Tucker Carlson apologized on his podcast. For what?

He says he was “misleading” his listeners about Trump.

• No specifics.
• No mention of Dominion.
• No mention of January 6 footage.
• No mention of Covid disinformation killing Americans.
• No mention of a decade of rhetoric about immigrants and Black Americans.
• No mention of antisemitism and platforming Nazis into the White House.

He just says he was “misleading.” The apology seems designed to collect absolution and avoid the judgment, especially without triggering restitution for all those harmed.

His former colleagues told Lyz Lenz in 2018 that Carlson never believed any of what he was selling the public. He was making money by doing a misleading bit.

Performing the demagogue because it paid.

That makes it worse. A true believer can plead conviction. A performer who knew the rhetoric was false and deployed it anyway because the ratings were good, knowing the harms it caused, is complicit.

The bet on not being held accountable paid for a decade. Maybe the Infowars case has spooked him. The Jones $1.5B judgment plus the Dominion $787.5M settlement where Carlson was named is real precedent.

All the Trump, MAGA, America First bets now have spoiled so badly, they apparently are beyond Carlson’s ability to spin harming others into his personal profit. So he wants out. Carlson would book all the harms as regret and keep the ill-gotten winnings. Victim money stays with him. His victims stay unnamed. The innocent and vulnerable people his show helped target get nothing for his role in profiting off their harm. The journalists that his adherents went after get nothing.

This apology therefore settles nothing, as much as he pleads he should get away free.

When [Tucker] Carlson parents sold the property, they sold the land off separately to housing developers, thus raping the woods where generations of kids had wandered and reaping the highest profits for themselves. Suffice to say that the signs — of extreme privilege, of decimating nature for profit, and of treating your own neighbors with disdain — were all there, in the parental nest, long before Tucker Carlson became America’s most pernicious super-spreader. What finally put an end to Father Coughlin’s stirring speeches promoting fascism in Europe and antisemitism in the United States was the Second World War. What might put an end to the mad and dangerous ravings of (the presumably celibate) Coughlin’s many honorary children?