to overlook and even excuse them.

This is revealed as the discussion unfolds. At 1:17, Walsh inveighs against men who have experienced the destructiveness first-hand in their private lives and who take logical and predictable measures to protect themselves. The target is men who refrain from marriage — specifically, men who refuse to marry because of the traps and perils that await them in feminst-driven divorce law. I have highlighted passages I plan to discuss:

Walsh: The whole system is rigged against men. And the family courts are rigged.

Carlson: Yea, that’s all true.

W: Which is true. That’s true. I don’t deny it. … I think in practice it means…live a life on your own…give up on the hope of ever, like, having a happy marriage. It’s not possible. …

C: It’s also weak. I mean look, I think everything is rigged against men, obviously, particularly white men, obviously. But OK, then you know, you’ve had tough tasks before. Make it your job, your duty to help fix it. Like, give the middle finger to the people who are oppressing you, and be happy. Build a great happy life. Have decent children. Like, that’s the greatest possible—

W: Yea, that’s exactly right, and that’s exactly the right message is, when someone says, everything’s rigged. It’s not fair. It’s really hard. I might fail. Right, OK. … Yes, you’re right. OK. What now? Now that we’ve established…how bad it is, which we have, what’s next? What are you going to do tomorrow? We’re all on the same page. It’s rigged. It sucks. It’s bad. I hate it. I wish it wasn’t this way. And yeah, even after everything I just said, you could still get married, and…you somehow you end up with a sociopath…and she takes the kids, she ruins your life.

C: Right, right. I‘ve seen all that.

W: All of that, that can happen. OK, now that we’ve established all of that…what are you going to do…with that information? …

C: You’re going to say to yourself, “I’m not afraid ‘cause I’m a man.” I could get hit by a bus. I could get ALS. Like, the number of bad endings that are possible in your life are just like limitless. And by the way, the end will be bad...you’re going to die.… But knowing all of that you still like, have to be courageous and just jump face first into it anyway. I mean, that’s kinda the whole point, right? …

W: So then your solution is to just embrace misery and despair at the outset, because you’re afraid that it might happen? …

C: The whole point is, you know, you’re dad. You’re not afraid. Right? I mean, you’re running toward the center of gunfire…

Several things are disturbing — and revealing — about this. Even aside from the substance of the matter, it reveals a willingness to take up the agenda and parrot the talking points currently being dictated by Conservative Central. Carlson prides himself on his independence of mind and resistance to mindless conformity to the establishment Left or Right. And he is not usually smug about this. He seems to recognize that this independence of mind, for any of us, is hard won, and we can never know that it is complete. He readily admits, for example, that he mindlessly followed the neoconservative line by supporting the war in Iraq, a position he came to regret. Yet here be becomes smug indeed, regurgitating official cliches rather than investigating the facts, arriving at his own conclusions, and stating them forthrightly and without flinching to the world. (Because, “I’m not afraid ‘cause I’m a man.”)

As for the perils in marriage and divorce today that Walsh and Carlson readily acknowledge and claim to understand but refrain from discussing or detailing here (or anywhere else) and dismiss so cavalierly, Walsh’s question simply needs to be turned on himself: “What are you going to do with that information?” These men have enormous influence after all. They talk to presidents and prime ministers, and their broadcasts are heard by so many millions that they themselves have also become, in their way, “mainstream” media. Yet to his own question, “What are you going to do?” about it, the best Walsh can reply is to “wish” it away. Walsh knows enough about the injustices of family courts (which he trivializes as “unfair”) to understand that something is seriously amiss with his country’s justice system (though it is clear that he has never investigated it or attempted to understand it and never intends to). Carlson confesses to having witnessed it first hand: “I’ve seen all that.” But for him too, that is as far as he plans to go.

So apparently they know that they live under a system of legal justice that is corrupt and routinely perverts justice? That 35%-50% of civil litgation in America is adminstered by courts that are crooked and systemically unjust? That Americans, however innocent of any legal transgression, are terrified of a summons to their own courts, knowing that it means certain ruin (including the possibility of summary incarceration), regardless of the matter to be adjudicated or the verdict? (And it is not only family courts that routinely plunder innocent citizens and leave them desolate, though they are the worst.) They know that the most basic duty of government itself — attested in civilization’s earliest legal codes, throughout the Bible, across the rich body of western political thought beginning with Greek philosophy and Roman law, and in the founding documents of the American republic — which is to administer justice, is, in the United States, routinely perverted and hijacked by courts that systematically administer injustice and that themselves operate as a quasi-criminal enterprise? And that the principal target for their depredations is civilization’s most fundamental and essential institution: marriage?

They know all this? OK, so then we too may well demand of these paragons of independent, maverick journalism an answer to the same question Walsh demands of defenseless private citizens: “What are you going to do tomorrow?” Will you “Make it your job, your duty to help fix it,” using your unrivalled influence? After all, “You’ve had tough tasks before.”

Or do you find it easier and safer to wag your finger at private citizens who have no such influence, simply for trying to protect themselves?

These men’s own words can so easily be turned against them because they are engaging in double-speak. The dereliction of duty they are trying to lay on the shoulders of less poweful men tells more appropriately and glaringly against them. For clearly these two men are as frightened of the courts as the private men on whom the are so eager to pass judgement. They know that showing the courage they demand of others would end their privileged careers in no time. Carlson managed to survive and prosper after being dismissed from public broadcasting and Fox News, but he would not survive this. His erasure would be complete and permanent.

So instead, he heaps opprobrium onto the victims of a legal underworld that terrifies him as much as it terrifies them and gives glib, unsolidicited advice to those who cannot fight back. “Give the middle finger to people who are oppressing you, and be happy.” Imagine such happy talk being recommended, for example, to black Americans during segregation, while you prudently hold your tongue and avert your eyes and allow the injustice that destroys not only them but their children to run rampant and unchallenged. (And ironically contrary to another off-the-cuff talking point Carlson casually mouths, this particular operation has been rigged against low-income black men long before it began targeting middle-class white men, because it originated in welfare.)

One is tempted to conclude that Walsh and Carlson are lashing out at those who remind them of their own fearfulness and failure of their own “duty to help fix it.”

Especially illogical, neither man gives any indication of realizing that the perversion of justice in family court and the oxymoron of “no-fault” justice that rationalizes it are both devised and driven by the same feminism that, just 10 minutes earlier, they had denounced as “the most destructive ideology in human history”. But it follows logically in the same conversation, and only a little investigation is needed to understand the connection. Yet again, they have no stomach for specifics illustrating this destructiveness and cannot mention a single example (other than the safest), even though one of the most serious — perhaps the most serious — they just finished dismissing and excusing. They know that it is easier and safer to offend the powerless, who cannot fight back, than the powerful, who can destroy you.

The pointlessness of this has long been obvious to anyone who grasps the truth and has the heart to confront it. “The conservative commentariat is clueless as usual about these realities,” Roger Devlin pointed out years ago. “All they have to offer is empty sermonizing about the sacredness of the marriage vow.” But no amount of nagging by the sanctimonious will persuade men to commit their lives to a fraudulent contract that sets them up for the judicial kidnapping of their children, extortionate plunder, and incarceration without trial. “Preaching hasn’t worked for the black family and it won’t work for the white family either,” wrote Laura Wood some years ago. “As long as our government sustains single mothers, as long as family courts continue to strip spouses of their assets and children when they have done no wrong, preaching is an exercise in fatuous denial.”

I enjoy many of Carlson’s interviews, mostly on topics (Covid vaccines, the Shroud of Turin) that I know nothing about. But when I hear this kind of nonsense on an important subject on which I have first-hand knowledge, I begin to question the information I am being fed on other matters, and I begin to wonder if the purveyors of “alternative” media on whom so many of us depend are really so independent of the “mainstream” as we think.

And that is the larger lesson to be “taken away” from this by all of us. That dissenting voices like Carlson, Trump, MAGA generally, all of us — none have yet managed to free their minds enough to identify and understand all the ills that have been wrought by the perfidy or neglect they and we identify with leftists/globalists/neocons/RINOs/deep-state functionaries/etc. If we complacently heap blame on others, and expect to be rescued by others, we will only convince ourselves of our own helpless and hopeless condition. We will also remain oblivious to the deeper challenges, like this one, that Trump administration leaders also seem determined to neglect and that supposedly independent journalists and examplars of manhood are, when the chips are down, not quite man enough to confront.

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Thanks to Vineet Mansukhani and several other readers for calling this video to my attention. Below is a short recent post on a connected theme, with some relevant links.

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Trump Is Not Alone in Neglecting Families

23 May 2025

Having posted several pieces recently on the Trump Administration’s ongoing failure to address the federal government’s systematic war against America’s families (all linked in this post), I was distressed to find this interview by Tucker Carlson with economist Oren Cass. While the bulk of the interview concerns economic policy (on which Cass seems to speak quite sensibly), it is sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion devoted to “family policy”. In fact, Carlson goes out of his way to raise this topic, because its connection with the rest of the interview is unclear. Carlson does this frequently, raising issues like the family crisis, fatherlessness, and the social pathologies that result from them, which he then does not pursue — as if he considers it important to mention but too dangerous to actually investigate himself. He is not alone in this among conservatives; in fact, it is the norm.

So perhaps Cass should not be blamed if he has nothing to say on this topic, which clearly he does not. He seems to have not the slightest understanding of how the US government is routinely and aggressively destroying families today. Not surprisingly therefore, he repeats standard conservative cliches and platitudes, and his meager remedies would achieve nothing.

Carlson’s response is more perplexing. He certainly does know full well what is destroying families, in all the grisly details, but like every other thriving journalist he has too strong a sense of his own survival to “go there”. Oddly, he praises Cass’ minimal suggestions on the family.

When even the “alternative media”, to whom we look for the uncensored truth is this clueless or censors itself about what many identify as they greatest social crisis affecting America and the Western world, we have a problem. If they will not call out the government over its most glaring neglects and failures, who will?

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If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.