Tucker, you’re no Jesse Ventura

www.americanthinker.com

At the beginning of 2025, Tucker Carlson was in a unique position in American history.

He had just been fired from Fox News so he was free from any corporate control. However he took with him the millions of followers he had accumulated to social media. He had generated high levels of trust among both the left and the right because of his willingness to bluntly call out bad actors from both parties, and was incredibly popular among young people who received their news from the new alternatives to the legacy print, radio and television media.

And even more importantly, he had the ear of the incoming president and a positive working relationship with the world’s richest man. He was a thirty-year veteran of the media industry who knew how the sausage was made and where the bodies were buried and it seemed like he was willing to expose everything by telling the real truth about the business of manufacturing news.

He had a chance to be the Walter Cronkite of a new generation, a trusted newsman that the nation turned to learn the truth about what was happening in the world around him.

Instead of following that path that was laid out before him, he decided that instead of Cronkite, he wanted to be Jesse Ventura.

For those of you who a too young to remember the days when the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) used to be the WWF (World Wrestling Federation), Jesse Ventura was a Navy SEAL turned professional wrestler who was hired by Vince McMahon to do commentary for big wrestling events; and when I say “do commentary” I mean he was hired to shill for the heels (evil wrestlers).

So for example, when a baby-face (good wrestler) had the heel in a normal submission hold Ventura would yell “That’s an illegal chokehold. He should be disqualified!”

However, if the manager of one of the heels clocked a baby-face with a folding metal chair knocking him unconscious, Ventura would mumble something about having dropped his pencil and that he didn’t see anything because he was bending over to pick it up.

What made Ventura so great was that he understood his assignment and was a master at it. When “Russian” wrestler Nikolai Volkov demanded that the audience stand up while he sang the Soviet national anthem, Ventura was the first on his feet. He was the man you loved to hate because of his mendacity and his pomposity.

For some reason, this is the path that Tucker Carlson has chosen to go down.

Except while Ventura’s whole schtick was meant to be a goof, Tucker seems to be taking it very seriously.

For example he doesn’t just espouse the mainstream Republican view that the U.S. should not be funding the Ukraine war, he felt it necessary to suggest that Vladimir Putin of all people is leading the fight to restore Christianity in the West and that Russia was somehow superior to the United States, showcasing it’s clean subways and grocery stores; he doesn’t just argue against supporting Israel financially, he claims that Hamas is just “a political organization” and that Israel is carrying out a genocide; he doesn’t just oppose the Iran war, he wants you to know that Iran is a peaceful country that wants to settle disputes through diplomacy.

He’s very upset by the “Epstein class” but appears to be good friends with millionaires like Russell Brand and Andrew Tate who have both been charged with exploiting teenage girls for sexual purposes.

In Tucker’s world people like Winston Churchill, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Zelensky, and even Donald Trump are the villains while the “heroes” are Putin, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Hezb'allah, and Tyler Robinson, who of course Tucker believes is innocent. He is upset that Israel would invade southern Lebanon and seize territory after being attacked with rockets by Hezbollah, but justifies Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in which they seized territory in the Donbass region on the grounds that NATO was encroaching on Russia’s “sphere of influence” and he feared the possibility of an attack.

The problem is, unlike Jesse Ventura, Tucker isn’t in on the joke; he’s not funny or clever, he seems to legitimately believe the worst people on the planet are actually the good guys or at least doesn’t know how to put his tongue in his cheek or wink at the camera when lauding them.

I’ll acknowledge that it is clear Donald Trump learned from the time he spent associating with the WWE the fine art of being someone people love to hate to enhance his popularity; but Trump, like Ventura, has a knack for it, he understands the gimmick. Tucker does not.

He’s become a humorless troll who continues to shred his credibility by repeatedly lying, often contradicting himself within days and repeatedly stating that he doesn’t know anything about the subjects he is talking about.

When Jesse Ventura would flip-flop on a take within a matter of moments, it was part of the act and the fans loved it because we all knew it. But with Tucker, who holds himself out as a serious commentator, it comes across as simple dishonesty; and because the villains he elevates are real people and not fictional personas that exist for an hour on television, his act has grown stale and deserves to be cancelled.

As a serious news man, Tucker has been a failure. As an entertainer, Tucker has been a failure. He isn’t the new Jesse Ventura, but rather he’s Jerry, the ventriloquist, the paranoid entertainer from the famous Twilight Zone episode “The Dummy” who ends up being possessed by his own dummy and in the tragic conclusion becomes the joke, not the comedian.

Image: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia // CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed