Why Is Tucker Hysterical?

For the past couple of days, I've been hearing clips, quotes, and soundbites of Tucker Carlson's remarks at the Turning Point USA 2025 Student Action Summit that's wrapping up today in Tampa. Oddly, I'm having a hard time finding YouTube segments carrying his specific remarks or any sort of written transcript, but I do see references to his complaints that, for instance, they've gotten men out of women's sports, but homeless people are still sleeping on sidewalks, so nothing really good has happened, or something like that.

The best I've been able to come up with is a five-hour YouTube of the whole first night, which is embedded above. Tucker's presentation starts at 4:15. The first thing that struck me was his annoying high-pitched giggle. But then he got right into Epstein -- it's wrong to say it happened a long time ago, it shouldn't be a big deal. That wasn't what he voted for, and he almost never votes. His argument implies that he voted for Trump to uncover the Epstein stuff, Trump is now saying we should be paying attention to things like the Texas floods, so he's betraying us, or something like that.

He darkly hints that Epstein was working for a foreign government, else where did the money come from, and nobody is trying to get to the bottom of it, especially now Trump. But once he comes right out and says Epstein was working for Israel at about 4:32, his tone becomes genuinely shrill and hysterical. His facial expression and hand gestures become increasingly angry and wild:

At 4:26, he says, "don't call me a lunatic", but he's acting like a lunatic. At 4:30, he gives a creepy Hannibal Lecter cackle out of a horror film. He's spent 15 minutes, fully half of his presentation, on Epstein, who died six years ago. And the applause at his applause lines is actually quite tepid. At 4:34, we get to the words everyone is pointing to,

You spend all day telling me it's so important that, you kmow, boys not play in girls' soccer teams, or whatever. I agree. I hate the trans stuff passionately. I think you sbhould keep the boys off girls' soccer teams. But I don't know. It kinda sounds like you're feeding me appetizers. At some point I want to look around and see a better country. . . . I don't want to see people sleeping on the sidewalk. I don't want to see people ODing on drugs.

But then he drifts into questions of whether interest rates are too high and whether people can pay their credit cards, and his point isn't completely clear. His talk is a little less than half an hour, and his big concrete point is about Epstein, which he somehow ties into the Iran B-2 raid, and he then complains that, essentially, Trump's first six months, which commentators across the spectrum have called the most significant of any recent president, are just appetizers meant to distract us from problems not being solved, such as houses are too expensive.

And he does it angrily. His voice often trails into a screech. I asked the web where Tucker lives, and it replied,

Tucker Carlson owns homes in Boca Grande, Florida, and Woodstock, Maine. He purchased a 2,870-square-foot home in Boca Grande in 2020 for $2.9 million, and a neighboring house for $5.5 million in 2022. He also owns a property in Woodstock, Maine, where he has spent summers for decades.

He comes from generational wealth; at the time of his separation from Fox, it was generally observed that he didn't need whatever Fox paid him, he was tired of working, and he was gonna pull the plug anyhow. Yet he feigns sympathy for people who can't buy a home at 35. What on earth is he really angry about? It can't be that. Nobody sleeps on sidewalks anywhere near his homes. The same for ODing in his neighborhood, unless it's a rich addict in a pool cabana.

Now he seems to be taking a line not much different from Elon Musk, that Trump, the father of MAGA, has betrayed MAGA. And he's big time angry about it. Third-party angry. He rambles on about starting an I'm-not-going-to-pay-my-mortgage party that will bring the banks to their knees. When did Tucker ever have a problem with the mortgages on his multimillion-dollar homes? Will his kids? I'm sure they already have trust funds.

Maybe it was the acoustics, maybe it was the mics, but I don't get the feeling he was getting the applause he wanted. He was the headliner, the top event of that show, but the crowd didn't seem all that enthusiastic. The great conservative commentators of prior generations, Buckley and Limbaugh, spoke with both wit and detachment. Carlson speaks with neither. He just isn't in their league. That may be part of what makes him so mad.